I came from Reddit where they definitely did matter. They don’t seem to hold any real weight here. Is this true for some or all instances? If they don’t matter, what are they for?
I’m disappointed by the lack of Whose Line Is It Anyway references in this thread :(
“everything’s made up and the points don’t matter”
What? It mattered in Reddit? Are you sure its that same Reddit?
Yes they are used to sort comments and that’s great. You also know if you’re getting into a circlejerk or a controversial discussion.
I get 3x more downvotes compared to upvotes for speaking truthfully and I am just doing fine
Not sure if I should up or down vote this to make a point /j
You should downvote
I treat them differently than on Reddit. I upvote content that I want other people to see.
Bc there are different ways to sort your feed, I want to highlight content that adds value to whoever else’s might log on later, even when I might not like it (news for example).
On Reddit, upvotes/Karma were indicative of your value as a poster to that community. They are more like Facebook likes/dislikes for algorithm purposes.
On Lemmy, I see that as the value of the post itself.
The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.
This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.
Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:
It does two key things in particular:
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Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.
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If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden’s Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there’s no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.
Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It’s a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.
Votes also make it very obvious when people react based on their wishful thinking — when a comment is factually true but is downvoted anyway, or vice versa. A good barometer of the sentiment in a community.
Yes, yes and yes. Unless it is overrun/diverted by bots & shills, which is a corruption silently allowed by reddit to serve its corporate agenda. Reddit, being proprietary and closed-source, does not disclose the specifics of its voting system, which grants it some plausible deniability in the face of accusations of bias. Lemmy and Kbin etc have the advantage of being opensource, transparent, forkable, etc. whether or not you’re in line with its creator’s political standing.
Wonderful explanation! I will continue to up/down vote posts and comments as I see fit. 😊
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I think how you see it is that on reddit, some communities require karma (points) and/or age to interact with the community. On both sites, it’s self-governing, like how most bots and trolls get downvoted to hell, and whether you should interact or take them seriously, stuff like that. I can’t say anything much about lemmy, since I’m also new to it, but it’s a way of self-governing… the algorithms also use votes to sort what gets shown at the top and bottom of a page and anywhere in between.
I’m currently on lemmy.ml and I’m relatively new, so remember other instances may be different, and take what I say with a grain of salt, because I’m new.
Have a great day and be kind! :D
They matter in the original intention of votes: visibility.
Votes get used to sort content.
Of course not.
They fill the role nonverbal cues do in real life. Whenever I go back to old-style forums I miss them, because everyone ends up arguing with a few trolls/nuts that would look like they’re being taken seriously otherwise.
deleted by creator
There is no such thing as karma here, it’s more so to express approval/disapproval
I like the lack of karma. Generally I’m using the up/down vote options to express my dis/approval, just like you’ve stated they’re for. Given how different things can be across instances it seems I’ll just have to relearn how I view and interact with Lemmy over Reddit.
Aside from the much smaller user base and communities, I prefer Lemmy 100%. I’m learning to enjoy the smaller user base since it’s also lacking the huge amount of bots and trolls.
Give me your internet points!!!
it influences the hot sorting
I thought up/down wasn’t for approval/disapproval, but to vote if the post was worth reading. In other words, a well written, factual article about a topic you disagree with should have a good number of up votes.
Theory and practice quite frequently don’t align in reality and humans are spiteful.
Hey, fuck you. I’m not spiteful!
Well then your username checks out
Upvoted because it’s an imprtant contribution, not because I agree with it.
It’s supposed to be that way, but Lemmy doesn’t always follow that system.
I’m fine with or without a voting system. It does seem to me that the instances which don’t allow downvotes seem a little bit better behaved though.
Not sure what you mean when you say Reddit votes matter in some way that they don’t on Lemmy.
On Reddit, the algorithm that determines which posts appear on the main page is heavily influenced by the number of up/down votes for the post and its comments.
On Lemmy, you get to make your own algorithm to choose which post comes first.
So you can even go with a most-downvotes-first approach.It will matter depending upon what people choose.
The usual ones on clients[1] are Hot, Top, Controversial, New and Old and the Controversial one has to do with both, upvotes and downvotes.
or is it coming from the server? Yeah, it seems to be provided by the server ↩︎
Ah, and that isn’t the case on Lemmy I suppose?
No clue, actually. I know you can sort based on votes, but I’ve never thought about how the main feed works. I’ll have to look it up later, if I can remember
Would be interesting to know. 😁
