Asklemmy

A lot of interesting perceptions on the upvote system here.

It's another form of user moderation. Is the content relevant to the community you're in? Upvote it. Did it help you? Was it a thought-provoking comment chain? Upvote it, it might help others!

Is is irrelevant, such as a dog photo in a cat community for example? Downvote it! Rude comment or flamewar? Downvote it! If you still want to see it, now it's easily sorted at the bottom. :)

A lot of areas of this site, such as the comment section here, can be organized by these votes for your convenience and sanity. You can also identify potentially malicious links/suggestions based off the like/dislike ratio on a comment. A helpful tip is to hover over the number beside a comments time-stamp near the top of a comment. It'll display the full ratio!

When things work correctly, it matters. Right now lemmy's sorting system is bugged, so just using "new" is the best way to find content.

But, when it works, the upvotes and downvotes determine how much visibility a post is given. It's basically a way for us users to tell the site what content is good, and what content is bad. If you see a thread with interesting discussion, or that links a fun video, or features a pretty art piece, upvoting will help more people find it.

If you see someone link to misinformation, or push a conspiracy theory, you can downvote to the tell the system that it is bad content, and it will show it to less people going forward.

i can't believe you've asked this! user voting is everything! without it there's no way to meaningfully rank the content. i prefer to browser top-day posts because i only want to see what the majority of people have decided is worth seeing. surely you can imagine that browsing a randomly sorted list would be full of boring and uninteresting posts!

The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.

I always found digg's naming here to make the most sense. Is this something you "dig" and want to "dig up" or do you want to "bury"? Up/down, dig bury, the general principle is that burying bad content and raising up good content means everyone ultimately gets to see the best-of-the-best.

I replied to a comment on this thread before - but I think it is good to reply to the OP as well

Lemmy uses a logarithmic vote and time based ranking algo for Active and hot - those sorts, when there's no issues are fuelled by the age of the posts, and also the score of the posts.

The first 10 votes are more powerful than the next 100, but this power is tempered by how quickly it takes to get those votes - a post that gets 1000 votes in an hour will be ranked higher than a post that gets 10000 votes in 10 hours.

You can see the full description of how the algo is supposed to work here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

As you can see, I highly recommended voting on posts regularly - even if it appears to do nothing, if the algo isn't glitched, older posts need a lot more votes than newer posts to reach the top of active and hot, and the faster a new post can get votes the more likely it is to reach the top. And If you want something new to get on the hot and new boards, even one upvote is all it needs to exponentially increase its rankin

EDIT: - Lemmy doesn't auto self upvote posts and comments... So if you aren't doing that you're not doing everything you can to get people to see it.

Voting creates a signal about the quality of a post so other users can rank posts based on the collective perspective. You don't vote for yourself, you vote to help other users.

Upvoting a post releases the Good Chemicals in the brain. You do this when you would like the person who made this contribution to do more of that.

Downvoting, in turn, produces the Bad CHemicals. The downvote button was famously invented to replace the previous disincentivizing mehchanism, Hammers.

I found this on Wikipedia:

Using a system of upvotes and downvotes users can influence what content appears at the top of the main feeds and of each community.

So if you find a post interesting, you can upvote it. And if someone posts cat pictures in asklemmy, you can downvote it, because it's off-topic and maybe you want to discourage such behaviour.

I'm not sure if Lemmy has upvote counters for users, but either way if you upvote a post or comment you say that it's useful/interesting, and it's a bit like a "thank you" in real life.

The intent is to rank whether something is a useful/meaningful/worthwhile contribution or not.

One way that I have used up/down votes, particularly on comments, is to surface the most valuable information. For example, if a post has valuable content, that is patently useful but it isn't the top comment I will down-vote the top comment(s) and upvote the valuable one.

For example, if someone posts a question and the top 3 comments are low-effort jokes, and the fourth comment is the answer, I would down-vote the top three and upvote the 4th. In an effort to surface the best information.

Now, I try not to do this unless I'm certain of post 4s quality. And usually not unless there are enough votes that a joke-commenters would feel personally picked on, or like their joke wasn't good.

Other examples of good comments (by my reckoning) are: transcriptions, useful links or context, proof, other examples of the same thing. Or somewhat verifiable reasons why the post is unhelpful or misleading.

The crowd isn't always right. But it can provide useful context and I try to be a part of that.

What is the purpose of voting up or down on? I’m not clear what voting is suposed to achieve?

I suspect content voting systems were a way to attenuate the proliferation of "me too", "this^" or similar posts on forums.

I've always liked Saidit's "two upvotes" system. It's so simple and creative, encouraging discussion rather than the mindless brigading that becomes so common with the vote wars for visibility.

Its a way to prioritize which posts you are going to read. if there are only 10 posts you can read all of them, if there are 1000 maybe not, depends on how much time you have, but when people can vote on which posts they find interesting there is a good chance you will find the most voted interesting as well.

For me, the main part of receiving upvotes is the "knowing" that someone agreed with or appreciated my comment. Encourages me to continue commenting. Like the opposite of being ignored during group conversations.

I upvote posts that are interesting usually. A higher score means more people may see it.

I usually upvote most people that reply to my comments even if I don't agree with them. It's my way of showing appreciation for the time they took to engage with me.

I don't like to down vote. In my opinion it shouldn't be used as a disagreement button. More for people who are needlessly rude.

@Lengsel On reddit, it was mainly a pre-requisite for who could post or comment. You needed an account with at least X karma to contribute. This would make it easier for mods to ensure quality content, or at least those that put in effort in lower-bar subs before making their way to start a thread to certain subs.

Here, maybe one day, when bots are more of a thing (so, next week), it can be a way to at least prevent some spam, some lesser content, and brand-new accounts from contaminating the masses.

I use it to appreciate a comment with nothing to add, or disagree without having to type a mess. It also prevents me from posting something obsurd that defames me and my profile, that makes me feel like I have a lot of unpopular opinions. It's really just helpful to have a number tell you what a POS or GOD you are.

It's a convenient way to get people to not write angry rants when they can instead just hit the downvote button and move on with their lives feeling like they've shown the person they're angry with what-for.

Edit: The downvote button has now saved /c/asklemmy from four angry rants about how wrong I am. Good job, downvote button! :)

It's a signal boost. You want more people to see it, so you help it rise to the top.

Maybe it's also a high-five. A positive emotional reaction to something you like.

Upvoting and downvoting allow users to express their opinions about specific posts, indicating whether they find them valuable or not. The more upvotes a post receives, the higher it will be ranked in search results within that community, making it easier for other people to discover it as well. This creates a sort of social proof whereby many individuals have deemed the content worthy enough to vote positively on it, suggesting its value and encouraging others to read or engage with it too.

To show the algorithm what the best topics or answers are. Basically a self regulating community. In theory trolls, spam and false information could be lowered in priority if the community decides to downvote that ~~person~~ post (Edit: Dang it, I meant post, not person.). In reality however, this voting mechanism gets misused as well. And unpopular opinions are often downvoted, even if they are correct and just an opinion (happens all the time in Reddit). So there are good and bad things about it.

Unlike Twitter or most social communities, Reddit and kbin let's you sort the replies by different systems, if you don't like the most voted or commented topics to be on top of the list. So you as a reader can still totally ignore it if you want.

You're voting as a community on what content you want to see and what you don't want to see. It is THE tool to determine what is intresting or not