Okay, say there’s a post that says something bad… what do I (or you) do? Do you upvote it because it’s like “thank you for pointing this out”, or does your upvote mean you support whatever the post says (which is kinda the opposite)?
This is super important and not sure how many people know what they’re doing lmao
Edit: Okay. It has been decided. We need more buttons than just Up/Down 🥲
I see voting as decentralized moderation, not as an expression of agreement or like or something.
Upvote means “I want people to see this” and downvote means “I don’t want people to see this.”
That’s the ideal.
But I think most people conflate those with agree and disagree.
That’s still consistent, normal people don’t want posts they disagree with to be seen by other people. Only debate perverts would upvote something they disagree with, because they want people to see “good discussion” or whatever.
EDIT To clarify, as a proud debate pervert I tend to upvote people I’m arguing with just so our argument gets more visibility.
agreed that’s human nature at it’s core. Reddits tried for years to push the “Upvote things that bring good discussion, downvote things that don’t”. But yeah humans always will be humans, I don’t see a time when a majority will ever follow that understanding, though I try my best to still follow it.
That’s true. I don’t think it’s generally a problem, but I do find it funny when you see someone politely correct someone else deep in a chain where no one else is reading, and the correction says “0”.
To anyone who downvotes like that: you look like an insecure clown.
100%. Content sorting is (to my understanding) handled by peer vote rather than any kind of central algorithm on Lemmy by default, so a vote is much less about agreement/disagreement, and much more about doing your part in the process of separating the wheat from the chaff imo.
In my view, even a (non-bot) lurker who only views/votes is still contributing to the community, because they still add another data point for sorting. It’s a collective effort that generates a collective content algorithm, so a person should vote accordingly.
This. It’s “I like this content” or “I dislike this content”, not agree or disagree. I get annoyed when people downvote because they don’t agree with an opinion, as it will then get less eyes. Downvote if the content is misinformation or just blatantly bad.