(For instances that allow downvotes, obviously.)

I ask because if I see a post with more than a handful of downvotes assigned to what otherwise seems like decent content, I consider it a yellow flag, and I’ll often go to the comments section to try and discover why the post is controversial.

Sometimes I’ll find it’s truly a matter of personal disagreement (such as on a hot-button topic like veganism), however I’ll often discover the downvotes are there for a more objective reason, such as misleading or outdated info in the post. On many occasions this additional digging has led me to change what would have been an upvote from me to no vote or even a downvote. On the flip side, if I see a post that I like but that looks a bit fishy, if it has hardly any downvotes relative to the upvotes, I’ll assume that it has passed Lemmy approval (a kind of Cunningham’s Law I guess) and is therefore probably okay (e.g. I see a reference in a ScienceMemes or HistoryMemes post that seems too bonkers to be true).

So what about you all? Do you use the upvote: downvote ratio to guide how you interact with posts?

  • LeapSecond@lemmy.zip
    2·
    4 months ago

    In my subscribed feed there are three types of posts that are heavily downvoted

    • Wrong community, spamming, or stupid takes by the same five people: it’s usually visible from the title and I wouldn’t click on them anyway but the downvotes draw your attention to the community/user so you know to avoid clicking on the post so they kinda help.
    • AI news: I guess people are just tired and mass downvoting them. I also wouldn’t click on them cause they’re not that interesting so the downvotes don’t make a difference.
    • Posts with a normal looking title in an appropriate community. Downvotes will make me click on them more to see what went wrong as there’s usually an interesting discussion in the comments.

    I don’t vote/comment much but this shouldn’t be affected by other peoples’ votes anyway.