Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they’re participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.
As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there’s some discussion about lemmy tracking ‘karma’ even if it’s not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement “karma thresholds”? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?
And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?
When Reddit started out, if someone added something to a conversation, you upvoted it. If a comment was irrelevant, you downvoted it.
Then a bunch of fuckin kids arrived and thought the arrows meant like and dislike, and turned the place into an echo chamber
It shouldn’t happen here if the votes don’t do much
What about community like memes? Almost nothing is irrelevant, it make sense to upvote what you like
It’s simple, you upvoted everything you read. Downvotes were reserved for total dicks
The total dicks need the most love though, being denied their whole lives.