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?
If I like something, I give an upvote. Haven’t thought about it so much.
Upvoted because I do the same.
I have added a bean to your current beans count
I liked your comment so I clicked the “up” arrow.
I had almost 40k comment karma and a couple hundred post karma on Reddit…
It never mattered to me.
My policy is this:
- Agree/Like/Interested = upvote
- Disagree/Not interested = no vote
- Stupid/Off-topic/Troll/Bait = downvote.
My policy is: Relevant to conversation = upvote.
Not Relevant or misinformation = downvote.
I upvote plenty of stuff that I disagree with because I think it will further engagement about an important topic.
I always upvote people I disagree with. Society is nothing without debate.
This was how reddit was meant to be. Now every opinion the hive mind disagrees with gets downvoted to hell.
My way:
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Upvote: neutral / friendly contributions related to the topic, regardless of whether or not I personally agree (Exception; hate speech wrapped in nice words. I don’t care how “friendly” the sentence seems, if the message itself is hate speech of any kind then downvote and/or report)
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Nothing: Contributions that are friendly but off-topic, accidental duplicate posts, and stuff I don’t understand.
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Downvote: Spam, scams, troll posts and hate speech of any kind.
I never downvote people just because I disagree. On the contrary - different opinions but discussed in a civilized manner, that’s an upvote from me.
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I follow this policy as well.
“Lemmy uses a voting system to sort post listings. - - You can upvote posts that you like so that more users will see them. Or downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen. Each post receives a score which is the number of upvotes minus number of downvotes.
- Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
- Hot: Like active, but uses time when the post was published
- New: Shows most recent posts first
- Old: Shows oldest posts first
- Most Comments: Shows posts with highest number of comments first
- New Comments: Bumps posts to the top when they receive a new reply analogous to the sorting of traditional forums
- Top Day: Highest scoring posts during the last 24 hours
- Top Week: Highest scoring posts during the last 7 days
- Top Month: Highest scoring posts during the last 30 days
- Top Year: Highest scoring posts during the last 12 months
- Top All Time: Highest scoring posts during all time”
Hot sounds a lot like what Reddit uses. They use some secret algorithm where each upvote is like a balloon that lifts the post up and as the post ages, more and more weights are added to it over time so that it sinks down and gives more space for newer posts.
Reading the documentation can be a bit boring, but you can always use Bing to summarize the main points and even ask specific questions about the text.
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.
To me it’s supposed to be a system of recommendation. Quality comments or posts get upvoted so they can be recommended to other people (appearing higher up on a page, or in the Hot/Active section) and low quality (abusive, bad attitude, incorrect) comments or posts, the opposite. Sometimes upvoted are also a “thank you!”. Downvotes can be a general expression of disapproval but i try to do that sparingly… really only if someone is being jerky, or posted something so incorrect that someone could be misled in a meaningful way.
This
I wish it is only used for post sorting. This whole Reddit karma being used as a trophy made it a reposting mess to begin with.
So it call it larma. It is karma but less important.
It’s odd to me how focused some people are on the total. My reddit karma count means absolutely nothing to me, except I’d watch it to see how very recent posts or comments had been received.
I think a good system for Lemmy would be to display “karma for the past 3 days” or week.
Yeah the Karma gamified this in a weird way.
The idea of up and downvotes has another pro tho: you can see if what you think resonates with other ppl and get better feedback. That one is really underrated imo.
its a bellwether to see how many people you engaged with (IMO). I’m under the impression its just for your information, no karma removed is a good thing (keeps All interesting instead of high karma reposted Twitter screenshots)
This is a good question, because it never gets a proper answer.
I think most people consider it a way to approve or disapprove an OP or comment, but it’s completely unclear why.
Let’s say you post an OP about basketballs in the community!basketballsarecool@someinstance. If your OP describes all the cool things about basketballs, you’ll receive upvotes. If your OP describes basketballs are useless, you’ll receive downvotes. And it probably will be the reverse in the community!basketballsareuseless@someinstance.
Lemmy could at least stand out if the development community would remove downvotes. It’s an unnecessary polarizing passive aggressive way to disagree with somebody, that leads to all kinds if unnecessary negative emotions.
But it would be even better if the whole upvote / downvote system can be disabled. You don’t know who is upvoting / downvoting and what does it say?
You can track a user’s “karma” ie. total upvotes on posts or comments using the API but I don’t think there’s anything that allows threshold outside of creating your own modbot that would delete all new user’s posts if they don’t meet the requirement.
As for the purpose of the upvote I think it just functions as a ‘I want to give this post/comment a boost’ whether that be because you found informative, it’s something that already agree with or is just a good contribution to the discussion.
It shows what people agree with the most. You can see your total score with the app.
That’s dangerous thinking.
Beans ^ and farts v .
