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?

  • Mr_Blott@lemmy.world
    47·
    1 year ago

    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

    • Square Singer@feddit.de
      17·
      1 year ago

      Maybe these two values should be split. Up/downvote for relevance, like/dislike for liking and disliking.

      • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 year ago

        While we’re at it let’s add metrics for 11 key emotions (that our advertisers want to know about but forget about them) we’re having while we read comments and the extent to which we’re having said emotions, and require full completion of the emotion matrix survey before viewing of the next comment or post?

        • Square Singer@feddit.de
          2·
          1 year ago

          Reductio ad absurdum is great to prove that pushing something to absurdity is absurd. It doesn’t actually further the discussion in any way.

          Using your reductio ad absurdum as a strawman argument, puts the cherry on top of your fallacy cake.

          • HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world
            2·
            1 year ago

            Lecturing people on logical fallacies is what doesn’t add to conversations. Reductio ad absurdum is great to point out that your idea is already absurd. Try playing any game with multiple currencies. They suck.

            • Square Singer@feddit.de
              1·
              1 year ago

              You are using reductio ad absurdum wrong. It is used as a proof by contradiction, which is not what you are doing.

              Instead you are using it to construct a huge strawman agument.

              This is like if you say “Keeping posts short is good” and I say “The shortest possible post has 0 characters and that’s not a good post, so short posts are bad”. Which could incidentally also be used for the exact opposite (“Explaining your arguments thorougly in a post is good” -> “The most thorough explanation possible has infinite characters, so explaining arguments is bad”).

              Because in general, every single thing that is overexagerated is bad. There is not a single thing that, if pushed to absurd limits, is good.

              You could have just said “I disagree, I don’t think it would be a good idea because, …”.

              Instead you used polemics and a logical fallacy.

              You appear to know your logical fallacies. They are guidelines how not to argue, not guidelines to follow.

    • rambos@lemmy.world
      6·
      1 year ago

      What about community like memes? Almost nothing is irrelevant, it make sense to upvote what you like