What is the purpose of voting up or down on? I’m not clear what voting is suposed to achieve?
I never vote up or down on here in the same manner that I never click Like on any social media sites either, I don’t see what the intent behind it is.
What is the purpose of voting up or down on? I’m not clear what voting is suposed to achieve?
I never vote up or down on here in the same manner that I never click Like on any social media sites either, I don’t see what the intent behind it is.
When things work correctly, it matters. Right now lemmy’s sorting system is bugged, so just using “new” is the best way to find content.
But, when it works, the upvotes and downvotes determine how much visibility a post is given. It’s basically a way for us users to tell the site what content is good, and what content is bad. If you see a thread with interesting discussion, or that links a fun video, or features a pretty art piece, upvoting will help more people find it.
If you see someone link to misinformation, or push a conspiracy theory, you can downvote to the tell the system that it is bad content, and it will show it to less people going forward.
Why you said makes me think the number of votes is wholly irrelevent.
What is interesting or helpful is entirely subjective, it’s personal opinion. What is considered misinformation is entirely subjective. That makes me believe the voting count on a post means nothing for indicating the quality.
Considering how any majority of people typically react emotionally rather than have humility and respond with consistant logic, it seems personal opinion on a mass scale is an unreliable gage for quality of material.
Yep. That’s why you sometimes see people downvoted into oblivion, simply for stating something which is true, within a community that is deluded about that given thing.
But at the same time, saying it is truly pointless, would mean you also consider the very concept of democracy, pointless. Yes, there will be a percentage of people who are unable to form a level opinion, and how many such users there are can vary wildly depending on who sees a given post/comment in the first place.
But results speak for themselves. Reddit’s voting system does work. Especially because when you go to a specific subreddit, its about a specific subject. Meaning the users who are there, likely align in what they are interested in, meaning the voting is now a much more accurate representation of what the subscribers of a given sub want to see. Your subjective opinion is likely to match that of the users looking at the same subreddit. And this continues working even as you subscribe to multiple subs. Each post only gets shown to users who subbed (unless on r/all), even though each user has a mixed feed of the stuff they subbed to.
Downvotes are an extremely effective way to control spam. Under every popular Twitter post there’s a bunch of rampant trolling, misplaced political hot takes, and crypto scams. Reddit has much fewer of these problems because voting ends up removing all incentives to do it.
Even in that example the system works as described and intended. That community deems “true statements” bad content, hence they downvote it.
It is not an objective measure, but reflects how much a given community values a specific content, how much they find it relevant.
Exactly. And due to the self-curation that subscribing brings, posts are likely to be seen mostly by people whose head-spaces align. For better, or worse.
The people downvoting you are proving your point a bit… Come on people, don’t downvote something just because you don’t agree. You can just not upvote it if you really want, but it’s adding to the discussion in a polite way which is what you want. Don’t discourage discussion and responses by downvoting them… Upvote the good stuff, downvote hate/spam, leave the rest alone.
You’ve created a bit of a contradiction here by assuming that the quality of content can be determined objectively in the first place. Quality of content is inherently subjective because there’s no definitive “perfect quality.” A research paper might be extensive and carefully written, but that doesn’t mean that it’s better content that a wellcrafted joke- a lot of people would rather hear the joke, which gives it subjective quality. The point of an internet community is to align yourself with others who have similar subjective views on quality. If you want jokes, follow a joke page. If you want papers, follow an academic page. The voting system within those pages determines the quality of posts within their subjective viewpoint.
Upvoted because it’s generally true.
On anything controversial, the voting system is borked, just like any voting irl. Gather enough people in one place/topic and you can make the most insane thing seem true.
Pictures of kitties and boobies though? You should be able to gauge what’s good and what’s crap.