Asklemmy

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.

A lot of interesting perceptions on the upvote system here.

It's another form of user moderation. Is the content relevant to the community you're in? Upvote it. Did it help you? Was it a thought-provoking comment chain? Upvote it, it might help others!

Is is irrelevant, such as a dog photo in a cat community for example? Downvote it! Rude comment or flamewar? Downvote it! If you still want to see it, now it's easily sorted at the bottom. :)

A lot of areas of this site, such as the comment section here, can be organized by these votes for your convenience and sanity. You can also identify potentially malicious links/suggestions based off the like/dislike ratio on a comment. A helpful tip is to hover over the number beside a comments time-stamp near the top of a comment. It'll display the full ratio!

Upvoting a post releases the Good Chemicals in the brain. You do this when you would like the person who made this contribution to do more of that.

Downvoting, in turn, produces the Bad CHemicals. The downvote button was famously invented to replace the previous disincentivizing mehchanism, Hammers.

The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.

I always found digg's naming here to make the most sense. Is this something you "dig" and want to "dig up" or do you want to "bury"? Up/down, dig bury, the general principle is that burying bad content and raising up good content means everyone ultimately gets to see the best-of-the-best.

I replied to a comment on this thread before - but I think it is good to reply to the OP as well

Lemmy uses a logarithmic vote and time based ranking algo for Active and hot - those sorts, when there's no issues are fuelled by the age of the posts, and also the score of the posts.

The first 10 votes are more powerful than the next 100, but this power is tempered by how quickly it takes to get those votes - a post that gets 1000 votes in an hour will be ranked higher than a post that gets 10000 votes in 10 hours.

You can see the full description of how the algo is supposed to work here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

As you can see, I highly recommended voting on posts regularly - even if it appears to do nothing, if the algo isn't glitched, older posts need a lot more votes than newer posts to reach the top of active and hot, and the faster a new post can get votes the more likely it is to reach the top. And If you want something new to get on the hot and new boards, even one upvote is all it needs to exponentially increase its ranking.

The intent is to rank whether something is a useful/meaningful/worthwhile contribution or not.

Voting creates a signal about the quality of a post so other users can rank posts based on the collective perspective. You don't vote for yourself, you vote to help other users.

i can't believe you've asked this! user voting is everything! without it there's no way to meaningfully rank the content. i prefer to browser top-day posts because i only want to see what the majority of people have decided is worth seeing. surely you can imagine that browsing a randomly sorted list would be full of boring and uninteresting posts!

I believe it's meant to make it easier to find the best posts. Anyone can post anything. The best things get upvoted. You can sort by votes to see the most popular posts first, or you can just look at a post's score to quickly see whether it's popular or not.

Upvoting and downvoting allow users to express their opinions about specific posts, indicating whether they find them valuable or not. The more upvotes a post receives, the higher it will be ranked in search results within that community, making it easier for other people to discover it as well. This creates a sort of social proof whereby many individuals have deemed the content worthy enough to vote positively on it, suggesting its value and encouraging others to read or engage with it too.

I found this on Wikipedia:

Using a system of upvotes and downvotes users can influence what content appears at the top of the main feeds and of each community.

So if you find a post interesting, you can upvote it. And if someone posts cat pictures in asklemmy, you can downvote it, because it's off-topic and maybe you want to discourage such behaviour.

I'm not sure if Lemmy has upvote counters for users, but either way if you upvote a post or comment you say that it's useful/interesting, and it's a bit like a "thank you" in real life.

One way that I have used up/down votes, particularly on comments, is to surface the most valuable information. For example, if a post has valuable content, that is patently useful but it isn't the top comment I will down-vote the top comment(s) and upvote the valuable one.

For example, if someone posts a question and the top 3 comments are low-effort jokes, and the fourth comment is the answer, I would down-vote the top three and upvote the 4th. In an effort to surface the best information.

Now, I try not to do this unless I'm certain of post 4s quality. And usually not unless there are enough votes that a joke-commenters would feel personally picked on, or like their joke wasn't good.

Other examples of good comments (by my reckoning) are: transcriptions, useful links or context, proof, other examples of the same thing. Or somewhat verifiable reasons why the post is unhelpful or misleading.

The crowd isn't always right. But it can provide useful context and I try to be a part of that.

What is the purpose of voting up or down on? I’m not clear what voting is suposed to achieve?

I suspect content voting systems were a way to attenuate the proliferation of "me too", "this^" or similar posts on forums.

I upvote posts that are interesting usually. A higher score means more people may see it.

I usually upvote most people that reply to my comments even if I don't agree with them. It's my way of showing appreciation for the time they took to engage with me.

I don't like to down vote. In my opinion it shouldn't be used as a disagreement button. More for people who are needlessly rude.

Its a way to prioritize which posts you are going to read. if there are only 10 posts you can read all of them, if there are 1000 maybe not, depends on how much time you have, but when people can vote on which posts they find interesting there is a good chance you will find the most voted interesting as well.

It's a convenient way to get people to not write angry rants when they can instead just hit the downvote button and move on with their lives feeling like they've shown the person they're angry with what-for.

Edit: The downvote button has now saved /c/asklemmy from four angry rants about how wrong I am. Good job, downvote button! :)

For me, the main part of receiving upvotes is the "knowing" that someone agreed with or appreciated my comment. Encourages me to continue commenting. Like the opposite of being ignored during group conversations.

It's a signal boost. You want more people to see it, so you help it rise to the top.

Maybe it's also a high-five. A positive emotional reaction to something you like.

Everyone has their own idea what they should be for. In general it's for liking and disliking, or agreeing and disagreeing.

I also didn't use to up/downvote much at all on Reddit (never used other socials), but here I upvote especially when someone responds to me or post to my communities, and downvote if something annoys me.

I'm not particularly bothered if I get downvoted, it can happen for a multitude of reasons both valid and insane, but I'm enough of a narcissist to enjoy when a lot of people like my stuff.

I've always liked Saidit's "two upvotes" system. It's so simple and creative, encouraging discussion rather than the mindless brigading that becomes so common with the vote wars for visibility.

It was the best, most innovative thing about reddit. It let the readers choose what they see, rather than purely newest/oldest first, or curated by some admin.

I came to Reddit from Fark.com. There, you were limited to the headlines the admins chose, and everything was purely chronological. New headlines were on top, and oldest comments were first. Often, great comments were buried. Going back since the reddit fiasco, even there they added the ability to sort by “smartest” and “funniest” as voted by paid members