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. Whether the votes accurately represent the value of the content, depends entirely on who sees it.
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.