this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
7 points (81.8% liked)
Asklemmy
43408 readers
1382 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For emphasis, they're something done for the collective community for the most part. By the time you are considering voting, you've already read the post. Voting is largely so later viewers can see just the best content. In this sense, it's like a social contract.
People who browse new posts get to shape the community. Their votes are most influential. But they also don't get to see as much quality content.
In some rare cases, you will actually come back to the thread, in which case voting just helps ensure that it's more likely there'll be more discussion when you check back.
And finally, it can just feel good to vote for stuff you like (it's like giving a very tiny reward). Inversely, downvoting is a low effort way to communicate to a poster that their post was bad and show others in the community that their post is not acceptable. That's very important for bigoted posts. Downvoting those posts makes it very clear to everyone that bigotry isn't accepted here.