this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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Why vote on posts? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (5 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

What is interesting or helpful is entirely subjective

Nothing is entirely subjective, at least not in the sense that you mean.

There are different degrees of shared opinion ("inter-subjectivity") among people, depending on the group. One of the advantages of the "communities" (or "subreddit" / "magazines") model is that you can find people with whom you share opinions, and if that community doesn't already exist, you can create it.

By joining a community that shares your interests, and customizing your feed to show those communities, content that gets upvoted will tend to reflect your interests, and upvotes will be a signal of quality.

People have limited time. By having an algorithm that can sort by likes / dislikes, everyone saves time by delegating some of the time-consuming task of discovering relevant content to the algorithm.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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 rankin

EDIT: - Lemmy doesn't auto self upvote posts and comments... So if you aren't doing that you're not doing everything you can to get people to see it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I may be in the minority here, but it doesn't feel right to me to upvote my own stuff. The vote counters should reflect how others perceive my contributions. It's a given that I agree with my own posts, so that shouldn't be counted.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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! :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

I generally reserve downvotes for problematic things, including but not limited to someone really pissing me off. >.>

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Dated, but has anyone come up with a better way? Outside of having another human carefully curate your shit, or some kind of Zuckerbot doing it, you need some way to filter out bullshit or any community will be overwhelmed with spam and trolls

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

You're right, there is only up/down vote systems with a user base that is in no way verified or otherwise restricted to a single vote/real person, or corporate algos.

There are plenty of different models. Do I fault the Lemmy devs for using it? No. Is it ideal for content discovery? Not really.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No need for sarcasm -- I was ASKING if there were other ways outside of up/downvotes, AI moderation, manual/human curation, or no moderation. Hence question mark.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You're right. Apologies.

There are many other models, some discussed in this post. All come with their own set of upsides and downsides.

For a small community, which Lemmy original was, straight up votes work great. Unfortunately it doesn't scale. Reddit is a perfect example.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yeah, there's a sweet spot where it works, but once you get a large usercount, it becomes a bit snowbally. Get a few early upvotes, and you're off! Don't get those upvotes early? It's gone, drowned away in the flood, even if the post was good. There's an element of luck that I'm not sure can, or should be, elminated.

What the modern big sites do with algo's that read your interests, has a more cons, still. As far as a lesser of two evils, I like the vote system as a content curation system the best.