Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they’re participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.
As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there’s some discussion about lemmy tracking ‘karma’ even if it’s not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement “karma thresholds”? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?
And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?
To me it’s supposed to be a system of recommendation. Quality comments or posts get upvoted so they can be recommended to other people (appearing higher up on a page, or in the Hot/Active section) and low quality (abusive, bad attitude, incorrect) comments or posts, the opposite. Sometimes upvoted are also a “thank you!”. Downvotes can be a general expression of disapproval but i try to do that sparingly… really only if someone is being jerky, or posted something so incorrect that someone could be misled in a meaningful way.
This