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?
It’s odd to me how focused some people are on the total. My reddit karma count means absolutely nothing to me, except I’d watch it to see how very recent posts or comments had been received.
I think a good system for Lemmy would be to display “karma for the past 3 days” or week.
Yeah the Karma gamified this in a weird way.
The idea of up and downvotes has another pro tho: you can see if what you think resonates with other ppl and get better feedback. That one is really underrated imo.