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.
It appears the bug is a “turn the server off and on again” issue - it can temporarily be fixed by a restart.
For the default sorts (hot and active), the algorithm for voting is a logarithmic scale, the first 10 votes have more pull than the next 100 votes. Of course this takes the life of the post into account as well - older posts are ranked lower unless sorted by sorts that shouldn’t take time into account.
You can see how votes should affect posts here:
https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html
As to how kbin sorts stuff I’m not sure, but I’m sure they have something similar for sorts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Votes measure popularity, not quality.
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.