Down votes, Up votes
What's everyone's thoughts on down votes and up votes. What do they mean to you. When do you down vote?
In my experience I only use the down vote, when a comment or post does not reflect the COMMUNITY it is posted in, not because I dislike X Y or Z.
I ask this because I have noticed many times when posting in smaller more niche communities that a post will get random down votes and I suspect it is from people scrolling new or hot and just down voting things that don't like.
7 replies
At the moment I suspect some of those random downvotes may be accidental misclicks/taps due to the all feed live updating.
That said, personally I've been using upvotes lately across many comments as a small bit of encouragement to new folks, and trying to reserve downvotes for generally rude comments that aren't constructive or that appear to be flat out misinformation/disinformation (to the best of my knowledge).
I only use downvote when the comment is so annoying that it is satisfying to push that arrow down which is rare
Also realize - votes here are federated, meaning they are 100% public, like tweets on Twitter.
Where can I see someone's up/down vote list?
You can't - they're not tracked in that way.
so, dick justice isn't right? I mean, I can understand if the upvotes/downvotes are publicly transmitted.... who knows what the instances share with each other. Maybe they are "%100 public" given some API calls...
The upvote/downvote tally total is transmitted, and your individual user can add or subtract 1 to each tally, but the Lemmy devs made a conscious decision to not track up/downvotes per user in a "reddit karma" like fashion: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/2370#issuecomment-1196642040