The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.

This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.

Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:

It does two key things in particular:

1. Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.

2. If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden's Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there's no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.

Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It's a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.

There is no such thing as karma here, it's more so to express approval/disapproval

I thought up/down wasn't for approval/disapproval, but to vote if the post was worth reading. In other words, a well written, factual article about a topic you disagree with should have a good number of up votes.

it influences the hot sorting

They just signify if a comment or post is good or bad. They do have some impact on how high up a post or comment is displayed within their list, ie a lot of upvotes will show up better on active or hot sorting, but that's about it. Some instances like Hexbear.net disable downvotes, to force discussion if you disapprove something.

There are still some sensitive mods who can see your vote history (within comms they mod) and ban you because they don't like the way you interact with their comm. Conservative comms especially, they seem to think they deserve a captive audience.

Also note that anybody can use lemvotes.org to view post/comment/user votes in most cases.

Lemmy doesn't enforce anything, but there's no accounting for small people with an ounce of power.

They matter in the original intention of votes: visibility.

Votes get used to sort content.

They never mattered. Its a psycological trick to steal your attention. Some instances disable downvotes or voting at all

they mattered on reddit? how?

Give me your internet points!!!!

No but there are some people who tend to act holier than thou because they have hundreds to thousands of meaningless points. I find out that they tend to be uptight assholes.

What? It mattered in Reddit? Are you sure its that same Reddit?

They release a little burst of dopamine in my brain

From what I remember, it doesn’t matter much on Lemmy. Don’t know the technical stuff behind it though.

Personally, just entirely hided the upvote/downvote numbers. Don’t care about it and it seriously means nothing. Turn off a device and the whole thing is vanished.

Yes they are used to sort comments and that's great. You also know if you're getting into a circlejerk or a controversial discussion.

disclaimer; i'm on an instance that doesn't have downvotes. even if i wasn't, though, the only time i ever really downvoted was for obvious troll content (and even then i really only did that to help the mods while i reported it).

i use upvotes mostly as a "hey op did a good job here so kudos (pretty much just use it the same way i use kudos in ao3). i don't really bother with downvoting - whether it's here, or on youtube, as i don't see a point. if i don't like something, i'm just not going to watch it; no point in going out of my way to let someone else know i don't like the thing they did.

They fill the role nonverbal cues do in real life. Whenever I go back to old-style forums I miss them, because everyone ends up arguing with a few trolls/nuts that would look like they're being taken seriously otherwise.

No real weight for the system I think. Theres a lot less people though, so if I see the same guy like 5 times in a row with -8 comments, I'm more inclined to think that person is a prick because thats how humans are built.

Its not going to stop them posting or push them to the bottom by default or anything though.

I think how you see it is that on reddit, some communities require karma (points) and/or age to interact with the community. On both sites, it's self-governing, like how most bots and trolls get downvoted to hell, and whether you should interact or take them seriously, stuff like that. I can't say anything much about lemmy, since I'm also new to it, but it's a way of self-governing... the algorithms also use votes to sort what gets shown at the top and bottom of a page and anywhere in between.

I'm currently on lemmy.ml and I'm relatively new, so remember other instances may be different, and take what I say with a grain of salt, because I'm new.

Have a great day and be kind! :D

I'm disappointed by the lack of Whose Line Is It Anyway references in this thread :(

"everything's made up and the points don't matter"

I get 3x more downvotes compared to upvotes for speaking truthfully and I am just doing fine

I treat them differently than on Reddit. I upvote content that I want other people to see.

Bc there are different ways to sort your feed, I want to highlight content that adds value to whoever else’s might log on later, even when I might not like it (news for example).

On Reddit, upvotes/Karma were indicative of your value as a poster to that community. They are more like Facebook likes/dislikes for algorithm purposes.

On Lemmy, I see that as the value of the post itself.

Of course not.

Not sure what you mean when you say Reddit votes matter in some way that they don't on Lemmy.

Never mattered to me and I don't like to use them. I only downvote in extreme instances where like I don't anybody really wants to see that. Usually people just being mean with swears or slurs or such. Its kinda the same with upvotes where I feel wow. I can't see anyone not wanting to see this its so amazing or oddly in some cases its where my only comment would be like yeah I feel the same or such and Im a bit to lazy to write that out. See Im here for conversation, communication, collaboration, and such. I actually try to make it a point to not comment on links where the person who posted does not put in a body starting the conversation. With the fediverse I have come to the conclusion that I will no longer give the internet special consideration with interaction and am going to treat it like meatspace. Shoving a magazine turned to the page of an article is going to be treated as rude. Let me know why you think this means anything or is worth my attention. Anywho the funny thing is now I upvote most things but that is just because of this interaction with settings that take things out of my feed if I interact with things and I don't want to arbitrarily downvote. And this is the problem with up/downvotes as some folks will ignore the whole thing, some will be super picky like I am normally, and some will upvote practically everything for some reason and maybe some troll likes who downvote almost everything and every behavior up, down, inbetween, and sideways of that. Personally I avoid feed views that use the up/down votes.

It's a democratic way of judging posts. Democracy is good.

Developed further, voting could replace moderators. I'd like to see that happen.