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.

  • sinnerdotbin
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    2 years ago

    The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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      2 years ago

      Yeah, there’s a sweet spot where it works, but once you get a large usercount, it becomes a bit snowbally. Get a few early upvotes, and you’re off! Don’t get those upvotes early? It’s gone, drowned away in the flood, even if the post was good. There’s an element of luck that I’m not sure can, or should be, eliminated.

      What the modern big sites do with algo’s that read your interests, has even more cons, still. As far as a lesser of two evils, I like the vote system as a content curation system the best.

      • sinnerdotbin
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        2 years ago

        Definitely the easiest to implement, and huge concerns with black boxes making recommendations. But I think we are going to see some serious problems with it here given how accepting most instances are to federating anyone combined with the lack of tools to differentiate legit users and a bot brigade.

        • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyz
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          2 years ago

          We’ll have to wait and see. The recent userspike rom servers that have no captcha/email requirement is certainly suspicious. But thats an external issue, not a problem with the idea of the vote system itself. Hopefully one that’s solvable if it ever turns out to be an issue.

          • sinnerdotbin
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            2 years ago

            Having a feature to view votes/sort from your local, a sort of “what is active outside your local by your local”, might be one way to mitigate it somewhat. Though most instances probably aren’t active enough to have wide overlap in user interest outside of the local.

            Ultimately all vote based platforms that have no identity verification are open to abuse (and email is hardly a verification when you can create as many as you want). But works well enough for now.

      • sinnerdotbin
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        2 years ago

        You’re right, there is only up/down vote systems with a user base that is in no way verified or otherwise restricted to a single vote/real person, or corporate algos.

        There are plenty of different models. Do I fault the Lemmy devs for using it? No. Is it ideal for content discovery? Not really.

          • sinnerdotbin
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            2 years ago

            You’re right. Apologies.

            There are many other models, some discussed in this post. All come with their own set of upsides and downsides.

            For a small community, which Lemmy original was, straight up votes work great. Unfortunately it doesn’t scale. Reddit is a perfect example.