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.

  • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyiEnglish
    5·
    2 years ago

    I replied to a comment on this thread before - but I think it is good to reply to the OP as well

    Lemmy uses a logarithmic vote and time based ranking algo for Active and hot - those sorts, when there’s no issues are fuelled by the age of the posts, and also the score of the posts.

    The first 10 votes are more powerful than the next 100, but this power is tempered by how quickly it takes to get those votes - a post that gets 1000 votes in an hour will be ranked higher than a post that gets 10000 votes in 10 hours.

    You can see the full description of how the algo is supposed to work here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

    As you can see, I highly recommended voting on posts regularly - even if it appears to do nothing, if the algo isn’t glitched, older posts need a lot more votes than newer posts to reach the top of active and hot, and the faster a new post can get votes the more likely it is to reach the top. And If you want something new to get on the hot and new boards, even one upvote is all it needs to exponentially increase its rankin

    EDIT: - Lemmy doesn’t auto self upvote posts and comments… So if you aren’t doing that you’re not doing everything you can to get people to see it.

    • subignition@kbin.social
      4·
      2 years ago

      I may be in the minority here, but it doesn’t feel right to me to upvote my own stuff. The vote counters should reflect how others perceive my contributions. It’s a given that I agree with my own posts, so that shouldn’t be counted.

      • Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi
        1·
        2 years ago

        Honestly, you might be more likely in the majority, Reddit automatically did it, so people didn’t feel guilty for removing said upvote.

        But that’s among one of the only platforms where boosting your own post is considered fine.

        Im not surprised if people compare it with the Facebook equivalent of liking your own post - the only difference is that Lemmy doesn’t tell you where the upvotes come from, which might entice more people to do it as they cannot be judged for it like you can on Facebook.