No Stupid Questions

Oh brother, this guy stinks

I go and upvote things I want to see more of.

Subjectively, I do not see a big diversity of opinions on Lemmy. Everyone seems to love Linux and communism and hate Windows and western politics.

Haven't been here for that long though so maybe I'm missing out on some communities.

I feel the same. The only times I (intentionally) down vote are for things like spam or people throwing insults around with zero substance. It's basically a button for increasing/decreasing visibility, and you get much more interesting discussions when it involves views you disagree with.

Nope, the points are made up and it lets me vent with the smallest possible impact. My voting ratio is highly positive despite not having any hesitation slapping that dislike button, because most things are worthy of up voting.

I do once in awhile but honestly I hate public voting. I would not mind a private ranking system for the feed that worked the way trustcafe works. I mean peoples public voting won't effect the way I peruse the feed but yeah some things are bad enough that I feel I should hit the down arrow. I upvote practically everything though as it marks it as read for my feed view.

Not really. I'm (somewhat) apprehensive to downvoting because all votes are public. So, I'm not gonna downvote someone who disagrees with me. I will (sometimes) downvote someone who is being an arsehole. If they keep doing it, I'll block 'em.

Also, I don't really get into comment chains to start with. If I say something and someone has something constructive to say, we might have a conversation. That's fine. But if it's negative, chances are I just won't reply to it in the first place. If I feel like maybe I've been misunderstood, I might clarify, but I'll only do that once. If the conversation isn't going anywhere, I walk. It's that simple. If you want a punching bag, I think these days you can get ChatGPT to do that.

I generally shy away from downvoting even things I dislike. I don't want to fall into an echo chamber where all I see are only the things I agree with.

This is not how Lemmy works. If you don't ever up or down vote anything, and if you have your client hide the up/down votes on all comments and posts, you will still see the same content as someone who prodigiously votes. Votes here are, in the truest possible way, optional.

But for people who do utilize up/down votes, they are a signal. Sometimes they're a weak signal, sometimes a bad signal, and yet other times might be a strong signal from the community. How to evaluate the signal is a matter of continued debate.

Now, as an aside, a major difference in the Fediverse compared to commercial social media networks is that the block functionality here is used for more than just dodging abusers. Precisely because there is no algorithm, blocks and mutes are how users curate what they don't want to see. This alone does not create a so-called online echo chamber, the same way that most people don't want to see a steaming pile of poo on their morning walk. People reasonably deserve to have a pleasant experience online. And depending on their life circumstances, this might be a lot better than their IRL situation.

I don't care enough to upvote or downvote anything. Maybe that's not the right way to do it, idc.

Retaliatory downvoting is a lame thing to get caught up in. A certain type of reddit person will downvote every reply you make to them. Most often I think I'll be 'the bigger person' and ignore their pettiness.

I get into these comment chains from time to time where really no matter what I post whoever I’m talking to downvotes...

I suggest avoiding such comment chains. If the person you are talking to is downvoting everything you write then you can be certain you are wasting your time.

Downvote if the person deserves it. You don't know that the person is the one downvoting you versus someone else. Although if you're in a conversation with someone who you feel deserves to be downvoted, you're probably better off blocking and moving on.

Nope. Fuck em.

I do know exactly what you're talking about.

When you get 5 or 6 responses deep no-one else is reading along it's just you and the other person. When each of your replies receives 1 downvote it's obviously from the other person just downvoting everything you say. It's just petty and childish and I'm not going to stoop to that.

That said, I do downvote comments that I feel deserve less prominence for whatever reason.

As an aside, piefed shows a user's "attitude" on their profile. Your's is 98%, mine is 62%. I think that means 62 of my last 100 votes were upvotes.

I use a Misskey platform to interact with the Fediverse as a whole (and especially with Lemmy and the threadiverse), among other reasons, purposefully because I can't cast downvotes onto others' contents. Even the "👎" emoji reaction, if I wanted to use it, doesn't count as a downvote from Lemmy's perspective.

Yeah, some things I see make me want to downvote, but I prefer commenting and replying as to why I'm disagreeing with that content, instead of treating human beings and their content as numeric computer variables (and as a former programmer, I'm well aware of how communication among living beings can't be replaced by zeros and ones).

The same applies in the other direction: I'm fond of people who disagree with me by actually stating what/why they disagree, instead of clicking a numeric button. If you ever disagreed with me and took the effort to try and tell me what you disagreed with and why, my sincere thanks for being a human being towards another human being!

After all, we're gathering on a set of social platforms whose main feature is discussion board and, IMHO, numbers can't possibly contribute to a discussion, especially open-ended discussions and artistic expression... if social interaction is to be replaced with numeric reactions, communication and content creation becomes pointless: why should I, as a content creator, spend the effort (sometimes I spend literal hours on the same reply/post/comment) composing something if the reaction will be numeric?

!nostupidquestions@lemmy.world

I downvote with some hesitation. Maybe I just don't get it.