Its a way to prioritize which posts you are going to read. if there are only 10 posts you can read all of them, if there are 1000 maybe not, depends on how much time you have, but when people can vote on which posts they find interesting there is a good chance you will find the most voted interesting as well.
For emphasis, they're something done for the collective community for the most part. By the time you are considering voting, you've already read the post. Voting is largely so later viewers can see just the best content. In this sense, it's like a social contract.
People who browse new posts get to shape the community. Their votes are most influential. But they also don't get to see as much quality content.
In some rare cases, you will actually come back to the thread, in which case voting just helps ensure that it's more likely there'll be more discussion when you check back.
And finally, it can just feel good to vote for stuff you like (it's like giving a very tiny reward). Inversely, downvoting is a low effort way to communicate to a poster that their post was bad and show others in the community that their post is not acceptable. That's very important for bigoted posts. Downvoting those posts makes it very clear to everyone that bigotry isn't accepted here.
i can't believe you've asked this! user voting is everything! without it there's no way to meaningfully rank the content. i prefer to browser top-day posts because i only want to see what the majority of people have decided is worth seeing. surely you can imagine that browsing a randomly sorted list would be full of boring and uninteresting posts!
Voting creates a signal about the quality of a post so other users can rank posts based on the collective perspective. You don't vote for yourself, you vote to help other users.
Upvoting a post releases the Good Chemicals in the brain. You do this when you would like the person who made this contribution to do more of that.
Downvoting, in turn, produces the Bad CHemicals. The downvote button was famously invented to replace the previous disincentivizing mehchanism, Hammers.
Upvoting and downvoting allow users to express their opinions about specific posts, indicating whether they find them valuable or not. The more upvotes a post receives, the higher it will be ranked in search results within that community, making it easier for other people to discover it as well. This creates a sort of social proof whereby many individuals have deemed the content worthy enough to vote positively on it, suggesting its value and encouraging others to read or engage with it too.
@Lengsel On reddit, it was mainly a pre-requisite for who could post or comment. You needed an account with at least X karma to contribute. This would make it easier for mods to ensure quality content, or at least those that put in effort in lower-bar subs before making their way to start a thread to certain subs.
Here, maybe one day, when bots are more of a thing (so, next week), it can be a way to at least prevent some spam, some lesser content, and brand-new accounts from contaminating the masses.
I use it to appreciate a comment with nothing to add, or disagree without having to type a mess. It also prevents me from posting something obsurd that defames me and my profile, that makes me feel like I have a lot of unpopular opinions. It's really just helpful to have a number tell you what a POS or GOD you are.
I always found digg's naming here to make the most sense. Is this something you "dig" and want to "dig up" or do you want to "bury"? Up/down, dig bury, the general principle is that burying bad content and raising up good content means everyone ultimately gets to see the best-of-the-best.
One way that I have used up/down votes, particularly on comments, is to surface the most valuable information. For example, if a post has valuable content, that is patently useful but it isn't the top comment I will down-vote the top comment(s) and upvote the valuable one.
For example, if someone posts a question and the top 3 comments are low-effort jokes, and the fourth comment is the answer, I would down-vote the top three and upvote the 4th. In an effort to surface the best information.
Now, I try not to do this unless I'm certain of post 4s quality. And usually not unless there are enough votes that a joke-commenters would feel personally picked on, or like their joke wasn't good.
Other examples of good comments (by my reckoning) are: transcriptions, useful links or context, proof, other examples of the same thing. Or somewhat verifiable reasons why the post is unhelpful or misleading.
The crowd isn't always right. But it can provide useful context and I try to be a part of that.
To show the algorithm what the best topics or answers are. Basically a self regulating community. In theory trolls, spam and false information could be lowered in priority if the community decides to downvote that personpost (Edit: Dang it, I meant post, not person.). In reality however, this voting mechanism gets misused as well. And unpopular opinions are often downvoted, even if they are correct and just an opinion (happens all the time in Reddit). So there are good and bad things about it.
Unlike Twitter or most social communities, Reddit and kbin let's you sort the replies by different systems, if you don't like the most voted or commented topics to be on top of the list. So you as a reader can still totally ignore it if you want.
A lot of interesting perceptions on the upvote system here.
It's another form of user moderation. Is the content relevant to the community you're in? Upvote it. Did it help you? Was it a thought-provoking comment chain? Upvote it, it might help others!
Is is irrelevant, such as a dog photo in a cat community for example? Downvote it! Rude comment or flamewar? Downvote it! If you still want to see it, now it's easily sorted at the bottom. :)
A lot of areas of this site, such as the comment section here, can be organized by these votes for your convenience and sanity. You can also identify potentially malicious links/suggestions based off the like/dislike ratio on a comment. A helpful tip is to hover over the number beside a comments time-stamp near the top of a comment. It'll display the full ratio!
For me, the main part of receiving upvotes is the "knowing" that someone agreed with or appreciated my comment. Encourages me to continue commenting. Like the opposite of being ignored during group conversations.
As someone who mostly lurks and rarely contributes, for me voting is a really nice way to say "I don't have anything meaningful to say about this topic but I appreciate/agree/like it".
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.
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.
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.
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.
I upvote posts that are interesting usually. A higher score means more people may see it.
I usually upvote most people that reply to my comments even if I don't agree with them. It's my way of showing appreciation for the time they took to engage with me.
I don't like to down vote. In my opinion it shouldn't be used as a disagreement button. More for people who are needlessly rude.
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