They might also be meaningless internet points. Who knows.

  • Zero22xx@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    211·
    11 hours ago

    They’re really not meaningless though. For one thing, they allow moderators and admins to more easily detect trolls and bad faith actors. And on platforms or with add-ons that allow better tracking of vote history, it allows the user to more efficiently moderate their own experience, should they so choose.

    Also, I think you’ve got to be kind of an asshole to not recognise that a little bit of validation from communities that you participate in is a nice thing to have and that downvotes can hurt to an extent, even if it’s not the same as getting physically slapped. And to be clear, I’m not pointing at you or anyone, I’m just riffing here. I haven’t even seen downvotes for a while now.

    So yeah, I’d say they’re meaningless in a video game sense. You’re not going to win any prizes with them. But there’s a reason they exist, plus no one is immune to the effects of positive or negative reinforcement.

    • Paradachshund@lemmy.today
      1·
      1 hour ago

      I agree. At the very least they say “this many people liked what you said or posted enough to click this button”, and that is far from meaningless.

    • d00phy@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      9 hours ago

      When I first got on Lemmy, there were a bunch of discussions about getting rid of downvotes, and I thought this was a bad idea. For the most part, they do a good job of allowing the communities to self-moderate. Sure there are trolls that downvote everything, and they can rot in Hell, but they’re a very small majority. Generally speaking, up/downvotes provide an easy way to sort the wheat from the chaff in both posts and comments.

      • Optional@lemmy.world
        9·
        8 hours ago

        remember the heated discussions about the “proper” use of downvotes?

        iirc there was a bloc of users who were very adamant that downvotes only be used for indicating the comment in question failed to adhere to the 1964 Chicago Manual of Style regarding commas or something, but everybody else was using it to say “don’t like it” and they were super-cheesed.

        • 1rre
          5·
          8 hours ago

          Personally:

          Upvote = I like it or it contributes well to discourse

          Downvote = repeated trolling (first comment gets a pass, as do unpopular opinions, but doubling down on unambiguous and apolitical truths doesn’t), spam, scams, etc.

          • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
            1·
            6 hours ago

            To me, voting is mostly a sorting tool.

            I may upvote to make sure a great comment is higher than the good comments around it. I may even disagree with the comment to some extent, but I’m still going to upvote, because I think it adds something important to the conversation and more people should read it. However, there are also situations when I upvote to show my approval.

      • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        There are also trolls who constantly say controversial things. Looking at the downvote counter tells you something.

        There are also people who… I don’t really know what’s going in the head of a person who intentionally insult everyone they come across. Did a nefarious little brother hijack that account or is that person really trying get some achievement about maxing out the downvote counter? Some people are a complete mystery. Either way, the downvote counter serves as a red flag.

    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      5·
      10 hours ago

      I thought about that too. If they were completely meaningless then why would they be used for sorting purposes. Turns out, they do mean something and they can be used for something.

  • Corroded@leminal.spaceEnglish
    26·
    13 hours ago

    I hope Lemmy’s internet points never become a thing people view as important. The way people act on Reddit to get a handful of up votes is embarrassing.

      • SatyrSack@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        5 minutes ago

        I like vote counts on posts, because they help me understand what sort of content the community likes, and what sorts I should just not post again. But a cumulative total on my profile? I really don’t care.

        • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
          4·
          11 hours ago

          Yeah it exists in the metadata, so certain front ends can display it and other platforms like Mbin and PieFed show it as a reputation score or something like that.

          I think the way that Lemmy handles it is perfect, there’s no reason to display the cumulative score and it definitely acts as a barrier to free and open discussion because people start censoring themselves and judging other users by their profile rather than the things they actually say.

  • madjo@feddit.nl
    11·
    11 hours ago

    I’ve been able to exchange some of my points in the Lemmy Store for a rub on tattoo.

        • hypna@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 hours ago

          I’ve been thinking recently that Lemmy would simply be better off without any comment votes. I’ve heard some instances disable them, but it still seems to be the norm. Group think already has enough pull given human nature. It doesn’t need a boost.

          • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2·
            1 hour ago

            I mean I don’t think showing votes on posts and comments is inherently bad… but aggregating them to a user across instances seems not only technically challenging from a protocol sense (given that (de)federation and blacklisting is entirely in the control of the server admin), but also a feature that should be intentionally omitted. It’s genuinely not a useful metric in terms of building communities, which I think the lemmy stack should (and does) consider to be an essentially overriding priority.

  • TheFrogThatFlies@lemmy.world
    5·
    10 hours ago

    But it is incredible the power those points have in our mind! Just now I’m being downvoted for a comment I did and I immediately felt the need to go there and justify the point I was trying to make. It took some effort to convince myself that I don’t care about that and that I don’t have to justify to those that didn’t understand my point.

    • TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zipOPEnglish
      2·
      9 hours ago

      Must confess, those points do seem to wield some strange power over my mind. Kinda scary actually. Some people have disabled those numbers entirely, and I’m beginning to see why.

  • .Donuts@lemmy.world
    7·
    11 hours ago

    And we should keep it that way. As soon as you can derive value from your profile karma and/or it means something, it’ll break any sense of earnest discussion some are trying to have in the first place.

    Look at Reddit: any serious thread is peppered with might-be-funny one-liners in the hopes of catching some upvotes. This makes those threads harder to read through, although it does make for funny AI summary results.

    It’s not just off topic banter to increase karma though. It’s also reposting old memes, jokes and stories that did well in the past to farm that sweet karma. Throw in some copied top-level comments too and some subreddits are basically perpetually living in déjà vu.

    Let’s not try to aim for that.

  • remotelove@lemmy.ca
    11·
    13 hours ago

    I’ll sell you mine. Hell, I might even trade some points for a block of your finest cheese.

  • Corroded@leminal.spaceEnglish
    10·
    13 hours ago

    For those that don’t know this is in reference to Reddit’s process of “vote fuzzing”. Most explanations online explain it as altering the votes to prevent things like rigging the vote or an individual going to someone else’s page and down voting everything they’ve posted or commented. I think in reality it’s more obtuse and erratic. I don’t know if the level of “fuzz” varies based off the age of the post or the total number of votes.

      • SouthEndSunset@lemm.ee
        4·
        11 hours ago

        It’s ok, it was a bad and unrelated joke.

        I was just suggesting that the Lemmy system was better than the Reddit system, but that there might be a better system than this.

        • imaqtpie@sh.itjust.works
          3·
          11 hours ago

          Lol that’s an interesting thought. I wonder what it would be like if instead of simply giving upvotes and downvotes, you could rate every comment/post on a scale of 1-10 or something. It probably wouldn’t work at all, but maybe there is some kind of system out there that would work better in the future.

          • SouthEndSunset@lemm.ee
            3·
            11 hours ago

            Somewhere in these comments someone has said that it’s used to discriminate …ie “this account doesn’t have a very high karma” or not being allowed to comment in a sub cause you don’t a high enough karma.