To me, it’s a way to quantify how other people feel about my own positions. It’s neither good nor bad to be upvoted or downvoted. People have unpopular takes sometimes and you shouldn’t stake your identity on the amount of upvotes or downvotes you have.

Instead, upvotes and downvotes are most useful for other people to guage comments. Generally speaking, if a comment is universally downvoted, that likely means the position is unpopular enough that it adds no value to a discussion, and is therefore not worth engaging with.

I consider it to be a system built upon mutual understanding - that you don’t have to seriously engage with everyone’s viewpoints, and conversely, that nobody has to seriously engage with yours.

It becomes a problem when upvotes and downvotes are gamified like on Reddit, because Goodhart’s Law demands that it stops serving its purpose when people are only attempting to optimize their upvote/downvote ratio.

I only care when I’m making a post, to help judge how people liked it. I don’t pay attention to points inside threads really.

I don’t, but I guess I do rely on them to float popular stuff up in my feed. After that, I couldn’t care less.

I dont think it changes my pov, but it def does for other people on a large scale

you could say the same message in different parts of the same thread, and by chance one will accumulate more downvotes and one will accumulate more upvotes

for example: https://sh.itjust.works/post/39444493/18993947 and https://sh.itjust.works/post/39444493/18993522 say the same thing, but one has 42 updates and 8 downvotes and one has 120 downvotes to 23 upvotes

people need to stop looking at these numbers

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care.

Its human nature, its encoded in our dna, in the past, social ostrization means death, so that feeling of “not wanting to get socially ostricized” persisted to modern day.

Btw you can actually see who downvoted you with https://lemvotes.org/, to see if they are actually real users or just bots/trolls.

I usually just assume any amount of downvotes between 1-5 to be bots/trolls. For upvotes, not getting upvotes doesn’t matter as long as I don’t get downvoted. I try to ignore votes, but like, my monkey brain just can’t stop being curious about the score. 🤷‍♂️

There’s also that fear of weirdos start trying to dox you if they didn’t like something you said. Like “I dislike Linux” for example (not my actual opinion, but like imagine if someone said that, they’d get fucking downvoted to hell and stalked around the fediverse)

As for other user’s scores: Seeing upvotes/downvotes on other user’s posts/comments does not really change my agreement/disagreement of their statements

Sometimes when I’m not doing too great and see loads of shit during my daily doomscrolling, I can get very synical, harsh and bold. When I get several downvotes, it can be a sign I’m in this negative depressing mood and I need to light up and be more open to others. It usually takes a while as first I fee like explaining myself making things worse, but in the end it let’s me think “hey dude, stop, take some distance. You’re not like this and your behavior is pulling you further down. Do something fun instead, stay away from comment sections and put away your phone completely and meet some friends or something”.

It’s a struggle sometimes.

Upvotes always help with the short endorphins boost, even though I don’t want to admit it. I got rid of all social media except YouTube and Lemmy. Yes, I’m I search of approval, again, not what I’m proud of. Because I want to get rid of this addiction and doomscrolling.

I can get upset if my post gets a few downvotes, like -5 or something, but oddly when it reaches -10 or lower it doesn’t affect me. Though it’s rare for me to see my posts go that deeply down.

Upvotes on my posts feel nice.

When I see it with other people who get downvoted because their jokes are misunderstood or if their argument isn’t well received but they meant well and it was on topic, I feel bad for them and give them an upvote (even when I don’t agree with them).
Though some people deserve their downvotes, if it’s clear that they don’t belong in that community or are arguing in obvious bad faith. I don’t often give out downvotes, but those people tempt me

Usually, no. Not for myself or others. Too many people vote emotionally for them to be useful feedback in most situations.

They also aren’t useful in short time frames on lemmy. I’ve lost track of how many people get whiny about votes, but they just didn’t wait for things to balance out. It’s lemmy, shit takes hours to spread and get seen, especially since not everyone sorts by new. Chill the fuck out.

But sometimes, they can be a warning sign, or an indicator of a successful comment/post. And other times, they can help realize you posted or commented in the wrong place.

I prefer to see both numbers rather than the sum. The variance sort of gives a ‘controversial’ score. Can’t get that with PieFed yet, but I prefer the deduplication of PieFed over the split scores on Voyager.

Yes. But only if people voted in the right way. You’re not supposed to vote it you agree or disagree with something. That’s not how this is supposed to work.

You’re supposed to vote if the context fits the sub or topic.

I pay almost no attention to the scores on other people’s posts, but admittedly, I do sometimes feel disheartened when I see what I consider an extremist view getting heavily upvoted. As for downvotes, I have those hidden, so in that sense, they’re a non-factor for me. But you’re asking whether I care. Of course I care and anyone claiming otherwise is lying. We’re social animals - we care what others think of us. That’s why I hid the downvotes in the first place: so they wouldn’t affect me. Mean comments are enough to deal with; I don’t need to hear the audience booing too.

My perhaps unpopular opinion is that while the voting system itself should remain, the scores should be hidden for everyone - and I mean both upvotes and downvotes. Downvotes don’t mean you’re wrong, and upvotes don’t mean you’re right. They’re just indicators of how popular your opinion is with the audience. That dynamic encourages people to self-censor unpopular views and, conversely, to post meaningless one-liners just for the applause.

When I see someone downvoted for no good reason, I tend to support them; upvotes don’t sway me at all. My own stuff I see votes as a guide to how well I fit a community (except in one controversial group which attracts down votes – there voters are meaningless

Down votes are useful for estimating the exactly how badly damaged the sense of humour in the community is.

I get a giggle whenever I see a throwaway shit comment of mine with many many down votes

No