Because to me, they seem like de facto "Agree and “Disagree” buttons, whether or not it was the intent.
If they were, they’d be called Agree and Disagree buttons.
"Agree and “Disagree” will just leave us in a Lemmy bubble.
They should be more about “good post or bad post”, so something that may be disagreeable gets upvotes if it is well stated.
Reward thought, creativity, etc, and let us all learn.
That would be nice but, no, it’s the agree/disagree button just like Reddit. There is honestly very little difference between Lemmy and reddit. Mostly just the numbers.
They should be more about “good post or bad post”, so something that may be disagreeable gets upvotes if it is well stated.
I don’t care how well stated some anti-vax or flat-earth bullshit is … It’ll get downvoted regardless because I disagree.
That would just be misinformation
Sure, according to us. But you don’t actually need to be right to think you’re right. If someone believes the earth is flat, they’ll downvote “globe-talk” as misinformation, just as it was intended! So it all just comes back to (dis)agreeing.
Not quite. Upvote means “I agree I like butt licking” and downvote means “I agree I like butt sex.” Easy to confuse the two.
Now, just to be clear, does this apply to both the upvoter/downvoter and the comment being left or just the upvoter/downvoter alone?
No, that’s the [other place] mentality. Upvote if you want to increase visibility to the post. For example, there may be a post with a link to an article about some politician doing something I disagree with. I would still upvote it if the post allows me to discuss why I disagree with said action.
Downvote if the content is harmful to the community (for example spam, overt racism, etc).
This is precisely how I use up and down votes.
I would also, as an example upvote something I think was incorrect if the was an insightful reply to it I felt people should see.
To clarify, I’m not talking about a troll post with a clever “dunk” reply.
Trolls always get downvoted.
I thought so too, but about a year ago or so this same question popped up, and some of the comments were really eye opening.
The essence of it was something like this: if you use the upvote/downvote buttons as agree/disagree, then you’re contributing to turning this platform into an echo chamber, which is the particular thing that makes social media such a shitty place.
You should use this feature on posts to indicate if it’s relevant to the community’s rules or not, meets the community’s guidelines or not, contains factual, useful information or not.
On comments, you should use it to indicate if it’s relevant to the topic or not, valid argument to what they’re replying to or not, regardless of your own opinion.
A great example someone commented was, when he explained they were browsing lemmy together with his girlfriend, they had a great laugh at a comment, and then he promptly downvoted it, to her surprise. And it’s because, even though the comment was fantastic, it was off topic, it wasn’t useful for the actual conversation.
Oh, and actually, there was a thing, even on Reddit - believe it or not - which acted as upvote/downvote guidelines, describing how you should use those buttons.
I’ll try to link the original post here if I find it.
Edit: Here’s the comment I was referring to on the original post: https://lemmy.world/comment/5219066
