Because to me, they seem like de facto "Agree and “Disagree” buttons, whether or not it was the intent.
That’s how I treat them. Maybe with a bit more nuance: I’ll upvote for something funny, informative things, or general good takes. I’ll downvote if someone has a bad take, is unnecessarily mean, or is generally incoherent.
If the comment doesn’t spark a reaction I just keep scrolling.
What you say and what you describe are not the same. Your explanation is literally how it was explained on the other site. So you are better than you think you are. =)
And I do it the same as you. Something I disagree with or don’t like but is reasonably argued and not mean or full of any -isms? No vote from me.
"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.
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.
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.
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
I upvote content that may be useful or interesting to others, content I agree with and good jokes.
I try to only downvote spam, misinformation and any troll content.
They should be “this is worthy to be seen by many” and “this is not”. Sometimes that also overlaps with my agreement with the post.
This is how I use the vote arrows too.
I think I’ve gotten a little idealistic since moving to lemmy because I definitely used the votes as agree/disagree on Reddit, because it was clear that was what the hivemind decided it was for, who was I to argue.
