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.
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!
The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.
Dated, but has anyone come up with a better way? Outside of having another human carefully curate your shit, or some kind of Zuckerbot doing it, you need some way to filter out bullshit or any community will be overwhelmed with spam and trolls
You're right, there is only up/down vote systems with a user base that is in no way verified or otherwise restricted to a single vote/real person, or corporate algos.
There are plenty of different models. Do I fault the Lemmy devs for using it? No. Is it ideal for content discovery? Not really.
No need for sarcasm -- I was ASKING if there were other ways outside of up/downvotes, AI moderation, manual/human curation, or no moderation. Hence question mark.
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