I hate that I always compare Lemmy to Reddit, but Reddit used to have (not sure if they still do) guidelines called “Reddiquette” that included guidelines about upvoting and downvoting. I don’t remember the specifics (and sending too much of my browser traffic to Reddit makes me feel dirty) but one of the guidelines was not to upvote/downvote on the basis of agreement/disagreement with the content.
On Lemmy, I’m honestly a bit lax about upvoting and downvoting at all. (I’m trying to be better about it.) Buy when I do upvote/downvote, I try to do so on the basis of whether the comment/post “adds to” or “subtracts from” the community or conversation. I can disagree with one comment’s take on some subject but still upvote them if they’ve given me a more nuanced perspective on the issue. If they’re just parrotting well-known talking points and not being thoughtful with their posts, I may downvote them evren if I agree with their ultimate stance.
I’m just mostly wondering how folks on Lemmy think about upvotes/downvotes and what implications that has for the content here.
Generally, it’s based on appropriateness to the C/, effort, and usefulness.
There are exceptions, though there aren’t any on C/s that I actually use. But there might be eventually, there were on reddit.
If something doesn’t fit the C/, that’s a down vote if I notice it.
If something is horribly low effort, even if it’s in the right place, that’ll be a down vote.
Upvotes, it tends to be because something was appropriate to the C/, and/or someone put some work in. But, even a low effort post/comment can get an up vote if it’s personally useful.
I used to up vote anything and everything that was on topic, but lemmy has gotten busy enough that I tend to only vote at all if I interact with the post in some way. So, like a title that indicates the post isn’t something that will interest me, I just scroll past because there’s just so much stuff now. But, I scroll All, and sort by new by default, so I end up scrolling past stuff that isn’t in my subscription list. If I only scrolled through subscribed stuff, I’d probably end up voting the same amount, but voting on everything I saw, if that makes sense.