The up/down vote system directs the ranking algorithm on how to order posts and comments, and it visually signals to the user the relative popularity of a comment.

This, imo, is a wildly underappreciated mechanic for combating a lot of the harmful issues people associate with social media.

Most people recognize that discourse on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. is designed to divide and inflame people. the reddit-style downvote is remarkably effective at addressing this:

It does two key things in particular:

1. Downvoted comments are down ranked and hidden, so people are exposed to less toxic content.

2. If people do engage with unpopular comments, the negative score influences how people engage with them. On Facebook, commenting to defend Biden’s Israel policy will get elevated and create viscous fights. On Lemmy, it will get flagged with a virtual dunce cap. You can dunk on it, but there’s no point in arguing with it: we can all see that the argument is already over. Laugh and ignore.

Taken together, these discourage people from feeding trolls, and in doing so reduce the incentive to post something uncivil or stupid. It’s a remarkably powerful tool to address a huge problem, and I wish more people understood this.

Never mattered to me and I don’t like to use them. I only downvote in extreme instances where like I don’t anybody really wants to see that. Usually people just being mean with swears or slurs or such. Its kinda the same with upvotes where I feel wow. I can’t see anyone not wanting to see this its so amazing or oddly in some cases its where my only comment would be like yeah I feel the same or such and Im a bit to lazy to write that out. See Im here for conversation, communication, collaboration, and such. I actually try to make it a point to not comment on links where the person who posted does not put in a body starting the conversation. With the fediverse I have come to the conclusion that I will no longer give the internet special consideration with interaction and am going to treat it like meatspace. Shoving a magazine turned to the page of an article is going to be treated as rude. Let me know why you think this means anything or is worth my attention. Anywho the funny thing is now I upvote most things but that is just because of this interaction with settings that take things out of my feed if I interact with things and I don’t want to arbitrarily downvote. And this is the problem with up/downvotes as some folks will ignore the whole thing, some will be super picky like I am normally, and some will upvote practically everything for some reason and maybe some troll likes who downvote almost everything and every behavior up, down, inbetween, and sideways of that. Personally I avoid feed views that use the up/down votes.

they mattered on reddit? how?

There are still some sensitive mods who can see your vote history (within comms they mod) and ban you because they don’t like the way you interact with their comm. Conservative comms especially, they seem to think they deserve a captive audience.

Also note that anybody can use lemvotes.org to view post/comment/user votes in most cases.

Lemmy doesn’t enforce anything, but there’s no accounting for small people with an ounce of power.

I thought up/down wasn’t for approval/disapproval, but to vote if the post was worth reading. In other words, a well written, factual article about a topic you disagree with should have a good number of up votes.

There is no such thing as karma here, it’s more so to express approval/disapproval

They just signify if a comment or post is good or bad. They do have some impact on how high up a post or comment is displayed within their list, ie a lot of upvotes will show up better on active or hot sorting, but that’s about it. Some instances like Hexbear.net disable downvotes, to force discussion if you disapprove something.

No but there are some people who tend to act holier than thou because they have hundreds to thousands of meaningless points. I find out that they tend to be uptight assholes.