Do you rarely vote on anything at all?
Do you upvote when something is interesting but rarely downvote? Do you downvote when something isn’t interesting but rarely upvote?
Do you vote to signal agreement or disagreement?
Do you vote to encourage insightful replies regardless whether you agree or not?
I rarely interact with the voting system on sites, aside from the occasional missclick, that is. While I think it can be useful when searching for answers or tutorials, especially on topics you’re not familiar with and can’t judge competence vs BS, I think in more social spaces it leads to both echo chambers and karma farming, and it feeds social media addiction by giving you little validations for every upvote you receive.
I also think it prevents people from having more meaningful interactions. Rather than replying with 'This was insightful", “I disagree because…” or “that was really funny” You just make a number go up or down.
I generally upvote stuff to reward engagement and effort. Anything I pass by that looks like a creative work someone is putting forth themselves I’ll upvote. Also pretty much any response to anything I post or comment on. Often times comments I respond to as well.
I only downvote utter bullshit, i.e. people spouting things that are categorically not true, or bad faith arguments, or just people being argumentative in general when there’s no reason to be so.
I don’t give enough of a flying fuck if we hypothetically disagree, only if your position is so odious that it is in fact literally objectively wrong or intentionally misleading.
Or utterly useless bots that no one asked for. I’ll downvote those, too, but I haven’t seen too many of them anymore in the corners that I regularly haunt.
largely agree with this
I almost never downvote a post, I’ll either block the instance, community, or person instead - I want a good feed
I will never understand the blocking mentality. Never done it. Online since BBS days and it has not been something I even consider doing.
The things I see are fine. People change their minds. I am never forced to engage with anyone thing I don’t want to anyways that’s what scrolling down is for.
Subscribe to what I like and simply ignore the rest.
Ya I get that, I just would prefer to see some content over others by a lot, like I don’t care that bdsm stuff is on the internet, but I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to see furry art, zero problem with it existing, just don’t want it in my feed that’s all.
I wouldn’t see any of that because I don’t subscribe to it.
But I get that use case, block is the new name for filter I suppose.
I was thinking mostly about blocking commenters.
Ahh ya so I try to browse all communities, because who knows some new community might be interesting and I don’t want to miss it
Yeah I just occasionally click on communities and browser them without posts in an alphabetical list.
Totally makes sense.