There was recently some discussion on Feddit.dk surrounding the usage of upvotes and downvotes.
Currently in ActivityPub (the underlying protocol powering the fediverse), Lemmy sends “Like” and “Dislike” activities for upvotes and downvotes. Other threadiverse platforms (PieFed, Mbin and maybe even other non-threadiverse platforms?) do the same.
However, the “Like” and “Dislike” activities are meant for… well, “liking” and “disliking” things. They are not necessarily associated with the action of “vote this thing up so more people see it” or “vote this thing down so less people see it”.
For instance, on Friendica, you can dislike a post and this sends a Dislike activity. From Friendica’s point of view, such a Dislike indicates just that - the user dislikes the content. It doesn’t necessarily mean “this should be shown to less users”, but Lemmy will interpret the Dislike activity like that.
This leads to strange scenarios with posts that a user finds relevant and interesting (something that the user may reasonably want to upvote) but also something that the user dislikes (i.e. downvote).
As an example, imagine a post with a title like “AI is awful” (I’m sure many here has seen posts like that). A Friendica user could reasonably agree with the post and thus “Dislike” it. As in, they also find AI awful and they dislike AI, so they dislike the post, to show their disapproval of AI. The Friendica user’s intent is not to hide the post from other users or make the post be shown to fewer users! They just intend to show their dislike for the topic at hand.
However Lemmy will interpret that Dislike as a downvote, and the post will thus be shown to fewer users and get ranked down in the sorting.
So is Lemmy and co. abusing the Like/Dislike activities? Should the threadiverse instead use a dedicated activity for the acts of “I think this should be shown to more users” and “I think this should be shown to fewer users”? That way, it would not be confused with the Likes and Dislikes from other platforms.
your example of how likes and dislikes can be interpreted on different platforms further reinforces my idea that likes and dislikes are an inherently bad metric that will be interpreted wildly differently between users, and that there should be better ways to interact with our posts than just two arrows.
There are some platforms that offer emoji reactions. That at least gives a bit more nuanced of a reaction than just “up” or “down” - but it is not clear how you would use emoji reactions to sort posts. The good thing about upvotes and downvotes is that it’s a very easy signal for which posts should be at the top, and which should be sorted below.