Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they’re participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.
As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there’s some discussion about lemmy tracking ‘karma’ even if it’s not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement “karma thresholds”? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?
And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?
You can track a user’s “karma” ie. total upvotes on posts or comments using the API but I don’t think there’s anything that allows threshold outside of creating your own modbot that would delete all new user’s posts if they don’t meet the requirement.
As for the purpose of the upvote I think it just functions as a ‘I want to give this post/comment a boost’ whether that be because you found informative, it’s something that already agree with or is just a good contribution to the discussion.
The karma tracking in the API is completely broken though. I made a script that actually counts all your comment/post scores and adds them up, and it’s wildly different from the total score of a user that the API shows. I honestly don’t understand how Lemmy comes up with the total scores.
Kbin labels it as “Reputation points”, and your profile shows up with 1815 points to me. Not sure what that tells you as far as the numbers you’ve been tracking so far.
From my script I get 3399 as the sum of all scores, but the API reports 7 points for my posts and 574 for my comments. But these values jump around quite a bit. Had much more and much less before too.
If I run my script for my user on a different instance, all of the values are quite randomly different as well. But then again, if I view the same posts/comments from a different instance, I will also get different results, because sync is currently not working correctly.
Lemmy doesn’t have guaranteed eventual consistency, so events like up/downvotes, comments, edits, posts all can randomly get lost due to network/server problems. If a server isn’t reachable in time, it will just not get the event.
And I’m on connect and their points are 260
My script, that sums up all posts/comments, reports my score as 3399. The API on my server reports a post score of 7 and a comment score of 574.
But I had much higher and lower scores reported by the API before.