For me, it’s equivalent to a statement that “I would like to see more of something like this”. That sometimes means upvoting things that I don’t agree with, yet very often I’ll pass over things that I do (such as “^This” - I agree, but don’t want to see more of it:-). Often I’ll upvote nearly every comment in a thread, to signal hopes for increased participation. To me it’s a signal for health and vibrancy of a community to see such.
But other people I guess use it as an “I agree” or “like” button? If that’s you, do you use it sparingly? What’s the rationale there - that when it is delivered, it means more? But with Lemmy so small, why not deliver it more often to help it grow? I mean you feel free to do you, I’m just curious. Maybe you feel it could encourage “karma farming”?
I’d even like to ask lurkers what they think, although I suppose that literally by definition I cannot:-). Then again, I recently became a lurker myself by watching the embedded Loops videos at https://tesseract.dubvee.org/c/[email protected], and I really miss being able to comment or vote on videos to help guide others to which ones I feel are most/least worthwhile to watch. It feels like a finger is missing - I reach out to do my normal activity and it’s gone.:-) So perhaps if someone was recently a lurker, what are your thoughts too?
For the most part, I upvote positivity and helpfulness and I downvote rudeness or useless/immature contributions. If I disagree with someone but they’re being honest and not malicious… I’ll either upvote them or just leave their comment alone, depending on the tone of the conversation.
On Reddit, I hardly voted on anything. There were just too many users and I felt like my tiny contribution didn’t matter all that much. But here on Lemmy, I find myself upvoting almost everything. The community is smaller and votes matter, so I feel like I’m actually helping create communities here.
Yeah Reddit, in addition to having fallen to become a toxic hellhole imho (really wish I did not have to say that but… it’s true so there it is), also became just EXHAUSTING to try to keep up in. Even an hour or two after a post came out, in the larger subs, the stream of comments got so long that you felt like you couldn’t comment at all in it, unless you’d read through all the others first. Or worse, by the time you wrote out a response, others had said similarly but it looks like you ignored them - technically you did at that point I suppose, despite it not existing at the time when you started (which got MUCH more complicated if e.g. you started writing before your work day, then wanted to finish at the end of it, rather than write it all out in one go).
But ad revenue must always go UP so… screw whatever might help promote helpful discussions, and instead make something that encouraged the quickest of tweet-style short replies (“I also choose this guy’s wife”, “I too also choose this guy’s wife, also”, “likewise, I similarly choose to partake in this guy’s wife as well” - I mean okay, we get the joke, it doesn’t need to be repeated twenty times in a row as a response to the same identical comment reply): i.e., people were trained to speak rather than listen.
Here, people still can do that, but the training component is absent, and the fact that it’s smaller makes it much less incentivized to do so.