My opinion is still that Lemmy needs reactions in addition to, or instead of, voting. Voting should be reserved for “this is something that should be seen / is not interesting,” but it doubles as “I dis/agree with this”. It’s ambiguous. Lemmy needs reactions – Github is a good model.

The real problem with having only voting and not reactions is that ambiguity. When someone makes a comment that I think is interesting and well thought-out, but I don’t agree with… do I upvote it? I think it is worth reading, but I don’t want to imply I agree with it. Same with posts: “Donald Trump orders the execution of all homeless people.” On the one hand, I want to upvote the fuck out of that because it needs to be seen and bubbled-up by the algorithm; on the other hand, I don’t want to imply that I agree with it.

Reddit used to always preach this: upvote content that needs to be seen, not based on agreement – although it never worked out that way, because people want a way to express their opinion about a post or comment. If voting is the only mechanism for expressing dis/agreement, that’s what it’ll be used for. If Lemmy had reactions, then it’d allow people a fast way to express their opinions about comment without having to resort to voting, or in banal responses that don’t contribute anything to the conversation.

If I could make one change to Lemmy, I’d get rid of voting altogether, and just have reactions. You can still sort: there are obviously positive and negative reactions (thumbs-up/down), and most reactions can probably be grouped into one of three categories: positive, negative, and neutral. You don’t need to support all emojis; again, Github is a good model. You have a half-dozen or a dozen choices, each of which falls into one of the three categories. The current sorting by vote could be done by subtracting negatives from positives; maybe you add the neutrals to the positives, because if someone bothered to react, it probably counts as being worth sorting up. That’s a debatable detail, though, not a blocker. But so often I see a comment where I just want to say, “I agree with this” without implying that it’s worthy of sorting up; or I want to say “you need to see this” without implying that I agree with the content. My current choices are: upvote or downvote with an ambiguous implication, or a reply saying “This!” that only muddies the thread.

Voting is ambiguous, and limited, and easily abused. It should be tossed out and replaced with reactions – or at the very least added to supplement voting. Then I could at least upvote important news to get it to the front page, but add a thumbs-down to show I don’t like it.