(For instances that allow downvotes, obviously.)
I ask because if I see a post with more than a handful of downvotes assigned to what otherwise seems like decent content, I consider it a yellow flag, and I’ll often go to the comments section to try and discover why the post is controversial.
Sometimes I’ll find it’s truly a matter of personal disagreement (such as on a hot-button topic like veganism), however I’ll often discover the downvotes are there for a more objective reason, such as misleading or outdated info in the post. On many occasions this additional digging has led me to change what would have been an upvote from me to no vote or even a downvote. On the flip side, if I see a post that I like but that looks a bit fishy, if it has hardly any downvotes relative to the upvotes, I’ll assume that it has passed Lemmy approval (a kind of Cunningham’s Law I guess) and is therefore probably okay (e.g. I see a reference in a ScienceMemes or HistoryMemes post that seems too bonkers to be true).
So what about you all? Do you use the upvote: downvote ratio to guide how you interact with posts?
Pretty much the same. I’ll look at the post or headline or whatever and make my assessment of if I want to see more like that. If I see downvotes already there tho, I try to figure out why. Sometimes the post does turn out to be spammier or more controversial or more factually wrong than it first appeared.