I sometimes post news articles that examine possible problems in society. Some may agree with the author, some may disagree. I often see these posts being downvoted if many disagree with the author.
Why do you downvote the post instead of commenting to express your disagreement?
As far as I understand, the idea is to upvote the post to spur conversation and comment to express your agreement or disagreement. Or did I misunderstand something?
Everyone seems to have their own opinions about how you use upvote and downvote. You can either downvote because you don’t think it is a good article or because you don’t agree with it or just because you want less people to see it. There is no way to enforce how peoples choose to use this system. Which means that it doesn’t mean a whole lot and shouldn’t be taken very seriously.
Funilly enough, it seems if you put those specific meanings behind individual emoji, and also display the amount of those emoji accrued, it seems like that would fix the issue, except for more obvious cases of unintended use, like trolling and polling.
Aka, I think Facebook may have figured that out via the expanded reaction suite (rather than just having the like button)
But as Lemmy currently stands, I 100% agree with you