What is the purpose of voting up or down on? I’m not clear what voting is suposed to achieve?

I never vote up or down on here in the same manner that I never click Like on any social media sites either, I don’t see what the intent behind it is.

  • CoderKat@kbin.social
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 year ago

    For emphasis, they’re something done for the collective community for the most part. By the time you are considering voting, you’ve already read the post. Voting is largely so later viewers can see just the best content. In this sense, it’s like a social contract.

    People who browse new posts get to shape the community. Their votes are most influential. But they also don’t get to see as much quality content.

    In some rare cases, you will actually come back to the thread, in which case voting just helps ensure that it’s more likely there’ll be more discussion when you check back.

    And finally, it can just feel good to vote for stuff you like (it’s like giving a very tiny reward). Inversely, downvoting is a low effort way to communicate to a poster that their post was bad and show others in the community that their post is not acceptable. That’s very important for bigoted posts. Downvoting those posts makes it very clear to everyone that bigotry isn’t accepted here.