If I remember the ancient days correctly, you were supposed to downvote incorrect info so it wouldn’t appear at the top? You weren’t supposed to downvote if you disagreed but if it was wrong info? Am I hallucinating that?
Those were still the rules when I left last year. People will upvote misinformation in the face of proof on there and here on lemmy.
If a platform puts arrow buttons on everything people say, and tell you that up means you get “points”, it’s a social metric. At this point if you’re trying to create a consensus metric, you’ll have to think of something else. It’s too ingrained in us.
This kind of information is all suppressed now, but early on when Facebook only had likes, there was a lot of discussion on how downvotes weren’t really needed. It was believed that people engaged more with content they enjoyed, and ignored unfavorable content.
This is wildly wrong. People obsessively engage with content they hate, to the extent that it probably makes more sense to only have a down vote button. Everyone knows that now, and the big sites uses psychological studies funded by casinos to gamify engagement, entirely in the pursuit of click-pennies.
What do votes mean? On lemmy it seems nothing. On other sites they mean revenue for the owners.
Lemmy has no total score anymore, so the up and down votes only matter in the topic layer. I think that’s the best solution rn. There’s no big incentive any longer to point farm.