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.
Yep. That’s why you sometimes see people downvoted into oblivion, simply for stating something which is true, within a community that is deluded about that given thing. Whether the votes accurately represent the value of the content, depends entirely on who sees it.
But at the same time, saying it is truly pointless, would mean you also consider the very concept of democracy, pointless. Yes, there will be a percentage of people who are unable to form a level opinion, and how many such users there are can vary wildly depending on who sees a given post/comment in the first place.
But results speak for themselves. Reddit’s voting system does work. Especially because when you go to a specific subreddit, its about a specific subject. Meaning the users who are there, likely align in what they are interested in, meaning the voting is now a much more accurate representation of what the subscribers of a given sub want to see. Your subjective opinion is likely to match that of the users looking at the same subreddit. And this continues working even as you subscribe to multiple subs. Each post only gets shown to users who subbed (unless on r/all), even though each user has a mixed feed of the stuff they subbed to.
That’s why you sometimes see people downvoted into oblivion, simply for stating something which is true, within a community that is deluded about that given thing. Whether the votes accurately represent the value of the content, depends entirely on who sees it.
Even in that example the system works as described and intended. That community deems “true statements” bad content, hence they downvote it.
It is not an objective measure, but reflects how much a given community values a specific content, how much they find it relevant.
Downvotes are an extremely effective way to control spam. Under every popular Twitter post there’s a bunch of rampant trolling, misplaced political hot takes, and crypto scams. Reddit has much fewer of these problems because voting ends up removing all incentives to do it.
