this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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Don't overcomplicate this. Voting is a way to collectively curate content. If it is relevant to the community and you feel the content is a positive addition to the community, you vote up. If you think it's a negative addition, you vote it down. That's all that there is to it.
I never downvoted any posts, you may check my alts. I don't do that. I simply ignore or tell users or repport.
Voting like this is a bit of a dark pattern, though. Especially downvotes. They come from places where the platform owners want to download the responsibility of community management to the community itself. This has a nasty tendency to silence valid criticism while simultaniously supporting brigading behaviour.
At the very least, we should be having serious, design-focused discussions about eliminating or highly restricting downvotes.
StackOverflow solved this specific issue pretty well IMO. Each downvote costs you a reputation/karma/fake-internet-point. Lemmy doesn't count karma, so that'd a bit of a nonstarter, but for systems that do, that feels like a good way to discourage rampant use of downvotes.