I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
The real question is why do we even need upvotes or down votes at all?
It’s the main metric by which you determine what posts are popular.
And the first layer of moderation.
On other platforms, it’s a mechanism to assign a sort of “social worth” to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.
I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like “Reddit but federated.” Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol
If you sort everything by Newest Comments, then the votes don’t matter to anything and it is just a normal message board. 😌
Exactly.
But if Lemmy was just seen as a federated message board, it wouldn’t have nearly the users that it does. It’s popularity rocketed (compared to the rest of the Fediverse) specifically because it takes so much of it’s style from Reddit.