On Reddit, you had the "fake internet points". On Lemmy the points are totally real, but still worthless.

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There are also trolls who constantly say controversial things. Looking at the downvote counter tells you something.

There are also people who... I don't really know what's going in the head of a person who intentionally insult everyone they come across. Did a nefarious little brother hijack that account or is that person really trying get some achievement about maxing out the downvote counter? Some people are a complete mystery. Either way, the downvote counter serves as a red flag.

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To me, voting is mostly a sorting tool.

I may upvote to make sure a great comment is higher than the good comments around it. I may even disagree with the comment to some extent, but I'm still going to upvote, because I think it adds something important to the conversation and more people should read it. However, there are also situations when I upvote to show my approval.

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What if we could trade in our Internet points for some sick cosmetics

🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️

Honestly, that way for obtaining flair and shit would be preferable to spending actual money.

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We all know that decorating your in-game character with cosmetics is the true endgame.

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I've been thinking recently that Lemmy would simply be better off without any comment votes. I've heard some instances disable them, but it still seems to be the norm. Group think already has enough pull given human nature. It doesn't need a boost.

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I mean I don’t think showing votes on posts and comments is inherently bad… but aggregating them to a user across instances seems not only technically challenging from a protocol sense (given that (de)federation and blacklisting is entirely in the control of the server admin), but also a feature that should be intentionally omitted. It’s genuinely not a useful metric in terms of building communities, which I think the lemmy stack should (and does) consider to be an essentially overriding priority.

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I agree. At the very least they say "this many people liked what you said or posted enough to click this button", and that is far from meaningless.

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I like vote counts on posts, because they help me understand what sort of content the community likes, and what sorts I should just not post again. But a cumulative total on my profile? I really don't care.

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My profile already looks amazing, no need for mtx.

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Banned, despite plenty of upvotes.

Refuse : microblogmemes

(old.lemmy.world)

Happens all the time. Anything to say @[email protected] or @[email protected]?

d00phy

Damn! I forgot all about that! Maybe cause I didn’t take it seriously because no real publisher takes the Chicago guide seriously! MLA all day every day m-fers!

d00phy

Yeah, I don’t get it either. People who take joy in the anger of others are… a different breed.

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Most people play Minecraft to build stuff. Other people just fill a village with TNT.

I guess those people also treat social media as a game of sorts. Instead of playing it the normal way, they try to find the most unorthodox ways to play it, and that results in a massive torrent of downvotes.

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The first person to say the earth went around the sun got downvoted into oblivion… but they were still correct.

Upvotes and downvotes can be farmed by telling the various communities what they want to hear.

But, like you say, voting shows the level of interaction and traction your post gets - or doesn’t. I’m not sure there’s any other option at the moment.

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Do the lemmy points actually matters ?

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If you believe the points matter, they will, but only to some extent. If you couldn't care less, you can also safely ignore the them completely.