The points matter in so far as they can be used as a metric of what is and is not acceptable within a group (or even society as a whole in some cases) as well as what is displayed first for users who use the default sort method.
Though it’s a crutch. I also regularly get one or two random downvotes for random uncontroversial stuff. I get some proportion of downvotes if I give a nuanced opinion and/or dispell urban legends. And I regularly get very few (if at all) votes by helping someone in the comments or giving the correct answer to a question, while other people get 800 upvotes for posting a meme picture, which they just took from someplace else… Don’t get me wrong, this might be as good as we can do. But I don’t think voting works particularly well for what it’s trying to achieve.
And it doesn’t really help me. If I do the default sort, it’s mostly news articles and pictures that show up and have a score of several hundreds. And the interesting posts are buried somewhere. So I kind of disregard the votes while browsing Lemmy, making them kind of meaningless for me and that purpose. YMMV. But I think I either need to unsubscribe from all those communities, or use several distinct subscription feeds.
The points matter in so far as they can be used as a metric of what is and is not acceptable within a group (or even society as a whole in some cases) as well as what is displayed first for users who use the default sort method.
Though it’s a crutch. I also regularly get one or two random downvotes for random uncontroversial stuff. I get some proportion of downvotes if I give a nuanced opinion and/or dispell urban legends. And I regularly get very few (if at all) votes by helping someone in the comments or giving the correct answer to a question, while other people get 800 upvotes for posting a meme picture, which they just took from someplace else… Don’t get me wrong, this might be as good as we can do. But I don’t think voting works particularly well for what it’s trying to achieve.
And it doesn’t really help me. If I do the default sort, it’s mostly news articles and pictures that show up and have a score of several hundreds. And the interesting posts are buried somewhere. So I kind of disregard the votes while browsing Lemmy, making them kind of meaningless for me and that purpose. YMMV. But I think I either need to unsubscribe from all those communities, or use several distinct subscription feeds.