Do upvotes matter?

cutecycle@beehaw.org to Chat@beehaw.org – 37 points –

Like, if there are no karma counts and there's no downvote, does upvoting things I like have an effect?

18

They make me feel happy when I get them, and I need all the dopamine I can get these days.

Take one from me you junkie.

One dopamine for you. Have a nice day.

1 more...

upvoting moves the post higher in the Hot, Active, and Top views.

::: spoiler technical details the value of upvotes decay logarithmically over time in the Hot and Active views. new posts and comments have quite a bit of an early advantage, and since upvotes decay, popular old posts and new posts are on roughly equal footing in the Hot and Active views.

here is the algorithm, where R is rank, s is score (number of upvotes - downvotes), and t is time since posting in hours

:::

Reddit monkey-brain says big number mean good, so I updoot anything good. I say if you like something, give it a doot.

It makes the person who commented feel actually heard, imo. It can be nice to see that someone read your comment and agreed

Yes, if anything they're more useful than ever. By not being able to see a score/like vs dislike total, or anything along those lines, your decision to up vote is completely uninfluenced, and 100% your own. That's very helpful in that it's unbiased. You might see a post with thousands of up votes and think "why bother" or "dang everyone likes thisbi should too". Without that subtle influence, you're purely up voting content that you felt was beneficial to you and others would appreciate.

I don't think it has any effect beyond showing other people appreciated the post. And I've read somewhere around here on this site, that not having "karma" associated with each account help prevents bot and faming accounts.

The mlem app shows a “karma” score — both for me and all of you lot.

Really? I wonder where it gets that information from... Is it just doing the math for all the posts on someone's account? I'd think not since that'd be pretty slow.. Do you have any idea how?

there's no fake internet points like karma, but the voting provides weight to how the data is sorted when viewing multiple community's posts at once. of course if you access the community's content directly through that community you'll see everything there regardless of the positive/negative votes on it.

So, downvotes are disabled on beehaw? It's a very good idea.