K3CAN

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.

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

Interesting! Not something I’ve encountered, but I suppose that’s what makes the Fediverse special! We can all control how we want to interact with things.

Oh, 100% agree that it’s a bit unhinged to actively call out people because they down-dooted something you posted.

Isn’t the Fediverse supposed to be open?

You can show your personal support for something by upvoting it or your opposition to something by downvoting it, but if you don’t want to take a stance on something at all, you don’t have to.

It’s an entirely optional mechanic. You can fully utilize Lemmy to view, post, and comment without ever voting if you don’t want to.

As far as I’m aware, the votes don’t really matter, anyway. Lemmy doesn’t seem to use karma the way that Reddit does. i.e. I’ve never seen a post removed because the user didn’t have enough karma, etc.