What’s everyone’s thoughts on down votes and up votes. What do they mean to you. When do you down vote?

In my experience I only use the down vote, when a comment or post does not reflect the COMMUNITY it is posted in, not because I dislike X Y or Z.

I ask this because I have noticed many times when posting in smaller more niche communities that a post will get random down votes and I suspect it is from people scrolling new or hot and just down voting things that don’t like.

  • Juliie@lemmy.worldEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    I only use downvote when the comment is so annoying that it is satisfying to push that arrow down which is rare

  • Elle@lemmy.worldMEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    At the moment I suspect some of those random downvotes may be accidental misclicks/taps due to the all feed live updating.

    That said, personally I’ve been using upvotes lately across many comments as a small bit of encouragement to new folks, and trying to reserve downvotes for generally rude comments that aren’t constructive or that appear to be flat out misinformation/disinformation (to the best of my knowledge).