A lot of interesting perceptions on the upvote system here.

It's another form of user moderation. Is the content relevant to the community you're in? Upvote it. Did it help you? Was it a thought-provoking comment chain? Upvote it, it might help others!

Is is irrelevant, such as a dog photo in a cat community for example? Downvote it! Rude comment or flamewar? Downvote it! If you still want to see it, now it's easily sorted at the bottom. :)

A lot of areas of this site, such as the comment section here, can be organized by these votes for your convenience and sanity. You can also identify potentially malicious links/suggestions based off the like/dislike ratio on a comment. A helpful tip is to hover over the number beside a comments time-stamp near the top of a comment. It'll display the full ratio!

Voting creates a signal about the quality of a post so other users can rank posts based on the collective perspective. You don't vote for yourself, you vote to help other users.

The intent is to rank whether something is a useful/meaningful/worthwhile contribution or not.

I replied to a comment on this thread before - but I think it is good to reply to the OP as well

Lemmy uses a logarithmic vote and time based ranking algo for Active and hot - those sorts, when there's no issues are fuelled by the age of the posts, and also the score of the posts.

The first 10 votes are more powerful than the next 100, but this power is tempered by how quickly it takes to get those votes - a post that gets 1000 votes in an hour will be ranked higher than a post that gets 10000 votes in 10 hours.

You can see the full description of how the algo is supposed to work here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/en/contributors/07-ranking-algo.html

As you can see, I highly recommended voting on posts regularly - even if it appears to do nothing, if the algo isn't glitched, older posts need a lot more votes than newer posts to reach the top of active and hot, and the faster a new post can get votes the more likely it is to reach the top. And If you want something new to get on the hot and new boards, even one upvote is all it needs to exponentially increase its rankin

EDIT: - Lemmy doesn't auto self upvote posts and comments... So if you aren't doing that you're not doing everything you can to get people to see it.

i can't believe you've asked this! user voting is everything! without it there's no way to meaningfully rank the content. i prefer to browser top-day posts because i only want to see what the majority of people have decided is worth seeing. surely you can imagine that browsing a randomly sorted list would be full of boring and uninteresting posts!

When things work correctly, it matters. Right now lemmy's sorting system is bugged, so just using "new" is the best way to find content.

But, when it works, the upvotes and downvotes determine how much visibility a post is given. It's basically a way for us users to tell the site what content is good, and what content is bad. If you see a thread with interesting discussion, or that links a fun video, or features a pretty art piece, upvoting will help more people find it.

If you see someone link to misinformation, or push a conspiracy theory, you can downvote to the tell the system that it is bad content, and it will show it to less people going forward.

Upvoting a post releases the Good Chemicals in the brain. You do this when you would like the person who made this contribution to do more of that.

Downvoting, in turn, produces the Bad CHemicals. The downvote button was famously invented to replace the previous disincentivizing mehchanism, Hammers.

I found this on Wikipedia:

Using a system of upvotes and downvotes users can influence what content appears at the top of the main feeds and of each community.

So if you find a post interesting, you can upvote it. And if someone posts cat pictures in asklemmy, you can downvote it, because it's off-topic and maybe you want to discourage such behaviour.

I'm not sure if Lemmy has upvote counters for users, but either way if you upvote a post or comment you say that it's useful/interesting, and it's a bit like a "thank you" in real life.

For me, the main part of receiving upvotes is the "knowing" that someone agreed with or appreciated my comment. Encourages me to continue commenting. Like the opposite of being ignored during group conversations.

I upvote posts that are interesting usually. A higher score means more people may see it.

I usually upvote most people that reply to my comments even if I don't agree with them. It's my way of showing appreciation for the time they took to engage with me.

I don't like to down vote. In my opinion it shouldn't be used as a disagreement button. More for people who are needlessly rude.

It's a convenient way to get people to not write angry rants when they can instead just hit the downvote button and move on with their lives feeling like they've shown the person they're angry with what-for.

Edit: The downvote button has now saved /c/asklemmy from four angry rants about how wrong I am. Good job, downvote button! :)

The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.