Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they’re participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.
As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there’s some discussion about lemmy tracking ‘karma’ even if it’s not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement “karma thresholds”? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?
And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?
“Lemmy uses a voting system to sort post listings. - - You can upvote posts that you like so that more users will see them. Or downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen. Each post receives a score which is the number of upvotes minus number of downvotes.
source
Hot sounds a lot like what Reddit uses. They use some secret algorithm where each upvote is like a balloon that lifts the post up and as the post ages, more and more weights are added to it over time so that it sinks down and gives more space for newer posts.
Reading the documentation can be a bit boring, but you can always use Bing to summarize the main points and even ask specific questions about the text.