I recently learned that voting on lemmy is not anonymous. Anyone can get information about who has upvoted and downvoted a post or comment.
In combination with your IP, this is a massive privacy (maybe even physical security) risk. Also, people can target you for your votes.
Sadly, this is something where I would prefer Reddit over Lemmy. Big tech scrapes data from both places anyways, at least Reddit is safe.
Most importantly, recognize that it does take time to adjust to the reality that no one cares about the fake internet points here.
Oh but they do.
It also informs how comments are sorted under each post (unless you choose New or Old by default).
IMHO the voting system is the best part of both reddit and lemmy: it gives certain powers to the majority. It gives a rough picture of how other people - even those that do not comment - feel about opinions.
edit: lol, even you do
Voting functions completely differently between the two sites. I didn’t say that voting doesn’t matter, I said that no one cares about the “points.”
People can and do use voting to let others know about interesting content or to express displeasure at seeing a post (which is why it is sometimes surprising to see any downvotes on certain posts such as the nice one I was responding to in the screenshot).
What people don’t use them for is a measure of merit or reputation. Voting here functions much more like reddit used to years ago. It helps sort content by what people want to see.
