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The problem is that upvotes serve two conflicting proposes. Upvoting raises visibility, so one use is to say, “this is a post people should see.” In that case, you may not necessarily agree with the content of the post, but rather believe it’s worthy of debate. A good example of this is c/unpopularopinion, where the community rules specifically state to upvote if you agree it’s an unpopular opinion, not whether you agree with the opinion.
The other, conflicting, use is to signal approval or disapproval.
You can’t do both at the same time. It’s a flaw in design Reddit had, which they fixed but monetized. Lemmy did not learn from Reddit’s mistake and instead repeated it.
Two conflicting uses for the same action is terrible UX design.
Yeah, fuck giving examples, because people ignore the stated problem and focus on the example. You’re exactly right. It’s stackexchange all over again, and I should know better than to provide any specifics, because people can not resist solving the wrong problem.
There’s an actual term for this behavior, but it escapes me. It’s the opposite of the X/Y problem, where people fixate on some irrelevant detail. I need to learn to ignore “can you give an example” comments, because all that leads to use someone trying to fix a specific instance of a larger, more general problem.