Let me rephrase what I mean. I guess I really am talking about the effect of enforced groupthink that platforms with voting like most social media sites cause, advertently or otherwise. Despite efforts to the contrary, voting here and elsewhere has always been an expression of approval or disapproval. So what tends to happen is that if someone posts something against the grain, people downvote it, and then it escalates from there. These numbers, despite their meaninglessness, were designed to trigger an emotional response—positive when high and negative when low. It results in the discouragement of the posting of anything that the user might think to be controversial. It gives a feeling that differences in opinions are unwelcome. And that’s really the problem with the way modern social media networks are designed.

We associate (probably not consciously), high scores and vote totals with things being “good”, and low scores with things being bad, when they really correspond to “popular” and “unpopular”, respectively. The algorithm is suggesting to its users that popular opinions are good and unpopular opinions are bad. This is a fine way to sort content like animal videos or funny dash cam GIFs but it’s a really terrible way to sort opinions.

Lemmy is little better than Reddit in this regard, because Reddit punishes its users for having “low karma” by taking away their ability to post and comment, but I still think that voting systems in general are a pretty bad way to score and recommend content.