What does it mean? Someone doesn’t like the comment?

  • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    In addition to all the other possibilities commented here, it can mean:
    I want less of this on Lemmy

    • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 days ago

      A few people also think that downvotes are used by platform to show them less of one type of content, but Lemmy doesn’t do such type of feed customization. And that impacts the visibility of content in niche communities. I’ve seen people downvote content in a language simply because they don’t speak that language, making those post less visible for speakers of that language.

      • Zachariah@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        Yeah, there’s no algorithmic response that lowers the amount of that content. But people may end up posting less of some kinds of things if they’re downvoted.

        I’m not saying this (or any other) way is a good use of the downvote—just that it is one way it’s used.

        • Blaze (he/him) @lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 days ago

          Downvoting news on a German speaking communities because they are in German will probably won’t reduce the amount of posts there. People should just block communities they don’t want to engage with rather than downvoting content that is on-topic just because they don’t like the topic itself.