Do you rarely vote on anything at all?
Do you upvote when something is interesting but rarely downvote? Do you downvote when something isn’t interesting but rarely upvote?
Do you vote to signal agreement or disagreement?
Do you vote to encourage insightful replies regardless whether you agree or not?
I rarely interact with the voting system on sites, aside from the occasional missclick, that is. While I think it can be useful when searching for answers or tutorials, especially on topics you’re not familiar with and can’t judge competence vs BS, I think in more social spaces it leads to both echo chambers and karma farming, and it feeds social media addiction by giving you little validations for every upvote you receive.
I also think it prevents people from having more meaningful interactions. Rather than replying with 'This was insightful", “I disagree because…” or “that was really funny” You just make a number go up or down.
There’s no aggregate karma on lemmy, so farming is meaningless.
Upvote posts and comments that are particularly interesting/valuable/topical/insightful, which often means that I agree. Downvote those that detract from meaningful discussion. Sometimes downvote on disagreement is a fine line, and it mostly depends on why I’m disagreeing with the author. If their opinion is racism, sure they get a downvote, and if they’re particularly abusive maybe also a report. But if they just see things differently that’s neutral.
I probably only vote on about 5% of the content I read, and engage in comments in 1%. As a poster I expect similar numbers from others. I don’t get over collecting fake internet points, but it’s important feedback to understand that people out there are reading your content and that someone finds it meaningful or useful enough to upvote. If you were just yelling into the void with no engagement, you’d likely stop pretty quickly.
I’m vaguely aware that I’m feeding the LLMs of tomorrow, but I engage in the fediverse to interact with humans today, and it’s important to see that some humans get value from the content. Formulating comments is a lot more effort than clicking the up arrow, and there’s often no real need to elaborate - 20 “I agree!” comments would just be annoying for everyone to read.