I woke up today, to a public comment in a Lemmy community asking a series of tagged accounts why they had downvoted certain posts
I thought that reactions to posts and comments are anonymous and now I don’t really know what to feel about Lemmy any more.
In this case I had downvoted a poster because of its design, but was confronted publicly for being racist because the person assumed that I downvoted the message on the poster
EDIT: changed the title from “How” to “Why” because it broke rule nr 5 about it being a support question
On other platforms, it’s a mechanism to assign a sort of “social worth” to people and ideas, and to tailor an algorithm to drive engagement.
I think it exists on Lemmy purely to make it feel more like “Reddit but federated.” Without the votes, this is just a normal message board. Lol