Obviously, most social networks have some sort of engagement button for liking/up voting/promoting a piece of content. As well as helping users feel like they’re participating, rather than just passively consuming, most networks also use the likes/ups to filter or promote content to other users.
As a dumb noob, what does the up/down vote do in lemmy in particular? Does it actually affect anything beyond changing the number beside the little arrows? I know there’s some discussion about lemmy tracking ‘karma’ even if it’s not visible in all clients. Can different instances implement “karma thresholds”? Or auto hide posts that fall beneath a certain down vote ratio?
And more subjectively, what do you feel up/down voting represents? Is it showing agreement with the post? That you want to see more posts like that? That other people should look at the post? Does it matter if this subjective purpose is actually unrelated to what the up votes do in reality?
From my script I get 3399 as the sum of all scores, but the API reports 7 points for my posts and 574 for my comments. But these values jump around quite a bit. Had much more and much less before too.
If I run my script for my user on a different instance, all of the values are quite randomly different as well. But then again, if I view the same posts/comments from a different instance, I will also get different results, because sync is currently not working correctly.
Lemmy doesn’t have guaranteed eventual consistency, so events like up/downvotes, comments, edits, posts all can randomly get lost due to network/server problems. If a server isn’t reachable in time, it will just not get the event.