No, not at all. When you get a ton of downvotes but zero responses, assuming you didn’t just post literal nonsense, I consider it proof I’m correct and it’s just a truth people don’t like. When you’re wrong people will downvote you and tell you why, which should be a learning experience that a person should be humble enough to accept but just downvotes or responses only attacking you not you points is pure validation you’re speaking an uncomfortable truth

Yes. Downvotes allow a well educated community to bury misinformation

I pretty much always win with votes. If I get upvotes, I think someone appreciated it. If someone downvotes, I think they’re a hater.

I won’t lie though; my adhd ass checks way too often in a desperate search for dopamine.

Only when I’m checking to see what I said before someone replied. Otherwise, I never check.

Yes, sometimes I say some stupid shit and other people correct me. Sometimes it’s the reverse. We all keep each other accountable.

Usually no, unless I’ve left a reply disagreeing then someone else comes along and downvotes them, makes me look like an ass who downvotes anyone I disagree with. I also check my own comments to see if people agree with me but I’ll keep the comment up either way, if I do change my mind I’d rather leave a new comment or add stuff in an edit.

It’s not too difficult to bot votes on lemmy so they’re even more pointless than they are on reddit.

There are only two things I think about when it comes to vote count:

1. if I make a joke, and it’s not being replied to but being downvoted I want to know if people understood the joke, understood it even was a joke, or if the joke was just not funny.

2. If I see a question being asked that doesn’t appear to be in bad faith being downvoted, and not answered, it pisses me off.

It depends, once I got like 20 upvotes and it was amazing to think them at 70% of Lemmy users read and agreed with my post!

When I see someone downvoted for no good reason, I tend to support them; upvotes don’t sway me at all. My own stuff I see votes as a guide to how well I fit a community (except in one controversial group which attracts down votes – there voters are meaningless

It lets me feel like my time here is being useful if I get the upvotes. I try to limit myself to positive/fun/helpful posts or adding additional facts from other articles to someone’s post of I feel more info is needed to get a full story, so if people reply or at least upvote, it feels like it was worth adding my contribution. If my humor/help isn’t needed or wanted in a place, I don’t want to both waste my time and annoy people.

They’re helpful to determine the general community’s take on something, even if there is little other engagement.

And if I’m being honest, getting upvotes is a sweet hit of dopamine. But I try to keep things in perspective.

Not really. Someone will disagree with me eventually, but that doesn’t mean I’m interested in debating or earning their approval somehow.

I’m on an instance that only federates upvotes so I don’t really think about downvotes or know if I am getting them.

Down votes are useful for estimating the exactly how badly damaged the sense of humour in the community is.

I prefer to see both numbers rather than the sum. The variance sort of gives a ‘controversial’ score. Can’t get that with PieFed yet, but I prefer the deduplication of PieFed over the split scores on Voyager.