You understand there is a difference though right?

Even if that statement is true is generality, it’s not like replacing a person, wholesale with an LLM, is a one for one exchange.

That’s a lot of interpretive logic to apply to a statement that basically says

“votes are for sorting, upvote things you like, downvote things you don’t”

That you have a strict interpretation of what votes are and are not for, doesn’t change the fact that its not supported by official sources.

If you want to push your interpretation, you do you, but presenting your interpretation as definitively the spirit of what was intended is factually incorrect.

It’s that kind of claiming of objective correctness that fuels fundamentalism and shuts down and kind of reasonable discourse.

Not that I necessarily disagree with your idea of what this kind of voting system should be (an entirely different conversation), im just saying it’s not definitive or official, and claiming that your suggestion “is what it really means” weakens your argument as a whole.

I would add that one of the fundamental problems with Lemmy is that people are not using the voting system in good faith. Upvotes and downvotes have increasingly become a measure of whether someone agrees or disagrees with an opinion, rather than whether a contribution is relevant, factual, constructive, or adds value to the discussion. That was never what the voting system was designed for.

Genuine question, citation ?

I’ve not seen anything that properly defines what the voting system is for other than the join-lemmy docs which seem to state it’s purely for visibility and sorting.

Lemmy uses a voting system to sort post listings. On the left side of each post there are up and down arrows, which let you upvote or downvote it. You can upvote posts that you like so that more users will see them, or downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen. Each post receives a score which is the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes.