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.
I don’t really downvote. I try to be helpful, so if someone’s just being rude, I typically just block them. Probably more efficient.
The default for Reddit was to hide posts with X downvotes, so people could manipulate that to hide posts they don’t like. Lemmy doesn’t do that by default, so there’s no real utility. Also users can choose to sort by time and ignore vote counts (I do) so your downvotes literally don’t do anything for those users. Thus, I just block people who go out of their way to be rude or offensive.
I upvote people who are helpful and/or kind. Otherwise, I don’t interact with that system.