this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2026
31 points (94.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

45241 readers
655 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Okay, say there's a post that says something bad... what do I (or you) do? Do you upvote it because it's like "thank you for pointing this out", or does your upvote mean you support whatever the post says (which is kinda the opposite)?

This is super important and not sure how many people know what they're doing lmao

Edit: Okay. It has been decided. We need more buttons than just Up/Down πŸ₯²

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 53 points 3 days ago (3 children)

I see voting as decentralized moderation, not as an expression of agreement or like or something.

Upvote means "I want people to see this" and downvote means "I don't want people to see this."

[–] Steve@communick.news 13 points 3 days ago (3 children)

That's the ideal.
But I think most people conflate those with agree and disagree.

[–] queermunist@lemmy.ml 11 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

That's still consistent, normal people don't want posts they disagree with to be seen by other people. Only debate perverts would upvote something they disagree with, because they want people to see "good discussion" or whatever.

EDIT To clarify, as a proud debate pervert I tend to upvote people I'm arguing with just so our argument gets more visibility.

[–] TheFogan@programming.dev 5 points 3 days ago

agreed that's human nature at it's core. Reddits tried for years to push the "Upvote things that bring good discussion, downvote things that don't". But yeah humans always will be humans, I don't see a time when a majority will ever follow that understanding, though I try my best to still follow it.

[–] andrewrgross@slrpnk.net 3 points 3 days ago

That's true. I don't think it's generally a problem, but I do find it funny when you see someone politely correct someone else deep in a chain where no one else is reading, and the correction says "0".

To anyone who downvotes like that: you look like an insecure clown.

100%. Content sorting is (to my understanding) handled by peer vote rather than any kind of central algorithm on Lemmy by default, so a vote is much less about agreement/disagreement, and much more about doing your part in the process of separating the wheat from the chaff imo.

In my view, even a (non-bot) lurker who only views/votes is still contributing to the community, because they still add another data point for sorting. It’s a collective effort that generates a collective content algorithm, so a person should vote accordingly.

[–] serpineslair@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

This. It's "I like this content" or "I dislike this content", not agree or disagree. I get annoyed when people downvote because they don't agree with an opinion, as it will then get less eyes. Downvote if the content is misinformation or just blatantly bad.