In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I’m ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.

I don’t have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it’s a matter of general principle in my opinion.

It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don’t engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can’t see those numbers, so it’s kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.

But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they’re a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they’re the only metric available.

Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there’s significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.