Saidit is different from many anonymous social media sites. One of the things that makes us different is our unique voting system, with two types of upvotes and no downvote.

For comparison, reddit's voting system has just up and down votes. A downvote "undoes" an upvote, and futhermore only the net result is shown to the user instead of the individual scores. (Reddit hid the individual up and down score counts about 4 years ago, presumably to cover up bot and shill activity just before the 2016 election which was driving up their traffic numbers, as I cannot see another reason to remove this long-established and user-desired functionality from the site.) Teams of people then "fight" for the upvotes vs the downvotes, and it has created a competitive and judgmental culture around many areas of reddit.

Saidit has a different voting system. We do not have downvotes. One person cannot "undo" the votes of another, so the toxic vote-brigading behaviors of reddit simply can not work here. Plus here your vote is guaranteed to be seen directly, there is no "vote fuzzing" here like reddit has. What you see on saidit is exactly how many votes there were, no more, no less.

Saidit has two types of upvotes, instead of just one, so there's more ways to display how you like something:

• The "insightful" vote, which is a lightbulb icon on the top, means serious approval of a genuinely thoughtful idea. It's for stuff that makes you think, broadens your worldview, and really adds something to the world and to saidit.

• The "funny" vote, which is right below with a picture of a laughing emoji, is for stuff that's not serious, but is still worthy of attention for entertainment value. Things like most music videos, funny memes, and jokes. A funny vote is still an upvote! If you want to see just the funny stuff, use the 'funny' tab at the top of the main page.

This system will help sort out the funny content from the serious content, which will keep saidit from getting overwhelmed with low-effort memes, which is what happened to reddit.

You can also vote both kinds of votes together, if something is both funny and insightful! This will give the post even more points, which will move it closer to the top of the front page of saidit. A funny vote gives 1 point, and an insightful vote gives 2 points, so both gives 3 points. The number of points combined with the age of the post determines its ranking on the front page.

As there is no way to remove points from a post, if you don't like something it's best to just ignore it and move on. If something is really out of line as per the pyramid of debate, or is just some spam advertisement, use the 'report' button and it will flag the post for a sub mod to take a look at it.

I hope that clears up everything about the saidit voting system to anyone who was wondering! If you have anymore questions, ask away.

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tl;dr: "insightful" vote is +2, "funny" is +1, both are good and improve rank. You can vote both simultaneously. There is no downvote. Ignore things you don't like, report stuff that truly doesn't belong.