It should mean "this post is not suited for this community" or "this comment does not contribute to a fruitful discussion". In practice it means "disagree".
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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In addition to all the other possibilities commented here, it can mean:
I want less of this on Lemmy
A few people also think that downvotes are used by platform to show them less of one type of content, but Lemmy doesn't do such type of feed customization. And that impacts the visibility of content in niche communities. I've seen people downvote content in a language simply because they don't speak that language, making those post less visible for speakers of that language.
Yeah, there’s no algorithmic response that lowers the amount of that content. But people may end up posting less of some kinds of things if they’re downvoted.
I’m not saying this (or any other) way is a good use of the downvote—just that it is one way it’s used.
Downvoting news on a German speaking communities because they are in German will probably won't reduce the amount of posts there. People should just block communities they don't want to engage with rather than downvoting content that is on-topic just because they don't like the topic itself.
agreed
It's a downvote, someone indeed didn't like the post or comment. Don't worry about it too much, some people just downvote everything
Oh ok lol sounds good
or found it off-topic, or poorly argued, or incorrect
or it was a link to a video without a text summary, which is the main reason I downvote anything
laughs in disabled downvotes