You’re right. Apologies.

There are many other models, some discussed in this post. All come with their own set of upsides and downsides.

For a small community, which Lemmy original was, straight up votes work great. Unfortunately it doesn’t scale. Reddit is a perfect example.

You’re right, there is only up/down vote systems with a user base that is in no way verified or otherwise restricted to a single vote/real person, or corporate algos.

There are plenty of different models. Do I fault the Lemmy devs for using it? No. Is it ideal for content discovery? Not really.

The idea is to gauge community interest/relevance and facilitate content discovery. I feel it is becoming a bit dated method of accomplishing this and easily gamed.