From what I can see, people will downvote shitposts even if they agree with it. But the downvote is used as the disagree button the majority of the time.
I will upvote any comment that seems to be made in good faith but I don’t have any illusions of that being how the majority of the network uses their votes. I think a higher percentage of people use their vote that way compared to Reddit but not much to make a difference.
That’s why I suggested hiding votes entirely. I think that would be unpopular because people like the dopamine hit of seeing your comment score go up, and so my compromise was to only hide 0 or negative scores.
If a company could pay $5 a customer for a competitive edge in customer satisfaction over their competitors, they would. Either they are getting way more than that or there is some cartel/monopoly action going on in the market. Maybe they are playing the long game to introduce an ad free model at a premium.
Still don’t see how nobody is undercutting existing players with ad free, smart tvs.