Are we supposed to know what the "Up" arrows and numbers mean?

[gilgongo]

I'm surprised nobody has asked. They have no tooltips, no explanation. What do they do?

Possible interpretations

1. It serves as another way of "agreeing" with the post, together with the existing "thumbs up" emoji.
2. If the post is at the top of the thread, it raises that thread in the stack position.
3. It's explained on a tooltip, but the tooltip isn't working.
4. If enough people click it for any of the posts on a thread, the whole thread moves up the list.
5. It does nothing and only you can see it (similar to a "starred" item).
6. It confers some kind of rank on the poster (although no such ranking is displayed on the user's profile).
7. It does nothing.

[noah-nuebling]

My intuitive interpretation would be that it increases visibility, in contrast to the thumbs up emoji which is just a social thing without any “special effects”.

I think I’m subconsciously relating it to Reddit upvotes.

[gilgongo]

I see - so the “special effect" is that the more "ups" a parent post gets, the higher it rises in the stack? I can't work out what it does to comments on parents though, since it can't alter their order, yet all posts have the "up" (arrow and no "down").

I love how it's just there with no explanation, no easy interpretation, and so presumably most people ignore it as noise.

[noah-nuebling]

If you sort the comments by "top" it will order them by the number of upvotes too I think.

[hagaigold]

did you find the answer?

[gilgongo]

I think the closest we have is that it participates in sorting. So I'll mark that as the answer. Would it have killed them to put a tooltip on it saying "Used when viewing this discussion by top comments"? I dunno - designers these days...

[hagaigold]

probably the one who implemented it, already moved to his next job :)
We always found ourselves as a new "monkey" once in a while - https://www.proserveit.com/blog/five-monkeys-experiment-lessons

[knoepfel]

See the answer here: https://docs.github.com/en/discussions/collaborating-with-your-community-using-discussions/participating-in-a-discussion#upvoting-a-discussion