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Lol the place that must not be named.
It’s a numbers game. Getting engagement and knowing your audience are skills. The fediverse is a small place compared to meta. Being a big player in the fediverse for most posters is like being in the best team in a college league. Meta joining with 500-2000x the users is like suddenly having to compete at a national professional level. Certainly a few players have the skill, but most will get benched in no time.
Maybe I’m wrong and I hope that I am, but I certainly know most default sub comments at the other place had no upvotes, no replies, and were at the bottom of the thread never to be seen. On here, nearly every comment i see or post has SOME engagement (like this discussion!). It’s a different game when you have hundreds of millions to billions of users.
It’s never throwing your ballot in the garbage though. I used to think the same way, but every vote on the left, even if for the lesser evil, even if they lose, moves the conversation to the left. When we all stay home you get maga nutjobs stealing the show running unchecked.
Last thing is that gerrymandered states are the EASIEST to upset by increasing voter turnout. To gerrymander effectively you have to put your opponent in dense areas they’ll win by a large margin, then spread your side so that you barely win the rest of the districts. That means that a 5% increase in votes on the left can take you from a loss to a nearly complete victory in a gerrymandered state.
Vote splitting on the other hand is a trickier beast, but in the end if all the left votes go to a moderate then that gives the left a lot of leverage because if the moderate candidate doesn’t bend to the left then they’ll lose the next election.
Always vote.