Out of the 37,000 people who voted for posts or comments in the last month, the 10 most prolific voters (0.02% of us) cast as many votes as the bottom 59%. Here’s how that looks, visually:
As you can see, a lot of people didn’t cast many votes. Someone cast 23k votes, with a group of 13 each casting at least 10k votes.
“But of course most people aren’t really engaged, most of those 37k people are just NPCs who don’t really matter” you say, “Rimu you’re just including them to make it seem worse than it is”, you might say. Ok, cool, let’s pretend the bottom 85% of us don’t matter and just look at the top 5000 voters. Here’s how the distribution looks among them:
Still super unbalanced. Let’s analyze this a bit.
Among those 5000, the top 147 (2.94%) cast as many votes as all the others (4853 people) combined. Among those 5000, the average number of votes cast in a month is 1142. Among the top 147, the average number of votes cast in a month is 6868.
How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?
It’s been a couple weeks and I wanted to add another perspective about this.
I noticed a user downvoting posts, https://lemvotes.org/user/FarStare@lemmy.dbzer0.com if it helps to have specifics. In the more than one full year of existing, they have never once contributed via making a post, never once commenting even, just doling out up- and down-votes in roughly equal proportion, and even those nearly exclusively via posts but almost never comments.
I am not concerned about receiving votes from PugJesus - either up or down, as PugJesus has earned the right to speak on behalf of the community. But who is this other person who is influencing how others see my content? Are they male or female? Do they have a degree of some kind? Do they primarily visit meme communities, as the vote pattern might suggest, or other communities as well?
So how do I feel about people who use the Threadiverse more than others? My answer is more complex and nuanced than simply yay or nay. I might prefer the opposite of the implemented feature even - the more someone posts (including comments?), the more upvotes they are allowed to make? Have they not earned such?
Also, if votes were exposed, each individual could decide for themselves how they wanted to make use of voting - perhaps someone would ban PugJesus, or conversely write special code (a 3rd party app / API recipient?) to highlight posts that PugJesus upvoted (isn’t that how “boosting” works? at least re-tweeting does).
It’s really difficult to guess what someone wants, as each person wants different things. Which is why ultimately in an effort to make things more fair & equitable, the solution can end up making it less so.
I like the follow-up suggestion to leave this new option OFF by default, so that an instance admin would have to specifically opt-in, perhaps as part of an overall suite of features limiting things like posts and comments as well. Although really, I think other approaches might work better - e.g. why would someone want to limit themselves to “some” of PugJesus’ content, wouldn’t they rather simply have it all or else ban him from the instance and therefore have none? I am not seeing the benefit realistically of having “some”, especially when the delimiter is not based on community or overall content but simply what time of day (based on an arbitrary threshold for when they starts and ends to restart the next period) the votes are cast?
No matter how many votes they make, they can only influence each post by one point, so it seems unimportant.
Unless you have evidence of vote botting?
Also, does this include the automatic upvote made when posting? If so those could just be the feed following bots that some instances have.
You can also downvote everything you don’t upvote, effectively making your voice count twice. I did that on Reddit when I was much more of a moron than I am today. I’m fairly certain there are more people like this.
Had to downvote you. I didn’t particularly want to, but I also wasn’t going to upvote, so them’s the rules I’m afraid.
When I took a look at lemvotes.org, I came to realise that there really are serial downvoters. Care to explain what goes on inside a head like that?
In the mind of that person they’re contributing to „correct” viewpoints being „on top” so that other people know what viewpoint is „correct”.
And there’s only one correct truth which deserves the upvote. Anything other than that should be downvoted so that the truth will rise higher, right?
I think submitting over 750 upvotes a day is a pretty clear sign that a bot is involved in one way or another.
There are some chronically ill people who are unable to work here who spend much of their day on this platform. They can easily exceed 750 votes. These also tend to be a big chunk of the people who post a lot and run communities and keep this place running and not feeling empty. Feels odd to punish it IMO.
If they are real people manually voting, then by all means they shouldn’t be limited by built-in assumptions.
At the same time, at a rate of 750 votes a day, even someone spending 16 hours a day on Lemmy would only have 76.8 seconds per vote to read a headline, read the article (ideally), and interact with the post, before immediately going to the next one.
While many posts don’t need that much time for a complete interaction, much more likely under the scenario of such mass voting is many votes with minimal to no interaction. If someone is using Lemmy to that extent, I would encourage them to redirect some of their voting efforts into thinking of more things to post or comment, as interaction—beyond just voting—is the beating heart of any such platform.
The votes could also be on comments. 750 per day still seems kind crazy when you break it down like that, but that’s literally one account.
The top 147 accounts average about 229 votes per day, and the top 5000 average about 38.
That’s not that unreasonable…
I agree that most cases are going to just be active users, and such activity should be encouraged, not discouraged.
As a well-designed bot can mimic (to an extent) the activity of a real user, however, I think it’s still important to ensure that all such users aren’t interacting with others in an automated manner, or otherwise consistently engaging in mass-voting or brigading.
Yeah I mean any account with that much activity is gonna highlight itself on a platform this small. It should be easy enough for admins to look at them case-by-case to see if their activity is bot-like.
Instances can ban obvious bot accounts and brigadiers. If an instance refuses to address a problem account or is a sanctuary for problem accounts, other instances can defederate from those.
Overall this seems like a non-issue here. This isn’t reddit. Maybe in the future it’ll be a bigger problem though
Average or Median?
Many votes are on comments, meme posts, etc. I know some people mainly use the threadi for articles but that’s just one use case. Averaging one vote every ~10 seconds doesn’t seem odd to me, and if you do that you reach your quota in 2 hours 5 minutes per day. Which for someone who spends half their day on here is nothing.
Exactly!
I’m not a bot; just a loser.
I think what they mean is, it skews what is considered a majority’s opinion. Regardless of whether its fair or unfair to use your one vote, what you get on your feed is not a representive of the majority’s opinion.
Not just that, there are topic that dont even make it to your feed or that someone thinks is too niche or controversial to post about even if aren’t. For example, dispite the internet being a large part of people’s life, all around the world. You dont hear what effect that has on people’s cultural identity and sense of self. To be flooded with US polictics, and culture.
People say that Americans make up the majority of the English speaking side of the Internet, but as the rest of the world’s access grows, I dont think that minority is so small anymore.
Or course not - did anyone think that it was?
Reading the Threadiverse, 99.9% of the world is (1) Linux, (2) politics, (3) leftist in-fighting, (4) schadenfreude over rightist missteps, (5) (just before any Western election) asking why aren’t centrists voting more, (6) GNU Linus and (7) comics.
e.g. “sports” doesn’t even crack the top 100 topics, much less top 10. The Threadiverse is a VERY biased subset of the wider world!!!
People vote for what appeals to them. Get out and vote more, folks!
The Threadiverse is a VERY biased subset of the wider world!!!
I am not talking about The wider world. Lemmy is in itself a community, that isn’t represented by what get vote to top feeds. Its like if you looked only at r/memes extrapolated what the Average reddit life and views look like.
People are different. Non-technical normal folks like sports - we here don’t, collectively, yet some people here actually do want sports content.
But it won’t ever rise to the top posts, like it does on Reddit (I presume, tbh I don’t want to go look to check:-P).
Some people even like USA politics? Others don’t. Nobody presumes that we are all the same.
I was agreeing with you that “what you get on your feed is not a representive of the majority’s opinion.”, while adding that I doubt that anyone presumes that it is - we know that we are different, from others, and from one another.
This looks like a Zipfian distribution. It’s a very widely observed phenomenon in many different fields.
I calculated a rough average for myself: ~150 votes per day, that’s ~4500 votes per month. If someone knows a tool that displays exact numbers, please let me know.
But yesterday I’ve exceeded piefed.social’s limit of 240 votes at 5pm. (I’m selfhosting and can change the quota for my instance, but the piefed.social limit affects remote users too). I wasn’t very active on Saturday so I had 6 pages of posts to catch up on Sunday, sorted by New Subscribed.
The Fediverse needs more good, constructive and fun content. If a post is good I upvote it, if multiple comments are good, I upvote them as well. That’s a lot of votes for positive stuff I like to see more of. Upvoting encourages users to post more. If less and less people upvote my contributions, I’ll stop posting.
I engage in wholesome communities like !dailygames@lemmy.zip where I upvote a lot of games and comments, because I like to see more people playing and interacting. Or !askouija@lemmy.world where I upvote questions that are fun and all single letter comments that form the answer, that’s easily 10 votes per post. Another example would be !ich_iel@feddit.org where the memes are fun and the comments are even more fun.
Yesterday I’ve reached a limit by upvoting positive content and it doesn’t feel good at all. I didn’t do anything malicious. By upvoting a lot, I signalled to the posters and commenters that I like what they shared and hopefully encouraged them to continue contributing to this place.
I understand why this was implemented, but in my opinion it hits the wrong people. Limiting votes in the Fediverse sends a wrong signal. We need more participation, not less.
I signalled to the posters and commenters that I like what they shared and hopefully encouraged them to continue contributing to this place.
You can do that much more effectively by writing a comment. Even just “Cool, thanks for sharing!” would have more emotional impact on the author than receiving 100 upvotes.
I disagree. One comment means that one person really liked what I shared. 100 upvotes mean 100 different people are validating what I shared. A comment with 100 upvotes is a high quality comment most of the time. A comment with one answer is just two people talking to each other.
If the 100 top upvoters would always vote on the same posts and comments, it would be a problem. I don’t have that data, but I doubt this is the case here. In that hypothecial case, the best solution would not be limiting everyone’s threadiverse usage with a quota, but instead investigate the 100 top upvoters for vote manipulation.
Any quota, no matter how big, will have the effect that a lot of people (not just power users) will vote less because votes suddenly became sparse and thus more valuable. Which again isn’t good for a network that needs more participation, not less.
Not true, imho. The first comment yes, maybe the second and third as well, but most comments on Reddit seem devoid of actual meaning, having devolved into merely:
^This
And my ax!
I also choose this guy’s husband
I totally agree with you, buddy
Hey pal I’m not your buddy
… and so on. Isn’t an upvote far more preferable? One can simply see the aggregated +1 effect, plus also the emoji reactions if any were added, but beyond that, why would someone comment unless they had something meaningful to say - beyond mere assent.
Downvotes are a bit different - it would be far more helpful to see WHY that was offered, but after the first reply or so that would get old too, and it becomes preferable again to see like “-50”, rather than have to wade through replies showing pig butts actively pooping - as Hexbears (in-?)famously do to one another, in large part due to downvotes having been disabled, for exactly the reason you cite here that people prefer longer-form interactions with one another.
Some people might prefer the comments, but I think most people here would prefer simply the overall vote counts and move on? Like a very popular comment might receive +100 upvotes and 10 comment replies to it? Receiving 50 upvotes and 50 replies might be overwhelming! Yet worthwhile if their content needed words to express the concept? Just not comments that should have been votes!?
An analogy might be a phone call vs. an email or text - sometimes the former is good but proper respect and decorum predisposes people in modern times to preferentially aim for the latter instead.
Edit: also, why not upvote someone’s comment and also reply to it? Maximum friendliness & interactionability!! :-P
According to you and your paradigm, and how you see the world working.
The comment you’re responding to shows this.
so instead of 100 upvotes you get 100 notifications to sift through for actual replies sprinkled in between "cool, thanks for sharing"s?
This is a good discussion to have. But then where are the graphs for posts and comments?
It feels like we’ve discussed this before. If 3 accounts make up >95% of the “post” form of contributions to the Threadiverse then that is indicative of an unhealthy community… though the solution seems to not be to throttle ThePicardManeuver, PugJesus, etc. and rather for the rest of us to step up and contribute more post content to this place?
And likewise for comments - why would a newcomer bother submitting posts when nobody comments on them? - and for votes too? What is stopping you from upvoting every single reply to any of your comments, regardless of whether you personally agree with the statements or not? SHOULD votes even be used as a “like” (agreement) button? 👍
We all use this place in different ways. Some are friendly, others ask provocative questions, some barely interact at all and many don’t even, simply lurking in the shadows. It’s the 90-9-1 rule: 90% lurk, 9% comment, only 1% post content. Here on the Threadiverse we are even more unbalanced. But… we get by.
What I still don’t understand is why people’s contributions - posts, comments, or votes - are somehow “bad”? The fact that people vote way less than they could seems irrelevant to me? We all have (or rather, HAD) the same access to voting (or commenting, or posting) the same as everyone else. Wasn’t that the epitome of “fairness” as in full “equity”?
A better answer imho, which PieFed already offers, is to place restrictions not on the amount of votes but rather on the kind - as in, if a community so desires, only count votes from subscribed members when doing sorting and such, which prevents drive-by influencers arriving at posts via All who haven’t bothered to read the community rules from overwhelming the legitimate members who want to have a discussion in peace. Making communities fully private also works to this end, but limits discovery whereas merely restricting voting in this manner keeps the positive discovery aspects but just limits the deleterious effects solely in regards to voting. We saw this in Reddit a ton when the 3rd party app devs were being harassed and all of a sudden people who we had never seen or heard before started responding to polls asking if our communities should go dark for the protest actions (which ultimately proved non-viable, hence why we moved here, giving up on Reddit as a lost cause) - that was terribly unfriendly of them to astroturf like that.
But merely to limit the vote amounts - I still don’t get “WHY” that is supposed to be a benefit? Again as opposed to voting being considered a “good” thing and people should do MORE of it?
the beauty of the fediverse is everyone can chose how they connect. I subscribe to piefed/lemmy communities from my hubzilla instance and receive chronological posts so there is 0 influence of anyone on what i see.
This looks like a healthy distribution. In the olden days of reddit (before the proliferation of bots) they had a very rigid pattern of the 90%/10%. If you had 1,000 users, 100 would cast votes. Of those 100, 10 would also comment. Of those 10, 1 would also submit posts. Across multiple years and various communities, this ratio tended to present itself.
How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?
Imo, if people that don’t vote get bothered, they should start voting themselves.
That is interesting data, thanks for presenting it.
I have to say I’m not that concerned about it, as long as there is no vote manipulation via multiple accounts involved. Everybody has one voice in each post and I don’t see a problem with some people using that voice more often. Hell, I am trying to upvote every post that isn’t something I don’t like in order to increase engagement. So I might even be one of the top 5 percent or so. And I’m certainly not doing it out of malicious ness or trying to manipulate what others can see (besides the normal up and down vote effect)
I am indifferent because anything but Sort by New isn’t enough of a dopamine drip (and that’s not a Lemmy-specific problem).
Same. Probably means I am only of those top people who does influence posts as I vote on everything I haven’t blocked.
Thank you for your service! (Helping the rest of us decide what best warrants our attention)
Reading the comments here, I am amused at how many people sort by new, completely ignoring the mechanism in question. Why do we have up/down votes on posts again? lol (might be more useful for comments)
You are reading a post that is 2 hours old. Naturally you will see a lot of people who sort by New. Come back in a couple days and see how the discussion has changed.
… I now see the obvious flaw in my thinking.
All good mate.
Yup. I am currently sorting by active
Assuming they are, in fact, human posters - I’d say this is a case of meritocracy. They made an effort to have their voice heard. This reminds me of that one story about people complaining that an union’s decisions are made by 10 people… and it turns out, that’s because only those 10 people bother to come to the union meeting.
I decide what I see by blocking what I don’t like, subscribing to what I do, and sorting everything by new/new comments where the votes don’t determine any kind of order.
Each account has one vote per post/comment and if they up voted everything then everything would just have one more vote and same for the reverse. Unless most of them are voting nearly the same way it will just get lost in the noise.
It also matters when they vote. Early votes have more impact than later votes. If early voters are a representative sample of the general voting trends then they are doing a service by raising what people in general want to see and filtering out what people in general don’t.
As long as they are manually voting with a single account I don’t really care.
I guess I had made an assumption that most of the people on Lemmy and piefed were the type who chose to be here because they didn’t want votes or algos choosing what they see. As such, I figured that basically everyone here sorted by some chronological order rather than by votes.
Are you tracking this metric?
No, PieFed has no telemetry or page view tracking.
I’m somewhat interested in these megavoters, mainly just in regard to if they’re real people or not and the personality of someone that seemingly votes on everything they come across. I’m curious if they interact otherwise or are just silently voting and nothing more.
I’m not really concerned as voting doesn’t seem to mean all too much here. I sort Top 6 Hr, but there’s a small enough pool of posts that I generally end up scrolling down to single digits as it is. Also, from the handful of times I used other instances, the vote totals don’t sync up anyway due to differences in federation details, so instance would still have an impact on what difference these votes have.
If anyone is also using a social media platform as their sole source of important information, I feel some potential vote manipulation is the least of that person’s problems with gathering reliable data.
Very cool stats though, I really enjoy posts like these.
I ‘won’ piefed.zip’s “biggest cheerleader award” (most upvotes) during their 1-year anniversary. I’ve only had an account with them for 8-months…
I post 2-3 a week now, and comment about once a day. I mod 2 communities (1 active, but the only poster: fedilytics).
I’ve been in the threadiverse since the Reddit 3rd party exodus. I heavily curate my feeds (viewed by “New”):
-
Subscribed feed: “I want to see everything that some one posts to the community” because I’m generally going to like all of it (lots of animal communities, but also some more niche tech communities and general fediverse information communities).
-
All feed: I block all the communities I’m not interested in and will never be interested in (a quick rough estimate is I’ve blocked ~1000 communities and ~20 instances, also the keywords “Slam”, “Slammed”, “Slams”, “Slamming”). This leaves me with a “I will often like some of what this community has” as a ‘second’ subscribed feed.
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Just quickly looked in the past 24 hours I upvoted 70 posts in my subscribed feed, probably another 40 in the all feed. Then there’s the comment upvotes. I don’t have an estimate on that, but probably a bigger total. Basically, if someone is positively contributing, they get an upvote. I especially like moving people from “1” to “2” to show someone saw their contribution and liked it, in the hopes they will get encouraged to comment/post more.
-
Honestly, I would upvote more, but if someone posts a link, I have to read or at least skim the linked content before I will upvote them (some good comments don’t get upvoted because I don’t want to read or skim a bunch of links at the time).
I’m not in favor of the voting limit. I think OpenStars@piefed.social and squirrel@cake.kobel.fyi articulate the reasons well. I am a little biased in favor of squirrel though. They always upvote my fedilytics community posts and my posts don’t get many votes, so I appreciate that someone looked at the effort I made and signaled they appreciated it. Which I suppose does go to some of the points they are making in their comments.
Let me know if you have any follow up questions.
Very interesting perspective. It seems like we have similar goals, opposite ways of getting there, but both somewhat rely on each other.
I’m pretty sure I’m somewhere in the top 2 dozen posters, and from scrolling .World’s top communities, I think I have the largest community having posts from primarily a single user, and it’s a topic I consider rather niche, owls. Nobody else here needs to know about owls. Most will not randomly encounter one or need to know any of the things I share about them.
I attempt to make other users ignore all that, not just to entertain or educate, but to make a mysterious creature most will never see feel like a part of your neighborhood, and one that they will value and want to protect.
It makes me a bit sad when I hear people block communities that they have no interest in. Maybe if it’s something political or vaguely/explicity sexual, I get blocking that stuff, but some of my favorite comments are from people who don’t consider themselves animal/bird people that end up enjoying what I do. I think that probably outweighs either upvotes or comments for me. Upvotes I think are fairly simple to get and can be games, comments require more effort, but getting someone to appreciate something for the first time feels like a milestone for both parties. I opened someone’s mind to a new perspective, and they either were moved by my passion on the subject or I found and shared something so unique it very mildly changed someone. I think that’s really special and if too many people just say “what do I care about some birds for?” and shut me out, I feel that’s a loss for them more than it is for me.
I used to block a few keywords, mostly trump, elon, and musk, but one day I noticed I couldn’t see my own post. Someone helped me figure out the keyword blocker wasn’t so smart, and my post contained something along the lines of “melons” and it saw the “elon” in there and blocked my own post. So I scrapped the keyword blocks after that. If you block “slam” and all variations, you might miss one of my favorite videos of a Great Horned Owl slamming into a Bald Eagle in a surprise attack over territory. Not saying you’re in the wrong for doing it, those “so and so slams whoshisface” are dumb, I just worry about missing the exceptions to the rules.
That’s the same reason I’m a Top 6 Hour scroller. I go pretty far down to see newer stuff. I used to browse New earlier on when we were much smaller and do like you do of trying to get people off the 1 mark. I’d try to leave a comment wherever I could, since I think an engaging comment is more powerful than a like.
I try to comment in places I think can get dialog going. If a post is just an article or headline with no commentary, I tend to pass by. I guess I’m here more to actually connect with other people. For actual news and information, I tend to just go to primary sources myself. For the Fediverse, I want to interact with you guys, so if someone just plops something down without adding something of themselves, it’s much less interesting for me. I typically reserve likes for things I interact with. Even if it isn’t something I have something to say about, if it makes me actually chuckle or makes me think deeper about a topic, then I vote. So I feel somewhat backwards with how your comment makes me see your method working.
It sounds like you upvote for participation that is fostering further activity. You seem less likely to react with in depth comments since they take time away from you upvoting other people’s activity. Finally, at least on this account, your post count looks low, so that seems to be your least used avenue of building up things.
I don’t disagree with any of that, even though it’s the opposite of my approach of sharing with you what I think you’d like of my interests first, sharing what I like about others’ interests second, and finally a few thumbs up for people that made me smile but I really have nothing to say about. It’s honestly most likely a good thing, as this way we’re complimentary to each other’s respective style. You’re doing what I’m not.
Maybe I feel we’re bigger than we are, as I tend to have people come to me here now, as I’m kicking off conversations. I’m pretty top-down these days, while you’re still building up folks from the ground up. That’s a more graspable concept for me that I hadn’t been considering. I do it for the people that are doing it for me, to show I appreciate them, but maybe I should be spreading that wealth a bit further. I had been picturing hue upvote counts as something that diluted the experience, but if you’re casting them far and wide, I do think that has the positive impact you mention. I’ll have to mind myself a bit better and make sure I’m doing my part to see your POV a bit more like I used to. After all, since my normal stance is upvotes are simple and low effort, I’d be a bit lacking if I wasn’t doing a good bit of it myself.
Thanks for reminding me a bit of the importance of small gestures!
I appreciate the through response :) Also, I really like your community and posts. Voyager says I’ve upvoted you 1,800 times and the Owl of the Year competition is great.
One of the reasons I don’t comment much is usually someone has already written a similar thing to what I would say. So, instead of essentially duplicating the comment or putting a (in my opinion) worthless comment like “This” or similar, I’ll just upvote and move on. As Squirrel and OpenStars already wrote something covering my perspective, I wouldn’t have commented on this post, if you have asked specifically about high upvoters.
As I’m writing this I just realized part of the reason why I don’t comment/post more is that usually I’m using an app on a phone and its a pain to go back and forth to reference information in different posts/sources/links.
I get your point about blocking, but I feel there are enough posts and comment in the threadiverse that wading through everything on an off chance something, in a usually uninteresting (to me) community, isn’t worth it. I’m alright missing some good content to better weed out the (to me) irritating/negative/bad (elon vs melon). I would rather spend my limited time supporting good content where I know I’m more likely to find it.
Also, one of the reasons I use “New” in the “All” feed is so I can support/encourage new or inconsistent communities (and find new subscribed).
I think you are definitely right about a good comment being worth more than an upvote, and pretty much follow your behavior with regards to posters who haven’t provided any commentary on a link. While I may appreciate the link, I’m not going to try and kickstart a discussion with someone who I see as not having put in the effort to start a discussion on their own post. Again, I see it as my time could be better spent elsewhere.
I would say every voting methodology should be welcome in the fediverse (except for downvoting things you aren’t interested in, asshole move in my opinion). Agree they are complementary approaches :)
As I say a few paragraphs above, if I’m going to post or comment I want it to be something that contributes and people will appreciate (not duplicating other peoples comments or posts). As it definitely sucks to put a bunch of effort into something and then not have anyone upvote or comment on it. See my second (inactive) modded community PolicesForAll for what happens with little to no support.
Haha. Our conversation has made make a few more comments than I normally would :)
Oooo, I can’t complain about 1800 upvotes! I must be doing something right. 😄
I’m more than fine with “ooh I like this” comments from people who have never commented on my stuff before. I just like to see who is checking in really. I browse the lemvotes lists from time to time to see who my regular lurkers are. I still appreciate them, and would of course love them to interact with me, but I’m still happy that they’re here having fun even if it’s just observing. I try to stay positive and encouraging though to show it’s safe to comment with questions or simple and silly things. I started off knowing nothing about the owls, and I’m still no real expert, so I want the community to be as approachable as possible. I try to keep it clear it’s our group, not my group. That said, as you say, there is something to not talking just for the sake of talking. If everything went: i love this owl - i also love this guy’s owl - this! - etc, that would be pretty lame.
I also waited until I was back at my laptop to reply since the response was going to be longer! I have a lot of down time during the day, so that lets me do more in depth responses. I don’t want to short change people on info!
We have a real simplistic voting system, which makes it approachable, but IMO, not the most useful. There are lots of posts I wish I could upvote in a “thanks for sharing” way, but also downvote in a “I hate this thing is happening” way. I feel weird upvoting something that gets me riled up! Similarly, it feels conflicting to upvote a post where I think the bulk of the comments are bad takes. The OP did a good job, but fervent people with different and often what I feel ignorant or incitive views overrun the comments, and I don’t want to steer people to that kind of mess. But at that point the voting would take up as much time as reading the posts if it were so granular.
I did make an effort to upvote more people yesterday, so we’ve had a positive effect on each other! Supporting each other is what makes a small place like the Fediverse work and feel real in an age of mega-sites.
Yeah, the first comment, even if it’s simple, is nice/worthwhile. After that, I would want comments on my posts to have substance.
I agree, a better voting system seems like it should be possible. Even if it just separates subscriber votes vs non-subscribers, I think it would be an improvement.
I already ran out of votes (took me under an hour, upvoting comments makes it go real quick). So, maybe I can come back tomorrow upvote you, to show anyone who may come to this thread later that I thought your comment was worthwhile.
I’m not going to change my voting habits so, maybe I’ll switch back to Lemmy or maybe the Piefed fork the anarchists are working on. I’m going to see if .zip admins will change/remove the limit before I make any decisions.
It does seem strange there’s a cap. I never would have imagined there was one. Maybe a downvote cap, but it’s someone going to get mad at you for being too positive? 😁
Yeah, I’m with you. Don’t know why you would limit a legitimate user’s enthusiasm. A downvote cap would not be the worst, but at the point, I think, just flag the user and have a discussion with them, if they are legitimate and not a bot.
I’m having a discussion with Rimu in another thread about it at the moment. To the data I’m pulling, it looks like the cap severely reduces posts and comments…
Thank you for your (voting) service! I hope you get to continue doing such unabated on PieFed.zip.
Instance admins can change the vote quota themselves in .env.docker (Docker environment) or .user.env. (YunoHost environment) by setting
VOTE_QUOTAto any number. In your case that’s on piefed.zip to decide.And thank you for your contributions. Fedilytics is a great tool for discovery.
Thanks :)
Yeah, there was an announcement about the update being scheduled on .zip. I asked if they were going to implement the quota or not.
Haven’t heard back yet, but it could take some time if they are discussing it amongst themselves first.
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