Compassion ~ Thought

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2024

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  • Okay but historically, limiting votes does not end well.

    So maybe implement ranked choice voting instead? j/k as far as this proposed solution but I hope you see what I mean here in terms of the underlying issue: democracy itself offers both problems and solutions to those who use it, hence why it is failing all across the globe.

    Also, at least up until now, people have been offered a full CHOICE as to how much votes affect them, personally. Sorting by New ignores votes entirely, while sorting by Top used to consider all votes, but now will consider only some of them (if half are being discarded, some by the vote quota itself and others by people changing their behavior as a result of needing to constrain their votes, or at least hearing the signal loud and clear that lots and lots of votes are undesirable, hence they stop offering them). I haven’t thought about how this impacts users of Scaled sorting, which I myself never use, personally speaking.


  • I disagree: votes are whatever the recipient makes of them.

    Voting controls who sees what content

    Sorting by New - even comments underneath a post - prevents the votes from controlling who sees what.

    it’s not kudos for content authors

    Again, that’s not up to you. Perhaps you meant that it “shouldn’t” be that way? But none of us get to decide how others actually feel about things.

    More to the point, votes reflect an “engagement” - a post that people upvote is one that they are saying is relevant, whether they enjoyed the content or not, while a fantastic item of content that receives hardly any votes…

    is content that will in the future go to other platforms.







  • I called it an anti-feature bc voting is a feature, but now this works against that. It’s a

    mandatory new feature that removes existing capabilities

    You said

    The vote quota is the equivalent of scaled feature.

    But I believe this is not the case, at least if I am understanding it correctly? Scaled sorting takes the existing votes and sorts them differently than Hot or New, but this new anti-feature will prevent the votes from being allowed to be submitted in the first place. People have already commented that they want to upvote some things - iirc it was a comment of Rimu’s - but could not bc they had already reached their quote for the day.

    I doubt I will reach the quota myself personally, but we will ALL be impacted by this change, I believe. It makes PieFed less “welcoming” to discard contributions made to it. It’s a hard enough sell to get people to switch to here from Reddit, without such “features” giving them subtle hints that they aren’t truly wanted here, and reminders that we are resource-starved while in comparison Reddit will bend over backwards to serve their needs (or at least pretend to).

    Ask yourself why it was created.

    I have asked not only myself but Rimu and everyone else, but I just don’t get it. The various explanations are that it’s “unfair”, and that it will save on resources. However, while it truly is “unfair” that the likes of ThePicardManeuver, PugJesus, etc. have to submit the majority of content across the entire Threadiverse… that is simply how it is right now, and as unbalanced as it is, it seems preferable to limiting their contributions?

    For that matter, why don’t we say that it is “unfair” that Rimu makes all of the contributions to the PieFed sourcecode? Should we now act to limit Rimu’s contributions, because others are not keeping up? OF COURSE NOT!!! Nor do we ask our heavy posters to limit the actual posts that they submit…? So how then did votes suddenly become undesirable?

    The technical burden argument resonates much more strongly with me. But… Rimu says that it is not for that reason. If it were then I could understand it, but since it is not…

    What then is the reason that this is being done? It surely CAN’T be the “unfairness” issue - see above, especially the comparison with Rimu’s contributions - so what then IS the reason for it?

    In your example, what if the two people talking the most were the only two adults in the room, and the rest were children? Or what of it were a technical meeting and they were the only two actual developers? Context matters so much there!!! Nothing in life is ever truly going to be “fair”, but at least we all had equal ability to vote on content, before the change, but now we do not - some people have less ability to vote as they wish than others. Consider: someone works very hard all week, then has a single day to check social media, but they reach the cap and then cannot vote anymore - why is their right to do so limited, whereas someone who votes equally but more spread out over the course of a week curtailed? Or someone who works hard all semester long, then has a break after finals week - they want to go on a social media splurge, but cannot, whereas someone who submits 100 times the total amount of votes is allowed to do so, as long as they space it out into multiple days.

    You talk as if before was “unfair” - when everyone had the same access to vote as everyone else - but I say that the new method is the truly unfair, when some types of access are favored over others. This is not friendly or welcoming to people who have circumstances that are different than others.

    I would be okay with a “rate limiter”, more than a “daily quota”, as the perception of the former is much more fair than the latter.

    This will impact me, you, and all of us. If you think more about what I’ve said you will see how. It is one thing to handle existing votes on a different manner (opt-in to doing so), while it is another to mandatorily reject submitted votes right at the source (NOT opt-in, nor opt-out either, except by migration to another instance I guess, if you can figure out how to find one that does differently, and hope that they do not change their minds about the situation later).








  • So first of all, it would be nice if this hypothetical “better” algorithm already existed, before we start limiting votes here & now, on this instance? Don’t let perfect become the enemy of good?

    Second, I think you’ve missed something wherein while each vote is individually binary, in aggregation they become a numerical value that is no longer binary - something that receives 1000 upvotes is significantly more popular than something that receives only 10.

    Third, whether the current system is “good” or not is not something for us to judge? If people WANT something, then why prevent them from having it? Even if something else is “better”?

    Sometimes people browse by New, and these people will not be impacted (on the side of receiving fewer votes than before this anti-feature was implemented), however many people desire instead to spend their time differently, and be alerted to what others have found to be “good”. This is obviously not a perfect metric for what YOU may enjoy, but… it’s a start?

    We don’t need to engage in binary thinking ourselves: a system can be more than simply “good, so keep it as-is” vs. “bad, so now get rid of it entirely or at least start limiting it”, there are shades and nuances possible within all of this. Especially the knock-on effects, I mean events that transpire downstream and as a direct consequence of the upstream ones, even if logically they seem at first to be disconnected. e.g., what link is there between offering posts vs. votes - none? But if people leave an instance as a result of this change, then fewer post content can result, despite the seemingly disconnected nature of those two.

    Voting makes the Threadiverse “welcoming”. You call it dopamine but however it is implemented, it makes people feel good to be here, and to contribute to a community. Perhaps even a wider, global community, beyond what they could reach if they merely went outside to touch grass irl?

    So yeah, make that better system first, and then offer it to people as an opt-in feature. However, the point of this post was to discuss a mandatory new feature that removes existing capabilities, NOW not at some future date when your mentioned hypothetical opt-in feature has been deployed to a production environment where people can use it here on PieFed. So you might want to put your comment here over into the original post discussing this new voting feature? Because it does not seem terribly relevant to me for it to be HERE, discussing just how mandatory this new feature should be made as? … unless you truly do want the capabilities of others to be curtailed?


  • The trouble I have with Lemmy.ml (this is relevant, I promise you:-) is not how it bans all criticism of Russia, North Korea, and China, but in its lack of transparency to never ACTUALLY STATE that this is their “real” set of rules, which differs rather profoundly from its own provided statement of being “A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developer”. Overall that reads as extremely disingenuous to me - while to them, OF COURSE they are doing the “correct” thing, in ALL matters, and yet… while I am not asking them to provide a justification, it would be nice to acknowledge in the light of day what policies are actually in place? It scares people away to have to discover that the hard way, and many seen to not land on other Lemmy instances afterwards but rather go back to Reddit or Bluesky instead.

    Thus likewise I am against how this voting scheme is not currently implemented in a transparent manner. e.g. this noticeably reduces the Newbie-friendliness of an instance, does it not? Users coming over from Reddit will not expect it and, already being overwhelmed by “there being too much to read” (I don’t personally agree but that is what THEY say, hence objectively true that this is their primary response), will get surprised and dismayed.

    Also, if it helps to share, at first I wondered: what if the default were to be set to be a value higher than a human being is likely to reach (even someone recovering from an illness so indulging in social media more often than a usual balanced individual may casually & routinely do?). As a defense against bot accounts it may serve some value? Although then again, would merely limiting the bot be the best course of action here? Possibly detection and banning could be a better course of action, or even redirection into a honeypot, rather than steering their behavior to fall more into lines of human norms? So no, the more I think about it, the more that I see this not as a measure to separate bots from humans but rather to enforce conformity among human populations: neurodivergent or otherwise “unusual” people are told to get their own instance from now on, while this level of activity is all that is allowed in the main spaces (and even then, the votes cast and displayed internally within the neurodivergent spaces will be blocked upon entry into the main ones, having been throttled).

    Anyway, the more transparently this can be handled the better.


  • That post received only 16 upvotes, and many of those are likely to reflect the overall sentiment about the voting situation being disliked, or otherwise indication that the post is “relevant” to the community it is in.

    I do not think of it as an indicator that thousands of people are running around the Threadiverse upvoting literally everything they see. In fact in Rimu’s various analyses he indicates that is definitely not happening. Maybe 2-10 people, but not thousands, hundreds, or even tens.

    Actually, at that point the user may look indistinguishable from a bot, and thereby be worthy of a ban from your instance for that reason? It’s kinda an extremely low-key DDOS to do so!!

    The VAST majority of people do seem to truly use voting as it was intended - to signal that more of such content should be continued to be added to the community?

    So analogous then to the prom king & queen winning the votes. Ultimately it’s going to be the popular kids rather than people who truly contribute or impact their environment, but it does still have SOME kind of a meaning? (The trouble with this style of reasoning is that the likes of Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Hitler, Jeff Bezos, Stalin, Bill Gates, Putin, etc. are all “impactful” even if not “popular”. So impactful != good, necessarily.)

    At the end of the day though, it’s your instance and you are entirely free to do as you wish with it. Again I think you may want to ban users that abuse the system in such a way - if they are making ALL votes meaningless then this is actively doing harm, right? (Also, someone could try reaching out to them and coaching them, but if they aren’t on your instance then it makes sense to leave that to their home server, and just protect your own users?)