Who decides what you see on the fediverse? A look at voting patterns
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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?
i stumbled on this through a different thread…
what is the concern? vote manipulation? if so, limiting votes is a really naive approach.
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I’m glad you were able to read that study! I took much the understanding you did, how we basically want the same things. We seem to come off just as crazy to them, but we’ve got to communicate effectively with each other if we ever want to deradicalize some people.
I don’t talk politics with my dad other than when I have to tell him he’s drifting into racism.
My brother likes to tease him by leading him to see the benefit of some bit of Dem proposed legislation and as soon as he agrees he says “well than vote for some Democrats because that’s what you actually believe in!” Then he gets all pissy and doesn’t want to talk stupid political takes for a while.Here’s a good example of a cowbee information post. It has the like to the suggested reading list, which is nicely formatted, a long comparison of social democracy vs communism, and an infographic. Again, no implied support for anything they say, but impeccable presentation.
I gave you a sub for PoliciesForAll. I’ll have to read through your posts. I skimmed through the library one a bit and it seemed like good stuff. Things like that that give everyone a baseline access to necessities I think is crucial to having a fair, just, thriving society.
I generally don’t tell them my “alignment” when we are discussing (to prevent them becoming biased or prejudiced during the discussion). I offer to tell them, just I don’t want to bias their thoughts, before hand. They’ve always been fine with that and the reasoning.
Eek, that sounds tough. Sorry you have to go through that.
Thanks for the link, that was a helpful cowbee post. I’ll have to look into their reading list.
Thanks for the sub. I’ll have to finish writing and posting the rest of the policies. I left the best ones for last (ex. horizontal support on the local/city level).
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I generally don’t tell them my “alignment” when we are discussing (to prevent them becoming biased or prejudiced during the discussion). I offer to tell them, just I don’t want to bias their thoughts, before hand. They’ve always been fine with that and the reasoning.
Eek, that sounds tough. Sorry you have to go through that.
Thanks for the link, that was a helpful cowbee post. I’ll have to look into their reading list.
Thanks for the sub. I’ll have to finish writing and posting the rest of the policies. I left the best ones for last (ex. horizontal support on the local/city level).
Yes, coming into a chat without declaring an implied agenda is the best way to go. I think it took my inlaws about 3 years to learn I wasn’t a conservative, and even after I said I was, it took them a few more months to grasp it wasn’t a joke. They asked my opinions a few times but stopped. The one sister spent the most time talking to me, but after everything she said, she said along the lines of “this sounds bad when I say it out loud” and then never brought up anything again. They do treat me a bit different. I wouldn’t say bad in most cases, but there are definitely some times where things are off.
Always glad to share links and resources!
I look forward to seeing more from you!
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Yes, coming into a chat without declaring an implied agenda is the best way to go. I think it took my inlaws about 3 years to learn I wasn’t a conservative, and even after I said I was, it took them a few more months to grasp it wasn’t a joke. They asked my opinions a few times but stopped. The one sister spent the most time talking to me, but after everything she said, she said along the lines of “this sounds bad when I say it out loud” and then never brought up anything again. They do treat me a bit different. I wouldn’t say bad in most cases, but there are definitely some times where things are off.
Always glad to share links and resources!
I look forward to seeing more from you!
Well I’m glad they don’t treat you badly, at least.
Haha. I want to finish up some of the remaining coding for my fedilytics’ posts before I go back to “policies for all” posts (unless I just have some written I haven’t posted yet). So, it might be a couple weeks before you get any new content there.
Either way, it’s been good chating with you
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Well I’m glad they don’t treat you badly, at least.
Haha. I want to finish up some of the remaining coding for my fedilytics’ posts before I go back to “policies for all” posts (unless I just have some written I haven’t posted yet). So, it might be a couple weeks before you get any new content there.
Either way, it’s been good chating with you
Good, I like the fedilytics posts too!
Nice talking with you as well!
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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?
I’m adding another voice saying that this isn’t a problem that needed addressing, and even if it was, putting a quota on votes is a terrible way to do it.
If you wanted to be in any way convincing, you’d need to show that those high-vote users were actually, deliberately, using their votes to influence what people are seeing, and show that there was no better way to address that. Considering that you can sort posts and comments by a variety of factors, the former seems nearly imposdibly and the latter irrelevant.
You built a really nice platform in Piefed, please don’t screw it up with ill thoughtout decisions like this. We’ve already lost at least one major contributor to the fediverse because of it.
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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?
@rimu Vote?
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@rimu Vote?
This is about Threadiverse - part of Fediverse that is link aggregating, not microblog
Like https://piefed.zip for example
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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?
I am not concerned that some people vote a lot.
I sort posts and comments by New. Given this, I expect that how others vote doesn’t much affect what news I receive - maybe not at all, though I haven’t looked at the algorithms to confirm.
I sometimes look at the votes. It is mildly interesting to see what attracts a lot of votes, either up or down. But I am more interested in the posts and comments than the votes.
I sometimes vote: up votes for what seems sincere, interesting, informative, evidence based or clearly expressing an opinion; down votes for the more extremely contrary, but mostly up votes.
It is important to see a diversity of content. Anything that is popular enough to be influential is interesting, even if it is utterly false or nonsense, merely because it is influential. Opinions and perspectives different from my own are helpful if well expressed. It is even good to see how extreme people can be, sometimes: how hurt, upset, deceitful, ignorant, unreasonable, deluded, disrespectful, abusive or manipulative they can be. It makes it difficult to decide what is worth my time, let alone someone else’s, and it often depends on my mood and how much time I have for a bit of a wander and a ponder. So, overall, it is far too complex for a simple net up/down vote to be very helpful.
So, I don’t think voting reliably distinguishes what is worth more of my time and attention from what isn’t. I suppose it is disrespectful of me to think that how many people vote is not very useful information. I sometimes wish I could filter or weight the votes according to how much I respect the opinions of the voters, but most voters are so anonymous to me that I couldn’t judge the value of their opinions even if there was some mechanism to rank or weight them.
I think what I see is more dependent on what people post than how others vote on it.
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That would just cause those 10 people to hate me. I don’t want to anger the people who determine what gets seen and what gets buried. That demonstrates the whole problem with having 10 people controlling everything - it’s a power imbalance.
Anyway you would not recognize most of them. The people who vote a ton are not the same people who comment and post a lot.
I don’t want to anger the people who determine what gets seen and what gets buried. That demonstrates the whole problem with having 10 people controlling everything - it’s a power imbalance.
I’m a week late to this discussion but, Piefed doesn’t have algorithmic sorting like Reddit, so does it matter? After reading most comments in this thread, it seems like most people (myself included) sort their main feeds by Subscribed/New. Occasionally I will also sort by Popular/New or Popular/Hot just to see what’s ticking in communities I don’t subscribe to.
Respectfully, I don’t think this is a great idea, Rimu. The 240 number seems arbitrary and personally, I do not feel as if I am being manipulated, or influenced on this platform by someone who happens to upvote a bunch.
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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?
