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’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.
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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?
Would you be able to make a stacked histogram where upvotes and downvotes are a separate colour please? Either as an absolute or percentage values would work. I have a nagging suspicion it would show some interesting patterns.
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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.
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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 long understood hat the squeaky wheel gets the grease. It sucks though.
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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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
and/or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
depending on POV
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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.
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… I now see the obvious flaw in my thinking.
All good mate.
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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 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.
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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?
my feed view is not based on public voting so I don’t really care.
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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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?
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?
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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!
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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)
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Having most voted content at the top allow me not to see much of communities where there is a lot of automatically published content but low engagement.
Engagement is a proxy for quality. Not the best proxy but as I block communities I’m not interested in but which have engagement I discover slowly more and more niche communities with a little pool of active users but proper human-made content and engagement.There are other ways to see this though. PieFed’s categories of communities for example are great at surfacing low-engagement content. An example is https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft, which has subsets like Photography. News, politics, and memes are always going to drown out the more niche content, so it is also helpful to have a dedicated News & Politics Topic area, allowing you to cut back on subscribing to those communities, yet you can still see that content whenever you actively want to look at it, just a button press away.
I even see poetry floating into my Subscribed feed now, since moving to PieFed!!:-)
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Sort by new and manipulate what people see.
Yes, I’ve just changed the sort to new.
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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.
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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.
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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?
Perhaps the weight of each vote could be adjusted for every user, based on how many times the user has voted the same as that voter. I’m sure this would greatly help reduce the effective risk of vote manipulation
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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.
