Who decides what you see on the fediverse? A look at voting patterns

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?

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!

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.

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 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?

I feel like I cannot make a decision on this without knowing who the top 10 users are.

I wonder where I appear in these graphs. Honestly, I have no idea.

Have a look on your profile, how much you vote is shown there.

The quota resets at midnight, UTC.

Thanks. I seem to be blind, all I can find is “Posts upvoted by A_norny_mousse”. I use the WebUI.

It’s this thing

It’s only shown if you cast any votes since midnight and that wasn’t long ago so perhaps you hadn’t yet.

Interesting.
I’m only seeing this:

Maybe piefed.zip doesn’t have this enabled or they use an older version? 1.7.0-dev.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

Average or Median?

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…