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

Exactly!

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.

No, PieFed has no telemetry or page view tracking.

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.

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.

Oh yeah, piefed.zip is running an old version.

I doubt that. Each of them only gets one vote anyway.

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.

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…

Average or Median?

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.

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!!

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

The way you presented this is as a kind of fight: what do YOU think of THEM that influence YOUR content (implied: without your CONSENT).

But… it’s just people voting, and commenting, and posting - all normal activities that people have done since before any of the Fediverse existed?

This all seems so incongruous, as in what two days ago was considered a virtuous activity all of a sudden is seen as “bad”, and already (not under discussion to maybe possibly potentially be done at some future date) throttled.

I would have preferred a greater rather than lesser amount of transparency and control. Like if a recipient does not like one of these top-10 voters, can they opt-out of that control by blocking them? And if so, how can an individual find out who these mass-vote-controllers are, short of spinning up their own instance thereby exposing themselves to all the frustrations that any public-facing interfaces have in the modern era.

But maybe we WANT these people to control what we see - if we like what they are doing and enjoy the work having been done for us already, each day before we even log in to check the content available on today’s feed?

That is part of my answer to your OP question btw: I don’t know what I think yet about someone else controlling my feed, unless I had the data to be able to make an informed decision? I already presumed that either people were doing so - for Popular feeds - or else I knew that I could bypass that anytime I wanted, simply by browsing All.

So I am uncertain what “new information” this post is adding to my previous understanding of how matters work on the Threadiverse? I suppose it definitively rules out anything remotely resembling a more even distribution, but I would have rather assumed a Power Law curve from the start. Do these accounts upvote any action taken by Russia and downvote any response by Ukraine? In that case I am VERY interested!! Though now that they are throttled, won’t they simply switch to multiple accounts and continue relatively unimpeded?

Things I would guess are upvoted: Linux-praising tech news, USA politics, memes, pictures of cats, calls for guillotining hundreds if not thousands of people world-wide, including even the janitorial staff at Meta who aren’t ideologically pure enough, unlike us here who use <correct answer> btw.

Things I would guess are ignored: anything requiring additional effort to parse rather than continuing to doomscroll mindlessly, like poetry.

But I thought all this a couple days ago too, so my thinking doesn’t seem to have changed in the slightest after seeing these graphs? Pulling the curtain back only this far isn’t enough for me to be able to DO anything with any of this new information?

Hence your rapid implementation of this new “feature” mainly comes across as having a “Just trust me bro” mindset behind it. Less “democratic” and more “authoritarian”? (From a process standpoint I mean.)