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

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.)

I disagree. One comment means that one person really liked what I shared. 100 upvotes mean 100 different people are validating what I shared. A comment with 100 upvotes is a high quality comment most of the time. A comment with one answer is just two people talking to each other.

If the 100 top upvoters would always vote on the same posts and comments, it would be a problem. I don’t have that data, but I doubt this is the case here. In that hypothecial case, the best solution would not be limiting everyone’s threadiverse usage with a quota, but instead investigate the 100 top upvoters for vote manipulation.

Any quota, no matter how big, will have the effect that a lot of people (not just power users) will vote less because votes suddenly became sparse and thus more valuable. Which again isn’t good for a network that needs more participation, not less.

I decide what I see by blocking what I don’t like, subscribing to what I do, and sorting everything by new/new comments where the votes don’t determine any kind of order.

This all seems so incongruous, as in what two days ago was considered a virtuous activity all of a sudden is seen as “bad”

This, exactly. At certain times of day, I’m the first upvoter on a lot of posts I see. But I’m also often the first person to downvote spam and report it to moderators, so people have less spam in their timeline. Moderators don’t instantly check reports, so it can take a couple hours for spam to be removed. Which is totally fine, all moderators are volunteers here. That’s why downvoting spam is important. And by doing this, I’m getting closer and closer to a vote quota that stops me from doing the thing I thought was good for the Threadiverse.

I also mentioned elsewhere that the FIRST up- or down-vote carries car more weight than the hundredth or thousandth. You are doing a true service to the Threadiverse - as too does someone who makes 23k upvotes (over a one month timeperiod I would guess?), but the effect of each & every one of your votes is so much HIGHER than the other scenario there: they aren’t so readily comparable, you making perhaps 1k highly effective votes vs. someone else adding background by making >20 times more votes total, yet increasing the counts from 100 to 101 or negligibly decreasing from 100 to 99, rather than you altering the entire future trajectory of the content item from 1 to 2 (DOUBLING its score) or from 1 to 0.

So if I were to be “afraid” of voters “manipulating” the content that I see - ignoring for a moment how I could browse by All/New or Local/New and thereby entirely ignore any effect anyone (other than mods) has upon what I see - then shouldn’t I be much more afraid of YOU, whose votes are highly effective? More so than someone who merely votes a lot?

I suppose the two scenarios are not mutually exclusive - someone could vote a lot and also do so in a highly effective manner that even more greatly impacts how others view content, using the default Subscribed/Top sort, but in that case it’s the effectiveness far more than the amount that has by far the greater impact upon what I see than merely the total number of votes. And not enough information was given in the OP graphs to be able to understand the situation, or to find out more (unless someone runs their own instance and can look further).

Btw thank you for your service! The Threadiverse needs people like you:-), doing what you are doing!:-)

When I took a look at lemvotes.org, I came to realise that there really are serial downvoters. Care to explain what goes on inside a head like that?

Yup. I am currently sorting by active

Assuming they are, in fact, human posters - I’d say this is a case of meritocracy. They made an effort to have their voice heard. This reminds me of that one story about people complaining that an union’s decisions are made by 10 people… and it turns out, that’s because only those 10 people bother to come to the union meeting.

In the mind of that person they’re contributing to „correct” viewpoints being „on top” so that other people know what viewpoint is „correct”.

Many votes are on comments, meme posts, etc. I know some people mainly use the threadi for articles but that’s just one use case. Averaging one vote every ~10 seconds doesn’t seem odd to me, and if you do that you reach your quota in 2 hours 5 minutes per day. Which for someone who spends half their day on here is nothing.

well thanks anyhow!

And there’s only one correct truth which deserves the upvote. Anything other than that should be downvoted so that the truth will rise higher, right?

How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?

Imo, if people that don’t vote get bothered, they should start voting themselves.

I ‘won’ piefed.zip’s “biggest cheerleader award” (most upvotes) during their 1-year anniversary. I’ve only had an account with them for 8-months…

I post 2-3 a week now, and comment about once a day. I mod 2 communities (1 active, but the only poster: fedilytics).

I’ve been in the threadiverse since the Reddit 3rd party exodus. I heavily curate my feeds (viewed by “New”):

• Subscribed feed: “I want to see everything that some one posts to the community” because I’m generally going to like all of it (lots of animal communities, but also some more niche tech communities and general fediverse information communities).

• All feed: I block all the communities I’m not interested in and will never be interested in (a quick rough estimate is I’ve blocked ~1000 communities and ~20 instances, also the keywords “Slam”, “Slammed”, “Slams”, “Slamming”). This leaves me with a “I will often like some of what this community has” as a ‘second’ subscribed feed.

• Just quickly looked in the past 24 hours I upvoted 70 posts in my subscribed feed, probably another 40 in the all feed. Then there’s the comment upvotes. I don’t have an estimate on that, but probably a bigger total. Basically, if someone is positively contributing, they get an upvote. I especially like moving people from “1” to “2” to show someone saw their contribution and liked it, in the hopes they will get encouraged to comment/post more.

• Honestly, I would upvote more, but if someone posts a link, I have to read or at least skim the linked content before I will upvote them (some good comments don’t get upvoted because I don’t want to read or skim a bunch of links at the time).

I’m not in favor of the voting limit. I think OpenStars@piefed.social and squirrel@cake.kobel.fyi articulate the reasons well. I am a little biased in favor of squirrel though. They always upvote my fedilytics community posts and my posts don’t get many votes, so I appreciate that someone looked at the effort I made and signaled they appreciated it. Which I suppose does go to some of the points they are making in their comments.

Let me know if you have any follow up questions.