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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Instance admins can change the vote quota themselves in .env.docker (Docker environment) or .user.env. (YunoHost environment) by setting VOTE_QUOTA to any number. In your case that’s on piefed.zip to decide.

And thank you for your contributions. Fedilytics is a great tool for discovery.

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 ‘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.

Very interesting perspective. It seems like we have similar goals, opposite ways of getting there, but both somewhat rely on each other.

I’m pretty sure I’m somewhere in the top 2 dozen posters, and from scrolling .World’s top communities, I think I have the largest community having posts from primarily a single user, and it’s a topic I consider rather niche, owls. Nobody else here needs to know about owls. Most will not randomly encounter one or need to know any of the things I share about them.

I attempt to make other users ignore all that, not just to entertain or educate, but to make a mysterious creature most will never see feel like a part of your neighborhood, and one that they will value and want to protect.

It makes me a bit sad when I hear people block communities that they have no interest in. Maybe if it’s something political or vaguely/explicity sexual, I get blocking that stuff, but some of my favorite comments are from people who don’t consider themselves animal/bird people that end up enjoying what I do. I think that probably outweighs either upvotes or comments for me. Upvotes I think are fairly simple to get and can be games, comments require more effort, but getting someone to appreciate something for the first time feels like a milestone for both parties. I opened someone’s mind to a new perspective, and they either were moved by my passion on the subject or I found and shared something so unique it very mildly changed someone. I think that’s really special and if too many people just say “what do I care about some birds for?” and shut me out, I feel that’s a loss for them more than it is for me.

I used to block a few keywords, mostly trump, elon, and musk, but one day I noticed I couldn’t see my own post. Someone helped me figure out the keyword blocker wasn’t so smart, and my post contained something along the lines of “melons” and it saw the “elon” in there and blocked my own post. So I scrapped the keyword blocks after that. If you block “slam” and all variations, you might miss one of my favorite videos of a Great Horned Owl slamming into a Bald Eagle in a surprise attack over territory. Not saying you’re in the wrong for doing it, those “so and so slams whoshisface” are dumb, I just worry about missing the exceptions to the rules.

That’s the same reason I’m a Top 6 Hour scroller. I go pretty far down to see newer stuff. I used to browse New earlier on when we were much smaller and do like you do of trying to get people off the 1 mark. I’d try to leave a comment wherever I could, since I think an engaging comment is more powerful than a like.

I try to comment in places I think can get dialog going. If a post is just an article or headline with no commentary, I tend to pass by. I guess I’m here more to actually connect with other people. For actual news and information, I tend to just go to primary sources myself. For the Fediverse, I want to interact with you guys, so if someone just plops something down without adding something of themselves, it’s much less interesting for me. I typically reserve likes for things I interact with. Even if it isn’t something I have something to say about, if it makes me actually chuckle or makes me think deeper about a topic, then I vote. So I feel somewhat backwards with how your comment makes me see your method working.

It sounds like you upvote for participation that is fostering further activity. You seem less likely to react with in depth comments since they take time away from you upvoting other people’s activity. Finally, at least on this account, your post count looks low, so that seems to be your least used avenue of building up things.

I don’t disagree with any of that, even though it’s the opposite of my approach of sharing with you what I think you’d like of my interests first, sharing what I like about others’ interests second, and finally a few thumbs up for people that made me smile but I really have nothing to say about. It’s honestly most likely a good thing, as this way we’re complimentary to each other’s respective style. You’re doing what I’m not.

Maybe I feel we’re bigger than we are, as I tend to have people come to me here now, as I’m kicking off conversations. I’m pretty top-down these days, while you’re still building up folks from the ground up. That’s a more graspable concept for me that I hadn’t been considering. I do it for the people that are doing it for me, to show I appreciate them, but maybe I should be spreading that wealth a bit further. I had been picturing hue upvote counts as something that diluted the experience, but if you’re casting them far and wide, I do think that has the positive impact you mention. I’ll have to mind myself a bit better and make sure I’m doing my part to see your POV a bit more like I used to. After all, since my normal stance is upvotes are simple and low effort, I’d be a bit lacking if I wasn’t doing a good bit of it myself.

Thanks for reminding me a bit of the importance of small gestures!

I appreciate the through response Also, I really like your community and posts. Voyager says I’ve upvoted you 1,800 times and the Owl of the Year competition is great.

One of the reasons I don’t comment much is usually someone has already written a similar thing to what I would say. So, instead of essentially duplicating the comment or putting a (in my opinion) worthless comment like “This” or similar, I’ll just upvote and move on. As Squirrel and OpenStars already wrote something covering my perspective, I wouldn’t have commented on this post, if you have asked specifically about high upvoters.

As I’m writing this I just realized part of the reason why I don’t comment/post more is that usually I’m using an app on a phone and its a pain to go back and forth to reference information in different posts/sources/links.

I get your point about blocking, but I feel there are enough posts and comment in the threadiverse that wading through everything on an off chance something, in a usually uninteresting (to me) community, isn’t worth it. I’m alright missing some good content to better weed out the (to me) irritating/negative/bad (elon vs melon). I would rather spend my limited time supporting good content where I know I’m more likely to find it.

Also, one of the reasons I use “New” in the “All” feed is so I can support/encourage new or inconsistent communities (and find new subscribed).

I think you are definitely right about a good comment being worth more than an upvote, and pretty much follow your behavior with regards to posters who haven’t provided any commentary on a link. While I may appreciate the link, I’m not going to try and kickstart a discussion with someone who I see as not having put in the effort to start a discussion on their own post. Again, I see it as my time could be better spent elsewhere.

I would say every voting methodology should be welcome in the fediverse (except for downvoting things you aren’t interested in, asshole move in my opinion). Agree they are complementary approaches

As I say a few paragraphs above, if I’m going to post or comment I want it to be something that contributes and people will appreciate (not duplicating other peoples comments or posts). As it definitely sucks to put a bunch of effort into something and then not have anyone upvote or comment on it. See my second (inactive) modded community PolicesForAll for what happens with little to no support.

Haha. Our conversation has made make a few more comments than I normally would

Oooo, I can’t complain about 1800 upvotes! I must be doing something right.

I’m more than fine with “ooh I like this” comments from people who have never commented on my stuff before. I just like to see who is checking in really. I browse the lemvotes lists from time to time to see who my regular lurkers are. I still appreciate them, and would of course love them to interact with me, but I’m still happy that they’re here having fun even if it’s just observing. I try to stay positive and encouraging though to show it’s safe to comment with questions or simple and silly things. I started off knowing nothing about the owls, and I’m still no real expert, so I want the community to be as approachable as possible. I try to keep it clear it’s our group, not my group. That said, as you say, there is something to not talking just for the sake of talking. If everything went: i love this owl - i also love this guy’s owl - this! - etc, that would be pretty lame.

I also waited until I was back at my laptop to reply since the response was going to be longer! I have a lot of down time during the day, so that lets me do more in depth responses. I don’t want to short change people on info!

We have a real simplistic voting system, which makes it approachable, but IMO, not the most useful. There are lots of posts I wish I could upvote in a “thanks for sharing” way, but also downvote in a “I hate this thing is happening” way. I feel weird upvoting something that gets me riled up! Similarly, it feels conflicting to upvote a post where I think the bulk of the comments are bad takes. The OP did a good job, but fervent people with different and often what I feel ignorant or incitive views overrun the comments, and I don’t want to steer people to that kind of mess. But at that point the voting would take up as much time as reading the posts if it were so granular.

I did make an effort to upvote more people yesterday, so we’ve had a positive effect on each other! Supporting each other is what makes a small place like the Fediverse work and feel real in an age of mega-sites.

Yeah, the first comment, even if it’s simple, is nice/worthwhile. After that, I would want comments on my posts to have substance.

I agree, a better voting system seems like it should be possible. Even if it just separates subscriber votes vs non-subscribers, I think it would be an improvement.

I already ran out of votes (took me under an hour, upvoting comments makes it go real quick). So, maybe I can come back tomorrow upvote you, to show anyone who may come to this thread later that I thought your comment was worthwhile.

I’m not going to change my voting habits so, maybe I’ll switch back to Lemmy or maybe the Piefed fork the anarchists are working on. I’m going to see if .zip admins will change/remove the limit before I make any decisions.

It does seem strange there’s a cap. I never would have imagined there was one. Maybe a downvote cap, but it’s someone going to get mad at you for being too positive?

Yeah, I’m with you. Don’t know why you would limit a legitimate user’s enthusiasm. A downvote cap would not be the worst, but at the point, I think, just flag the user and have a discussion with them, if they are legitimate and not a bot.

I’m having a discussion with Rimu in another thread about it at the moment. To the data I’m pulling, it looks like the cap severely reduces posts and comments…