illi comments on It's been fun, but I don't have another migration left in me.

[–] illi@piefed.social 66 points 4 months ago (68 children)

I think I might be out of the loop. What's happening...?

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[–] Elting@piefed.social 89 points 4 months ago (67 children)

There is a new rule metering the number of votes that can be cast by a user. You can see yours on your profile.

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[–] illi@piefed.social 68 points 4 months ago* (41 children)

That's.... really weird.

On the surface the reasoning behind it makes sense, but there is also something about it (that I can't quite point out yet) that rubs me the wrong way.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 108 points 4 months ago (39 children)

It doesn't make sense though. It was presented as this unequal distribution thing where a few users cast the most amount of votes, but that really doesn't matter because each user still only gets one vote per post or comment. No one's opinion is outsized or disproportionate just because they vote on a lot of things.

It was really bad statistics from the start. It was framed sorta like wealth disparity, using the same kind of chart, but it's categorically not the same thing.

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[–] mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works 45 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

That sounds like the PieFed admins are just going to make it worse. Now there's going to be first user advantage, with the first comments on a thread getting preferrential treatment

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 24 points 4 months ago (2 children)

I don't see how. Unless you mean people rationing their votes are less likely to scroll as far down?

But yeah this place is going to be desolate without pugjesus, and I wonder how many more people are gonna leave once users rationing votes results in content receiving less engagement.

Overall, just a terrible decision in my opinion

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[–] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

Based on the stats shown in Rimu's post, the monthly average vote count of the top 5000 of prolific voters was 1142, and among the top 147 prolific voters, their average monthly was 6868.

With a 240 daily limit, that comes out to 7200 votes per month, which is already above the average of the most prolific voters.

Those 147 top voters may be effected if they only voted sporadically throughout the month (so they vote like, 500 one day and 700 another, but with some rest days of no voting in-between), and those posting above that average who definitely would be effected appear to only total about 60 people.

So for 99% of the userbase, they would not need to consider rationing votes at all.

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[–] illi@piefed.social 20 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Ok, so in the announcement post they talk about mostly technical reasons for this. But from the linked post it does in fact sound like the aim is to throttle most active members because they have too much influence?

This is what rubbed me the wrong way and I just couldn't figure out why. We all have one upvote to give, some people just give it way more of them - so in comes the great equalizer in the form of the daily quota.

I hope you pardon my exagerated metaphor, but this is like limiting free speech for journalists, because they excercise the right of free speech way more than others.

It's "just" votes so I'm hesitant to call this censorship but... this does feel like a first step. Will there be daily post quotas too because some people post more than others?

💯 1

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[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 7 points 4 months ago (34 children)

but that really doesn’t matter because each user still only gets one vote per post or comment.

where does the policy change actually impact the user then? I guess at maximum we can't upvote more that 240 things a day (comment or post). I think that's more than the vast majority of users do per day, right?

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 28 points 4 months ago

The point isn't about how many users are likely to hit the daily limit, the point is how having a daily limit might cause people to start rationing their votes. Instead of doling them out however they see fit, they might start thinking "hmm, but is this worth spending a vote on?"

Overall, that can have a chilling effect on voting in general, lowering engagement and reducing the motivation to post (if you only get a handful of upvotes on each post, it might feel "dead" and seem to have no point. It's encouraging to see several dozen users like your post). And that can expand to a chilling effect on posting.

Also, if someone has a disability or is recovering from illness or surgery then they're more likely to spend more time on here, meaning they're more likely to reach the vote quota. This disproportionally impacts them.

Sure, 240 a day is high, but it's not unreasonable for a human to reach, and it's nowhere near "obvious bot" territory.

Based on the charts rimu shared, there are so few users who actually reach "obvious bot" territory that it's impossible for them to not highlight themselves, and they should be easy enough to handle on a case-by-case basis. We're talking less than 10 accounts. Admins can look at each one to examine their activity, and if they're a bot they can remove the account.

There's no reason to limit people's votes.

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[–] bad1080@piefed.social 7 points 4 months ago (32 children)

i guess it's an anti-botting measure where they can't distinguish a power user from an automated system?

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 13 points 4 months ago (1 child)

There are so few accounts that have that much activity on them that admins could easily handle them on a case-by-case basis.

This doesn't get rid of the bot accounts, it only limits their voting activity like everyone elses, which will make them harder to detect.

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[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 7 points 4 months ago

It will make it easier for a bot farm to outvote the humans.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 12 points 4 months ago (25 children)

Farming engagement has no incentive. It can't be monetized here, there's no karma. There would be no point.

Power users on the fediverse aren't doing it for personal gain, they're doing it to enrich the fediverse and make it a more attractive alternative to corporate social media.

We see so many complaints that it's dead here, or there aren't enough communities, or it's hard to find the right community for something, or if the community exists it might be dead. That's a lot of people's rationale for not switching from reddit.

Power users here are trying to fix that. It's an enormous task and more than a single user or a handful of users can do, but they're doing their part and in many cases carrying more than their share of the burden. This change is kind of a slap in the face to them.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 4 points 4 months ago (23 children)

Reddit is different for multiple reasons.

It has karma, the fediverse doesn't.

It has millions of daily users, the fediverse doesn't.

It's a publicly traded company with a profit motive, the fediverse isn't.

It allows paid advertisements, the fediverse doesn't.

There's therefore a monetary incentive to farming karma on reddit, there isn't on the fediverse.

Some people farm karma on reddit accounts just to sell them to advertisers or propagandists. This wouldn't work on the fediverse for the above reasons, and because there's no market for it for the same reasons.

Reddit feeds are governed by closed-source algorithms designed by a centralized company, fediverse feeds are not.

And lastly, you said yourself that the guy used secondary accounts to boost himself. This is voting abuse and should be dealt with whenever it can be positively identified.

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[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 2 points 3 months ago (22 children)

Reddit wasn't initially different though is my point -- it wasn't publicly traded, it had trickles of users initially, and didn't have adverts. Hell, it popularized the canary reporting as part of its yearly ethics report.

Some feddit instances are more popular than others, and once they gain traction amongst the masses, might be rife for viral media targeting. Yes, the defederated architecture in theory prevents against that, but if one server swallows up all the users by offering something the others can't, then that somewhat easy balance between instances might get upset

Who knows what the future holds, but we've seen what happened to other sites and it would be epitome of hubris to believe it couldn't happen here

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 4 points 3 months ago (21 children)

But would restricting the votes of a single user really be, in any way, a remedy to that theoretical problem? Much less restricting them now, when the issue on the Fediverse is largely not enough activity, not excessive artificial activity? And specifically targeting users that are not creating artificial activity, but simply those who are creating 'too much' activity?

Rimu himself said that he didn't think that the top voters he was concerned with were bots or coordinated in any way. He just thought they were voting too much.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 months ago (10 children)

Is your point seriously that the people who aren't active don't influence the the fediverse as much as people who are?

That's really weird, and if you just think about that for a minute you should see why that's weird.

Like, imagine there's an election and the board of elections was suddenly like "welp, according to this chart, a lot of registered voters don't regularly vote, so it's unfair to let some voters who vote in every election have a disproportionate impact on the election results. Therefore, we're canceling voting."

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 months ago (8 children)

You don't have to convince me of the flaws in FPTP, or the culpability of non-voters in the final results.

But those are red herrings, because neither one would be solved by limiting the voting rights of everyone including the ones who exercise those rights. That's a flimsy excuse, the kind of scapegoat a braindead right-winger would use. Do better.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 months ago (6 children)

Yes, you're totally right, as long as we restrict everyone's voting rights, then it'll be fair! /s

You're advocating for stupid and unnecessary regulations simply because you think you won't personally be affected by it.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

This has nothing to do with equity, you dunce. Voting on the fediverse is not a limited resource. Everyone can do it as much or as little as they want. Until now, when there's an arbitrary limit for no reason.

And if you think the fact that some people don't vote in elections is sufficient justification for taking voting rights away from everyone, then you're frankly an idiot. If that's what you mean by equitable, then that word is functionally meaningless.

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[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

The silent majority is made up of more than just the lurkers, and I think you know that despite leaning on it and needless personal attacks to drive your argument

I am curious though now: Attention is a limited resource, you have bots and even some users dominating that resource. How would you go about making it fairer?

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

"Attention is a limited resource"

What units do you measure that in? Minutes/hours? Everyone has the same amount of it each day, and everyone rations their own attention however they see fit. One person spending hours on the fediverse and upvoting hundreds of posts isn't taking anything away from someone who spends minutes on it and upvotes a dozen.

Whatever you mean by "silent majority", it doesn't matter. You're missing the point that nothing is being taken away from them when someone else votes more than they do.

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[–] tetris11@feddit.uk 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Let's go with minutes per session, and let's go with majority of users interacting with their front page which is their first point of entry and is set to "Hot". You're certain that one person spending hours upvoting hundreds of posts won't skew what other users see in their browsing period? You're sure that their attention isn't now being diverted elsewhere?

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 2 points 3 months ago

Yes, because that user can still only vote on each post one time. It doesn't skew anything. Either way, for a post to get 100+ upvotes, it requires 100+ users to upvote it, so nothing is going to reach the all feed unless a significant number of users vote on it, and no one single user has a disproportionate impact on that even if they vote on hundreds or thousands of posts.

It's like voting down the ballot when some people only vote for president and governor. It's perfectly fair; they had the same opportunity you did and chose to only vote on two spots. You didn't get an extra vote to cast on any given seat.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 3 points 3 months ago (7 children)

Man, you comment far more than the average user, much less the 'silent majority'. The average user doesn't upvote much; they comment even less. Would it be 'fairer' for your comments to be limited? After all, you're a 'vocal minority' whose activity is swaying the Fediverse. Wouldn't it be 'fairer' if you participated less, regardless of the fact that your participation does not actually consume (meaningfully) limited resources or space?

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 3 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

but if the level of discourse had an upper cap which easily contains the habits of a semi-active user, then I generally welcome it.

Again, your commenting far outstrips that of a semi-active user. Perhaps you should be advocating for a comment limit based on the average user as well.

You should probably advocate for a post limit based on the average poster too. Wouldn't want it to be unfair, after all. And posts are MUCH more visible than votes or comments.

I have a feeling that this impacts largely a minority of one.

It was geared towards the muzzling of ten 'top' users (10, mind you, is some ~2% of the daily users of Piefed.social to begin with), but under the presumption that their votes are evenly spread out, day-by-day.

In reality, most people aren't on the Fediverse every day - they come in, participate in a discussion or three, and then might not be back for a few days. So it's easy to hit the limit, as it is a daily limit, simply by being active in a discussion.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 3 points 3 months ago

Whilst I sense the sarcasm of your tone, I do largely agree that post and comment caps would likely dampen the effect of overactive subs (filtering out political posts by curating my subscriptions is a chore…)

... most of those political posts aren't done by the same people. They're 'overactive' because many Fediverse users are heavily political. So limiting the number of individual user posts or comments would do jack shit for that.

Anyway, to get to the crux of it: I’d be sad if you leave, but not sad if you posted a little less

Sorry that I want to participate in a community on my own terms. You won't have to worry about that frightening level of autonomy from me on here anymore.

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[–] Elting@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Personally, I comment far more than I vote and I tend to agree with Rimu that a comment is far more engaging than a vote is. Still, I like receiving as many votes as I can when I do comment or post.

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[–] Elting@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago

Yeah, at best you could frame this as an experiment in trying to keep things small. The conflicting reasoning given makes me think there wasn’t a terrible amount of forethought to this decision and perhaps it was guided more by a strong hunch.

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[–] atro_city@fedia.io 2 points 2 months ago

They were voting too much? Wat? There is such a thing?

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 9 points 4 months ago*

That's the thing - Rimu openly admits that he doesn't think that the power voters are bots. The issue isn't distinguishing us. It's just that Rimu doesn't like so many votes being cast by so few users. Shit man, if I encounter two active discussions in a day (admittedly not a daily occurrence on the sometimes-sleepy Fediverse), I'll be close to hitting the 240 limit simply by having an opinion on the majority of comments.

Shit, my vote quota is half-used-up today just from this comment section. I haven't even posted or browsed anything else.

As someone with a laundry list of physical and mental ailments, my 'touching grass' time is extremely limit, and general I reserve the monumental effort there for important issues - like keeping up with the social events of my actual friends, or participating in local politics in my increasingly-fucked-and-fascist country. "Touch grass, it's more fun than shitposting about history!" doesn't really apply for me.

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[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 8 points 4 months ago (1 child)

All social media pretty much operates on a 90/9/1 division. Only 1% of users actively post. Only a fraction of that 1% are power users like PugJesus. Killing power users won't accomplish a different division of labour where more people post, it will only accomplish killing the ecosystem as a whole.

You thought the Fediverse was dead now? Wait until the power users disappear.

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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 3 points 4 months ago

This is what I'm saying. Posting/voting isn't a limited resource that can be distributed unfairly. People do it or don't do it as much or as little as they want. Why restrict that on an ecosystem that you want to grow?

If the issue is compute, or resources to run the compute, or admins to maintain the compute environments, then focusing on those issues would be better. Ask for donations to add a new server, encourage people who can to set up their own servers to distribute the load, request that more people play an active role as admins. But restricting engagement/activity of your users sounds like the beginning of the end of your ecosystem...

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[–] Elting@piefed.social 30 points 4 months ago

Yeah, I can't seem to see what it accomplishes except to make the few users that reach it kinda mad. It seems like an experiment at best to see what kind of effect it will have on hot/all.

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[–] MxRemy@piefed.social 11 points 4 months ago (5 children)

Wait, like total votes ever? Like you hit it and you can never vote again?? 😭

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[–] Elting@piefed.social 21 points 4 months ago (4 children)

No, just over a set period of time.

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[–] MxRemy@piefed.social 11 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

Ohhh, that's way more tolerable! Thanks for letting me know, got worried there lol.

I think it was YouTube back in the day that used to have a max number of total likes per account? After which, it would appear as if liking worked from your end, but it didn't actually do anything on the backend. I was afraid we had one of those situations.

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[–] bad1080@piefed.social 9 points 4 months ago* (2 children)

youtube still has a limit on upvotes, i am pretty sure it's 5000. once you have 5k they remove your oldest ones.

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[–] MxRemy@piefed.social 5 points 4 months ago

Oof, I hate it...

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[–] JayGray91@piefed.social 5 points 4 months ago

This is correct at the moment. One can check by going to your their Liked Videos playlist.

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[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 3 points 3 months ago (18 children)

WHAT?!*
Mate, who the hell cares about minor shizzle like that. Are you serious...?

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 11 points 3 months ago (17 children)

The combination of the irritation (being unable to upvote replies to your own material being particularly grating) and what it suggests about the future of the instance.

I actually planned on continuing to post as-usual (upvoting with alts, annoying as that would be) after I discovered it, but when the reasoning came out I knew it was the canary in the coal mine.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 12 points 3 months ago (15 children)

Man, I literally hit the cap before it was even announced. I went to the Matrix channel, confused as hell, and got told it was intentional.

The cap is 240 votes. I almost hit the cap just upvoting most of the comments here yesterday. If I participated in any real discussions outside of my own comms, I would almost certainly hit the daily cap on that given day.

The issue was not abuse, and Rimu didn't say it was abuse in that sense. The issue was always that Rimu doesn't think that a small minority should be more active in participating on here than the majority.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 9 points 3 months ago (9 children)

So it was a massive outrage, not worthy of the dev’s time to at least offer an explanation, and yet one more example of the right-wing dev / runner-path. Really?

What?

At no point did I say that Rimu was right-wing in any sense or say that he shouldn't have offered an explanation?

This is a shitty administration decision, it will have shitty effects on the instance long-term, and, especially, it affects me, personally, in a shitty way that I'm not willing to put up with. That's it.

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 12 points 3 months ago* (7 children)

Because it has a bizarre, but coherent, justification that suggests outright hostility towards 'power users'.
Because it was dropped suddenly, without warning or prior suggestion that it was in any way incoming, to the point where other Piefed instance admins were surprised by its introduction (as an opt-out feature, not opt-in).
Because it enshittifies the user experience of active accounts for no real gain. Shit, man, several users here, in this very thread, hit the vote limit. The ones who are on non-Piefed.social accounts probably won't realize that their subsequent votes aren't being counted by Piefed.social because they 'voted too much'.

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[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Well, I'm too weak and sick to try to zoom in with my traditional power-glove diplomacy, so what do you figure you'll do then, mate?

Oof, I followed you and Blaze to PF.S from Lemm.ee, and now it's yet another bloody-well disaster. This is just a bit much.

Seriuously, I have so much stuff queued upon in my archives that I was looking to post on your communities as a personal thanks. Really only had 1-2wks left to sort it all, fuckitall.

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[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 3 points 3 months ago

I’m leaving. I’m out. This is it for me.

Well then fuck my life.
I cannot tell you how fun & interesting it was trying to add on to your posts and/or provoke questions, accordingly. And you were an amazing sport upon such..!

I love history and animal facts to death, so of course, please leave your T# address?

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[–] PugJesus@piefed.social [S] 5 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

Damn, I certainly can’t imagine voting 240x in a single day. There might remotely be that number of opportunities in my subscribed stream, but that would be like me forming an opinion upon every-goldurn thing that I possibly saw in that day. And beyond, really?

There are 303 comments in this post alone. If I have an opinion on 2/3s of them, I'm almost at the cap.

~300 comment posts are not the norm on the Fediverse, but I see a fair number of ~80 comment posts. If I run across two or three of them, suddenly I would have very few other opportunities to upvote.

Considering, on top of that, I post quite a bit and get a fair number of comments on each (I had ~90 comment replies to my posts on a pretty normal day's output on HistoryMemes alone), it doesn't take much browsing to hit 240 votes.

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[–] JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

Alright, you're right.
I'd forgotten about the post / comment type of vote.
Yes, of course you're right.
(altho that's still a lot voting, mate!!)

I wonder... is there a technical difference upon such votes across ActivityPub/Fediverse?