I’m not running to be the next red or blue Fuhrer, I’m trying to discuss topics online.
So I don’t need a majority. I don’t need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It’s not an election. I only need people with the mental health to discuss things in good faith.
The voting system on reddit and piefed is designed to heavily amplify the terror of how stupid people are.
I already have to try to figure out how to not die while people sabotage the atmosphere with climate change and sabotage modern medicine with anti-intellectualism. So upvotes and downvotes shouldn’t make much difference, and intuitively, I would say upvotes and downvotes aren’t a big deal. They’re just reminders of how denialists and anti-intellectuals that want to kill themselves and me are much more common than friendly people, which is the much bigger problem in itself than reminders of it.
But I was on reddit from a young age, and I never spent time away from it until the past couple years of adulthood, and now I’ve learned my intuition is wrong. Being buried in downvotes and spammed with lies that get upvotes, while telling the truth, has a very different psychological effect from just being spammed with lies while telling the truth. Now that I can see how different it actually feels, it seems like it’s damaged me deeply over the years.
And there’s a very easy fix for the psychological factors: filtering. The same way you can remove replies from your view if they come from me in good faith, I should be able to remove votes from my view if they come from people I know act in bad faith. In fact, filtering replies is basically useless and overserved already (allowing people to manipulate the feed by removing other people’s posts from everyone’s view instead of just their own). Whereas filtering votes would actually be useful.
This would require being able to see who’s voted on a post, obviously. In all my years on reddit, I never had a strong opinion on whether reddit votes should be anonymous but now I do - they should not. They should be pseudonymous, meaning someone could still Sybil attack me if they really felt like it, but I would still detect it and deal with it pretty quickly.
There are at least 3 major benefits to this:
- I can find out if people whose opinions are actually worth caring about hate one of my posts (they probably do sometimes, but I’d probably have no idea with the current system)
- Instead of being frustrated or angry when people flood me with downvotes or flood those abusing me with upvotes, I can take it as an opportunity to identify more bad-faith voters to filter, which would feel completely different psychologically. The reminder of being outnumbered by idiots no longer comes with a reminder that they systemically make it impossible to fight back against them in many ways; instead, it becomes a reminder of the ways intelligent people can fight back with superiority.
- Sorting could also be implemented, so my front page could include any posts that were buried in downvotes by known lie supporters / honesty haters
The Nazis will pretend the point of this is to play pretend and enjoy positive vote scores by pretending they’re not from filtering negative votes. But no, that is not really a benefit for adults and it is also none of the benefits I listed above, and it’s sad that this paragraph is needed.
But people are childish, and that paragraph was needed, because people somehow struggle with the difference between looking for people to discuss topics with online, and debating for an election. It should be pretty simple to comprehend me saying those are 2 different things, but people struggle with stuff like that.
I previously had a post about piefed’s design and community making me want to stop viewing / commenting on other people’s content and just use it as a place to dump my own, with minimal discussion. I was talked out of it and deleted that post, but I’m back to it now. As long as the voting system is designed to psychologically traumatize me, while I’m surrounded by people who will laugh at that statement and abuse me more over it, it seems like the only point to this place is to drive traffic to my nostr key, and commenting on other people’s posts isn’t an effective enough traffic driver here.
It seems like it’s probably more worthwhile to comment on reddit, because reddit has a bigger audience and more chance someone is impacted or learns something from a discussion, at the cost of the psychological impact on me.
Theoretically downvoting data is entirely public, so it’s mainly a choice of each UI to either show it or not. Most do not, but some do.
There is https://lemvotes.org/, although I find that extremely often it has difficulties with content on PieFed, I do not know why. It would indeed be nice to get that limitation resolved, for those who need access to it.
I think some 3rd party apps do show you exactly who has downvoted some item of content - I recall seeing screenshots even - but I don’t use any mobile apps right now and don’t recall which ones might do it. Also it might be a mod-only view.
The Tesseract alternative UI for Lemmy would also do it, but there too there are some limitations (which I don’t recall, except that it is not currently compatible with PieFed).
Also if you started your own instance then you would have full access to that data. I am not sure by what mechanism, like a UI option or a CLI database command or what.
I will add that I have thought along similar lines, but in practice it tends to be far more hassle than it is worth. Like when someone replies with a rather toxic comment, and so I go through their recent history to see if they provide any value at all or if I am better to simply erase their existence from my view of the Threadiverse, and more often than not lately I see them offering helpful posts and replies in other contexts. Everyone has bad / off-days.
So in the end I simply blocked the largest Lemmy communities - especially News and Politics ones - and that solved a large fraction of my issue with encountering toxicity. And blocking all users from lemmy.ml, who perhaps due to existing inside their repressive echo chamber seemed the most likely category of people to consistently reply with batshit insane logic, which I simply do not need in my life. Anyway, some communities are simply inherently more toxic than others, so find the ones that are worthwhile (uplifting, kind, relevant, etc.) and enjoy those - plus ofc be the change that you want to see in the world (as best you can at any rate).
That’s likely because rimu defederated from the instance that lemvotes runs to collect voting data. So, communities on piefed.social are not forwarding voting data on to it.
Do you know why that defederation occurred? Voting data is already publicly available so I imagine there must have been some other reason(s)?
I can’t speak for rimu (he is the one that pulled the defed trigger), but I don’t disagree with the decision. I personally don’t view the radical transparency of votes provided by lemvotes as helpful or useful. Admins and mods already have access to voting data that is relevant for their moderation purposes. So, often lemvotes data is simply used as a way to call out people that downvoted but didn’t reply or as a way to sleuth past votes from another user to find some rationalization that their vote shouldn’t count. It also more easily enables things like a user voting in one community prompting a moderator in another community to preemptively issue that user a ban.
I understand that all of these things are certainly possible without lemvotes if you run your own instance and just harvest/analyze all of the activitypub data. Defederating from the lemvotes instance may be futile, but I guess I just see more negatives than positives of providing all that voting data to lemvotes.
Yes, that’s it.
Thank you for explaining that it was not some oversight and has nothing to do with the software and rather an intentional instance-level decision.
I think what OP is trying to argue is that sometimes users feel powerless against some people who follow them around downvoting their content, which is facilitated by the opaqueness of the voting process.
Some people want to expose themselves to criticism, but only among a more narrow audience. Hopefully the ability of some communities to restrict votes to only subscribed community members will aid with that, by elimination of drive-by downvoters scrolling through All without knowing anything about a community’s standards.
I am not sure where I stand myself on the issue, except that the data is public anyway and the chief negative would be for a (new) user to presume that it is not.
Was that the intended goal or a side effect? Are you saying team PieFed are fundamentally hostile to this area of improvement?
Very insightful post, I appreciate it. Especially the info that I can potentially get the data by starting a new instance.
I must address this part -
Filtering votes should be separate from filtering replies for this reason. I basically only block people that block me or threaten to block me, very different from how aggressively I’d want to filter votes.
Thank you again for your response, very helpful. More reason to have hope / not give up
On Lemmy, the only way to block both replies and votes (iirc) is to block the user that they come from, or join an instance that has all downvotes disabled (such as https://reddthat.com/). PieFed offers a plethora of additional options for each.
I don’t think either platform allows someone to reply but not to vote - the closest thing to it would be to disable all downvotes from everyone, or if you want to do it selectively then that gets back into blocking (or even full defederation from an instance).
Of of PieFed’s neat ideas to improve upon the existing options is to allow voting only from Subscribed community members, so that e.g. some random person scrolling All who does not bother to read the community sidebar (in fairness, some apps seem to go to great lengths to almost actively hide these from their users) will not impact the community discussions. I am not sure if it restricts only voting and lets comments through, but it might, and either way may be worth investigating. More details in https://join.piefed.social/2024/06/22/piefed-features-for-growing-healthy-communities/.
Note how nearly all of the above is optional, able to be configured by the user or at least able to be easily switched off for someone running their own instance. But damn it really is so nice to have options to choose from:-).