- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- fediverse@lemmy.zip
Just like Reddit, PieFed keeps track of how many upvotes and downvotes your posts receive and the net value of all the votes received is called your “reputation” (Reddit calls it “karma”). This is not shown in the UI anywhere (except to administrators), to dissuade the karma-farming behavior common on Reddit. Reputation is not a game or status symbol, it is a mechanic for enhancing trust and safety on PieFed.
Some people have criticized PieFed for this, calling it a “social credit system” similar to the one in China so I thought it’d be good to explain exactly what it does so people don’t need to guess or rely on hearsay.
Appreciate you taking the time to articulate your thoughts on different features over the past week or so.
I’m open to hearing other people’s critiques on the other aspects (if they have any), but everything makes sense, to me, until the “Low quality communities”. I recall this “feature” being a point of contention in the past.
You said its not as effective as you thought it would be and you don’t use it much, is it an opt-in feature? If not, can it be?
Alternatively, can admins make, alter, or add their own list?
As far as I know it’s a custom list. Admins will manually go into the admin settings, communities, pick one and edit… And set the checkbox for low quality to flag it on their particular instance.
Appreciate the explanation. That seems like a reasonable approach to me. Might be worthwhile having that info be transparent to the users.
Yeah. I really appreciate how Rimu is doing the blog posts to explain what PieFed does. And why. I think traditionally, we’ve been more one of those projects with a minimum of documentation. Half of it is self-explanatory, and you’d need to figure out the rest of the settings and intricacies by skimming the source code and old chats. We got some people volunteer to add a bit to the documentation in the past. Other times it’s like it always is with Free Software developers. They rather add 5 new features than write all the paragraphs to explain what the already existing features do. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
…Just my personal opinion…
(In case someone is interested in contributing to more transparency/documentation: https://join.piefed.social/get-involved/ )
Maybe the issue is the name? “Low Quality” makes it sound like you’d rather not have the community at all, but reading the description it sounds like the appropriate targets are Meme communities. “OkBuddy***” “***Circlejerk,” etc.
It’s not likely you’d often see productive or interesting conversations there, where rep would matter. They’re mostly ha ha funny image posts. It doesn’t make them useless, it just means they’re disposable.
I don’t particularly care for memes and as a general rule I would agree with you, but, for example, history memes with pugjesus had some good and informative posts, comments, discussions.
My potential issue is related to dictating what is considered “worthwhile” as an absolute, from a single unalterable source. If every admin can make/alter/delete list(s) and the list(s) is transparent, I don’t see an issue with it.
Oh yeah fair point, PugJesus is pretty chill. It’s a blurry line to draw where memes end and srs bsns begins.
“It’s a fine line between stupid and clever.” -Spinal Tap
At least PieFed has thought already about it: (from OP’s blogpost)
Oh I missed the bolded part, my bad.
It was also heavily curated and controlled. You likely didn’t see any of the comments pointing out omissions and inaccuracies since they’d be hidden and the users shadowbanned.
Which is part of the reason keywords on an instance level can be a poor way to control and curate content. It’s just going to miss those who know how to game and bypass these systems and use it as a weapon as part of some kind of moderation arms race.
Call them “Shitpost” communities and call it a day.
I was about to type basically the same thing. There has to be a more professional word than “shitpost” though, surely.