- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
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?
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This is a good discussion to have. But then where are the graphs for posts and comments?
It feels like we’ve discussed this before. If 3 accounts make up >95% of the “post” form of contributions to the Threadiverse then that is indicative of an unhealthy community… though the solution seems to not be to throttle ThePicardManeuver, PugJesus, etc. and rather for the rest of us to step up and contribute more post content to this place?
And likewise for comments - why would a newcomer bother submitting posts when nobody comments on them? - and for votes too? What is stopping you from upvoting every single reply to any of your comments, regardless of whether you personally agree with the statements or not? SHOULD votes even be used as a “like” (agreement) button? 👍
We all use this place in different ways. Some are friendly, others ask provocative questions, some barely interact at all and many don’t even, simply lurking in the shadows. It’s the 90-9-1 rule: 90% lurk, 9% comment, only 1% post content. Here on the Threadiverse we are even more unbalanced. But… we get by.
What I still don’t understand is why people’s contributions - posts, comments, or votes - are somehow “bad”? The fact that people vote way less than they could seems irrelevant to me? We all have (or rather, HAD) the same access to voting (or commenting, or posting) the same as everyone else. Wasn’t that the epitome of “fairness” as in full “equity”?
A better answer imho, which PieFed already offers, is to place restrictions not on the amount of votes but rather on the kind - as in, if a community so desires, only count votes from subscribed members when doing sorting and such, which prevents drive-by influencers arriving at posts via All who haven’t bothered to read the community rules from overwhelming the legitimate members who want to have a discussion in peace. Making communities fully private also works to this end, but limits discovery whereas merely restricting voting in this manner keeps the positive discovery aspects but just limits the deleterious effects solely in regards to voting. We saw this in Reddit a ton when the 3rd party app devs were being harassed and all of a sudden people who we had never seen or heard before started responding to polls asking if our communities should go dark for the protest actions (which ultimately proved non-viable, hence why we moved here, giving up on Reddit as a lost cause) - that was terribly unfriendly of them to astroturf like that.
But merely to limit the vote amounts - I still don’t get “WHY” that is supposed to be a benefit? Again as opposed to voting being considered a “good” thing and people should do MORE of it?
Perhaps the weight of each vote could be adjusted for every user, based on how many times the user has voted the same as that voter. I’m sure this would greatly help reduce the effective risk of vote manipulation
This looks like a healthy distribution. In the olden days of reddit (before the proliferation of bots) they had a very rigid pattern of the 90%/10%. If you had 1,000 users, 100 would cast votes. Of those 100, 10 would also comment. Of those 10, 1 would also submit posts. Across multiple years and various communities, this ratio tended to present itself.
No matter how many votes they make, they can only influence each post by one point, so it seems unimportant.
Unless you have evidence of vote botting?
Also, does this include the automatic upvote made when posting? If so those could just be the feed following bots that some instances have.
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.
Had to downvote you. I didn’t particularly want to, but I also wasn’t going to upvote, so them’s the rules I’m afraid.
I think what they mean is, it skews what is considered a majority’s opinion. Regardless of whether its fair or unfair to use your one vote, what you get on your feed is not a representive of the majority’s opinion.
Not just that, there are topic that dont even make it to your feed or that someone thinks is too niche or controversial to post about even if aren’t. For example, dispite the internet being a large part of people’s life, all around the world. You dont hear what effect that has on people’s cultural identity and sense of self. To be flooded with US polictics, and culture.
People say that Americans make up the majority of the English speaking side of the Internet, but as the rest of the world’s access grows, I dont think that minority is so small anymore.
Or course not - did anyone think that it was?
Reading the Threadiverse, 99.9% of the world is (1) Linux, (2) politics, (3) leftist in-fighting, (4) schadenfreude over rightist missteps, (5) (just before any Western election) asking why aren’t centrists voting more, (6) GNU Linus and (7) comics.
e.g. “sports” doesn’t even crack the top 100 topics, much less top 10. The Threadiverse is a VERY biased subset of the wider world!!!
People vote for what appeals to them. Get out and vote more, folks!
The Threadiverse is a VERY biased subset of the wider world!!!
I am not talking about The wider world. Lemmy is in itself a community, that isn’t represented by what get vote to top feeds. Its like if you looked only at r/memes extrapolated what the Average reddit life and views look like.
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.
I think submitting over 750 upvotes a day is a pretty clear sign that a bot is involved in one way or another.
There are some chronically ill people who are unable to work here who spend much of their day on this platform. They can easily exceed 750 votes. These also tend to be a big chunk of the people who post a lot and run communities and keep this place running and not feeling empty. Feels odd to punish it IMO.
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.
The votes could also be on comments. 750 per day still seems kind crazy when you break it down like that, but that’s literally one account.
The top 147 accounts average about 229 votes per day, and the top 5000 average about 38.
That’s not that unreasonable…
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
Average or Median?
Exactly!
I’m not a bot; just a loser.
I calculated a rough average for myself: ~150 votes per day, that’s ~4500 votes per month. If someone knows a tool that displays exact numbers, please let me know.
But yesterday I’ve exceeded piefed.social’s limit of 240 votes at 5pm. (I’m selfhosting and can change the quota for my instance, but the piefed.social limit affects remote users too). I wasn’t very active on Saturday so I had 6 pages of posts to catch up on Sunday, sorted by New Subscribed.
The Fediverse needs more good, constructive and fun content. If a post is good I upvote it, if multiple comments are good, I upvote them as well. That’s a lot of votes for positive stuff I like to see more of. Upvoting encourages users to post more. If less and less people upvote my contributions, I’ll stop posting.
I engage in wholesome communities like [email protected] where I upvote a lot of games and comments, because I like to see more people playing and interacting. Or [email protected] where I upvote questions that are fun and all single letter comments that form the answer, that’s easily 10 votes per post. Another example would be [email protected] where the memes are fun and the comments are even more fun.
Yesterday I’ve reached a limit by upvoting positive content and it doesn’t feel good at all. I didn’t do anything malicious. By upvoting a lot, I signalled to the posters and commenters that I like what they shared and hopefully encouraged them to continue contributing to this place.
I understand why this was implemented, but in my opinion it hits the wrong people. Limiting votes in the Fediverse sends a wrong signal. We need more participation, not less.
I signalled to the posters and commenters that I like what they shared and hopefully encouraged them to continue contributing to this place.
You can do that much more effectively by writing a comment. Even just “Cool, thanks for sharing!” would have more emotional impact on the author than receiving 100 upvotes.
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!! :-P
This looks like a Zipfian distribution. It’s a very widely observed phenomenon in many different fields.
That is interesting data, thanks for presenting it.
I have to say I’m not that concerned about it, as long as there is no vote manipulation via multiple accounts involved. Everybody has one voice in each post and I don’t see a problem with some people using that voice more often. Hell, I am trying to upvote every post that isn’t something I don’t like in order to increase engagement. So I might even be one of the top 5 percent or so. And I’m certainly not doing it out of malicious ness or trying to manipulate what others can see (besides the normal up and down vote effect)
the beauty of the fediverse is everyone can chose how they connect. I subscribe to piefed/lemmy communities from my hubzilla instance and receive chronological posts so there is 0 influence of anyone on what i see.
I am indifferent because anything but Sort by New isn’t enough of a dopamine drip (and that’s not a Lemmy-specific problem).
Same. Probably means I am only of those top people who does influence posts as I vote on everything I haven’t blocked.
Thank you for your service! (Helping the rest of us decide what best warrants our attention)
Reading the comments here, I am amused at how many people sort by new, completely ignoring the mechanism in question. Why do we have up/down votes on posts again? lol (might be more useful for comments)
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.
… I now see the obvious flaw in my thinking.
All good mate.
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.
Each account has one vote per post/comment and if they up voted everything then everything would just have one more vote and same for the reverse. Unless most of them are voting nearly the same way it will just get lost in the noise.
It also matters when they vote. Early votes have more impact than later votes. If early voters are a representative sample of the general voting trends then they are doing a service by raising what people in general want to see and filtering out what people in general don’t.
As long as they are manually voting with a single account I don’t really care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule
and/or
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
depending on POV
I guess I had made an assumption that most of the people on Lemmy and piefed were the type who chose to be here because they didn’t want votes or algos choosing what they see. As such, I figured that basically everyone here sorted by some chronological order rather than by votes.
Are you tracking this metric?
No, PieFed has no telemetry or page view tracking.
I feel like I cannot make a decision on this without knowing who the top 10 users are.
That would just cause those 10 people to hate me. I don’t want to anger the people who determine what gets seen and what gets buried. That demonstrates the whole problem with having 10 people controlling everything - it’s a power imbalance.
Anyway you would not recognize most of them. The people who vote a ton are not the same people who comment and post a lot.
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 doubt that. Each of them only gets one vote anyway.
I think don’t watch the most upvoted content because i prefer chronological order :)
Edit : So i understand your point with the vote quota, it’s a good idea. :)
