I’m trying to understand how PieFed’s voting culture is different. I’ll admit, I usually upvote things I like and downvote the rest. Sometimes, if a post has a low score, I don’t even read the title, I just downvote and move on. I suspect I’m not the only one who does this.
I know PieFed shows “Attitude” (the percentage of positive vs. negative votes you cast) on profiles, which is a nice touch. But aside from that metric, it doesn’t seem to physically limit the act of downvoting.
Are there plans to make voting more meaningful? For instance, I’ve seen suggestions in the community about restricting votes to subscribers to prevent “drive-by” downvotes from people who aren’t part of the community. How does PieFed plan to handle the issue of users reflexively downvoting without engaging with the content?
Why would you downvote something you’re not even interested in without looking at it? You’re not feeding an algorithm here — your downvote doesn’t affect what content you’ll see in the future, it just makes it appear to others that the content had been downvoted.
Upvote content you like. Downvote content you actively don’t like.
Some people have wild personal psychologies.
All I really do is post owl stuff, and I’ll pick up a stray downvote here or there by accident I’m assuming. But I had one user downvoting near every post I made. No biggie to me, just a curiosity really. I wasn’t sure why they wouldn’t just block me or the community if they didn’t like the content, but whatever. This went on for a couple months.
One day they left a comment finally and it was a positive one. I replied essentially “thanks, but I thought you hated my content or me myself.” Their reply was “nah, I love all your posts, I just downvote everything from .world to lower them in the sort.” My guy, it’s one vote. The whole thing was funny, especially since learning they were actually a fan, but so confusing to attempt to penalize someone for such a random reason, especially someone you seemingly enjoy.
Do not display posts with which I have already interacted (opened/upvoted/downvoted)
To stop seeing the content with that setting. it’s faster than opening the post.
Upvote content you like. Downvote content you actively don’t like.
That’s pretty much what I do.
To stop seeing the content with that setting. it’s faster than opening the post.
Downvoting won’t achieve that. Just block the community its from if it is consistently a source of posts you’re not interested in.
Every post I vote stops showing when I reload the page.
To warn you, downvoting is public on the forumverse, so if you are perceived as reflexively downvoting at scale in a community- you risk getting community banned.
what setting? you don’t stop seeing content by downvoting it. I don’t know how that would work. Or do you mean the “hide content I have interacted with” setting?
Yes that setting. I stop seeing posts after I reload by voting them with that setting enabled.
in that case, you could simply upvote them instead of downvoting them ;)
You need a client that marks a post as read as you scroll by. On Android I use Summit. In a browser Voyager should do. Maybe we get it with Lemmy 1.0 in Lemmy-UI, I don’t know.
Sometimes, if a post has a low score, I don’t even read the title, I just downvote and move on. I suspect I’m not the only one who does this.
We did it everyone. We found the Reddit hivemind themself
ngl sometimes someone gotta take one for the team 🫡
I know PieFed shows “Attitude” (the percentage of positive vs. negative votes you cast) on profiles, which is a nice touch. But aside from that metric, it doesn’t seem to physically limit the act of downvoting
It does. When you downvote too much the ability to downvote is removed. You can’t downvote post from user’s profile page.
There is some restriction.
But imo, the most important thing would be how to currate content so user can find the most revalent one. That’s somerhing that vote can’t achieve. We have hashtag and flairs, what’s left is to expand them with search function :
Include, exclude, and, or…A lot of that depends on the instance you’re on. The one I’m on, for example, disabled downvoting, so you can only upvote. And to me, this has become an essential feature, and I refuse to go on an instance that allows downvoting.
Downvoting allows for passive aggressiveness and the shutdown of anything people don’t want to see, which usually results in content about minorities being instantly buried without saying a word. Downvoting prevents meaningful engagement from happening.
On these kinds of instances, if something is wrong with a post or whatever, people will comment on it. Talk about it. And the culture of the community will do the rest. But if there is something you don’t like, you have to face it, and you have to actually engage with it and express why you don’t like it. You can’t just throw your downvote and move on without expressing any form of criticism.
I genuinely think it’s the best solution. I don’t think you can re-fix the downvote button. Just get rid of it. :)
As a queer and nd entity, sometimes I see a post that’s iffy, but I don’t want to explain the issue to normies, so I just downvote. If downvotes are disabled, I have to comment and explain the microaggression, and expose Myself to hate if the mods don’t want to remove it. In My experience spaces like that develop a culture that privileges mainstream voices for the specific subculture, but actually suppresses other minorities. For example, you could have a trans community that’s very white dominated and features casual racism. Or an autism community where people use slurs that disparage people with ID or NPD.
Well, removing the downwoting option does not remove the option to just send thumb down emoji as a reply. Yes, this removes anonymity, but still it will be hard for someone to discuss a single emoji like 👎 or ⬇️ since anyone can express their likes or dislikes.
I don’t even get why someone would want to vote on things especially with no real perspective like you describe. default donwn??? I upvote everything now but that is because of a quirk with a setting where I tell it not to show me things I have viewed or interacted with so upvoting removes stuff im not interested in. Previously I rarely if ever voted for something up or down and usualy only neder extreme circumstance. ie omg this is so aweful I need to do the community a service and down vote it or this is so great everyone really needs to see this. I personally don’t really like community voting because everyone does it so many different ways its a useless metric. I would love rating to be used in a basic algorithmic view that only takes into account the ratings you give. trustcafe does this where verything can be rated (posts, users, comments, communities, domains, etc) and defaults to a value of 50 that the user can change to between 0 and 100. So like rather than blocking someone I can be like. This person is annoying but they are a real person (I think) and I don’t want to totally discount them so I will drop them to 25 so their things go twice as far down my feed but then this other person I really jive with so I will rank them 75 so their stuff will be bumped up higher.
> @hubertmanne@piefed.social said: > > I upvote everything now but that is because of a quirk with a setting where I tell it not to show me things I have viewed or interacted with so upvoting removes stuff im not interested in.
Okay, I get the rationale behind it, but it seems like an improper extension of the voting mechanism, doesn’t it?
(Not specifically singling you out, I’m just speaking broadly.)
One of those side effects that doesn’t just affect you. Makes me wonder if this was added because it increases engagement metrics.
Thats what I kind of mean. some folks vote on everything. some don’t vote on anything. some are very specific and thoughtful in their voting and some have default voting things. I have been both. I don’t view voting information as at all useful in a community type of way. Now make it scarce and maybe. Like every day your get one up or down vote that will expire in a week or something. Thing about that kind of thing though is it encourages folks who like to manipulate to make a bunch of accounts. I could totally see cm0002 going through all his accounts to downvote things on lemmy.ml. I just don’t think its very useful unless as a feature for accounts locally.
I would love rating to be used in a basic algorithmic view that only takes into account the ratings you give. trustcafe does this where verything can be rated (posts, users, comments, communities, domains, etc) and defaults to a value of 50 that the user can change to between 0 and 100. So like rather than blocking someone I can be like. This person is annoying but they are a real person (I think) and I don’t want to totally discount them so I will drop them to 25 so their things go twice as far down my feed but then this other person I really jive with so I will rank them 75 so their stuff will be bumped up higher.
That’s an interesting take on feed curation
Its basically what was done with trust cafe which the wikipedia guy started. the thing is he did not make it federated and as much as I like the setup I like the decentralized nature of the fediverse betters. I like using the portal but if someone made an app with this type of function I would be tempted. well as long as I did not have to run it on a phone.
I skimmed wiki on trustcafe. It’s not open source, so it’s a pass from me. But the idea might be worth exploring
A crazy idea: since such ratings would need to be stored per account anyway, it would also allow to have for example “this instance feelings towards this info source”. So if everyone sets “I’m not fan of the source of this link”, an averaged score could be shown on other posts. Something like those “is this site neutral” pages. It probably could only work with/on the main link of a post and some might not be fans of such hive-mind labeling. But the possibility would be there
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Emoji reactions are a big one - rather than voting you can apply an emoji, which is a much richer expression.
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Every community can have different settings for who can downvote. Here are the options:
- If you downvote more than you upvote, pretty soon you can’t downvote anymore.
Ah true! NodeBB doesn’t support emoji reactions yet.
Thanks for reminding me of yet another way we’re behind Piefed :muscle:
If you downvote more than you upvote, pretty soon you can’t downvote anymore.
Oh, I guess I’ll start using only upvotes to mark posts as read.
Do you have any ideas for improving discovery of niche topics? What about that suggestion about limiting downvotes to subscribers to prevent drive-by downvotes?
The Explore menu is PieFed’s attempt to improve discoverability. https://piefed.zip/explore is pretty light on the topics and feeds but if you look at https://piefed.social/explore you’ll see what it could be.
Limiting downvotes to subscribers is in the screenshot I shared earlier, as “community members”.
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Compared to PieFed, Lemmy devs look lazy as hell. I didn’t even thought that such options could already exist in the Fediverse somewhere.
They’re too busy banning anarchists to write code
