Voting in the threadiverse
-
Hi,
i want to explore the various way we can highlight content.
Currently, on the threadiverse, we use vote to show our approval, discontent...and we can couple it with a bot for moderation. Or hide post below a certain score...
Some instance completly removed downvote as Beehaw. Piefed is experimenting private vote. On other fediverse software, mastodon, iceshrimp, there is no downvote and we use emojis to express our feelings.
You also have website as https://slashdot.org/ where you can tell that comment was insightfull or a troll, or funny...
There is also also website that compare software or video as https://tournesol.app/
- Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
- Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
- What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
- What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
-
I have a dumb questionAren’t votes on Lemmy private?
-
They're not. Each post's upvoters are visible via ActivityPub endpoints.
-
They aren't shown to users, no, but because votes are federated, they're freely accessible to anyone willing to put in some effort. Set up a server and you'll get access to the data.
-
As much as I wish votes could be private, obfuscating them would make troll instances harder to notice. I think I hate it the most that the current model gives the illusion of being private, when it isn't.
-
I like the downvotes disabled model.
It also means that the “active” sort algorithm doesn’t promote posts that get lots of “downvotes” -> engagement
-
It promotes downvoted posts?
-
They really aren’t
Here are yours :)I think this is a huge problem but I also don’t think things are going to change
-
Yeah, that’s concerning.
However after being on the Fediverse for a while, I understand that the freedom from corporations comes in a trade-off with privacy, and even if I’m not tech savvy I’m convinced this isn’t going to change. Maybe there should more understanding about this, and we should put online only things we are totally ok with being publicly available and share private stuff only in specific places such as encrypted chats -
The thing is, what’s stopping Google or Meta from spinning up an instance just to profile you? They wouldn’t even have to embrace extend extinguish they could just quietly spin one up and start reading everything. I think the Votes should only be visible to the community mods/admins but that would require a change in how the whole system works and I don’t think it’s going to happen
-
Yea, the best solution is:
- Keep votes "semi-public" (visible to mods/admins) to aid in moderation and avoid vote manipulation.
- Make it very clear to users that votes are not private.
As long as users know that votes are not private, it should be okay.
-
I honestly personally preferred Reddit's sorting algorithm. Lemmy's algorithm is a bit too slow to update for my taste. This is kind of part of Lemmy's design though. My problem with Reddit was never it's sorting algorithm (honestly that was a big part of its strength!), it was just all the ways they enshittified later on.
-
Public voting, or at least semi public-voting helps cultivate a high-trust culture on-site in my opinion. And being able to remove repeat offending downvoters who do it nonetheless is very useful.
I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn't all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. As that kind of behaviour now is more-or-less confined to non-interacting support/troll accounts, it's much rarer of a problem. Unlike Reddit when a lot of threads can quickly get downvote buried instantly for seemingly no reason.
-
That also means you can't downvote just wrong information anymore. Look at YouTube, which disabled down votes and nothing got better. And their votes weren't even public.
I think that's a terrible idea.
-
This sounded off, so I checked the docs.
...downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen.
-
A big problem with the data collection is how hidden and one sided it is. On here its out in the open, we say how it works and the data is available for anyone. On Facebook its hidden for users to speculate on what's being collected and only Facebook and the people they sell it to have access.
Data is very useful for making cool tools that enhance user experience and it can also be dangerous. I think the fediverse is privacy conscious enough to find the right balance.
Personally i dont think we've found it and need to do more to preserve privacy.
-
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Making them private is absolute idiotic. People participating in a discussion forum are willing to engage in a public conversation, if you are not willing to respond in public, then don't respond at all. And if you think that the original comment is bad/harmful/offensive, report it and move on.
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
"Votes" are not real votes. It's just a terrible misnomer for "Liking" and "Disliking". I think we should get rid of votes altogether and use the real vocabulary.
I'd also would like a system where users could define their own scoring algorithm, and I would like to assign different weights depending on the person and the topic/community. I for one think that downvotes (dislikes) should only be counted if you are a member of the community and if you have made a positive contribution to the discussion.
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
I'd like to be able to follow people just to see what they are liking/commenting on. Also, given that this is a discussion forum, I wonder whether we could build a wiki-like system where people could annotate parts of a comment/post and challenge/elaborate/investigate specific parts of an statement. This could be used either for a "Change My View" style of discussion or even full-on adversarial collaboration projects.
-
snoopy@jlai.lu personally, since I create AP enabled software I am on the side of votes being public data. We already have enough issues with votes being out of sync with each other. Mixing in private voting is just asking for trouble.
Emoji reactions are neat, although niche to those softwares that utilise it. They allow for greater expression which is nice. They're useless for deriving value (for ranking purposes) unless you assign value to them.
