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.
Bro, reading all this sounds like you aren’t cut out for social media and its associated ills. You should probably disconnect for awhile because this shit is clearly taking a toll on your mental health.
I can’t afford that luxury. My mental health will have to keep adapting.
Anyway, I can easily tell you how replies have a purpose even when they can’t be filtered. Can you tell me how reddit votes have a purpose when they can’t be filtered? You think I want to know what a horde of malicious, moronic, anti-intellectual anonymous psychopaths and possible bots deemed worthy of my front page? Or is it something else?
I mean honestly, this sounds like a “you” problem you’re trying to get the devs to fix.
You say the people that disagree with you are psychos not worthy of your attention yet you let them affect you to this degree. Why not just flip the switch in your mind and say “idgaf about people who disagree with me on this” and just keep doing your thing. A lot of people already do that here and the downvotes they receive do not seem to distract them from persistently espousing unpopular views.
If engaging in online platforms like this and getting downvotes for perhaps unpopular opinions is harming your mental health, again this is very likely not the place for you. In all likelihood you are not martyring yourself for a particularly good cause. A lot of folks online here are not necessarily going to be here looking to have their minds changed or discover deep universal truths.
Many are probably here to throw a quick vote against or in support of something and maybe rile someone up with a curt reply for laughs. Being able to engage with content in a non-committal way with votes is a big appeal of platforms like this and Reddit.
One of the reasons Digg died and Reddit took over was that they took away the downvote feature in one their ill-fated redesigns. People like downvoting stuff they don’t like probably more than upvoting things they agree with. If you take that away, you’re taking away at least a good 80% of your audience that likes that stuff.
If you are only interested in pure discussion without votes, your best bet is to find an online forum without such a feature on the topic you are interested in discussing. The audience will undoubtedly be much smaller or perhaps be non-existent but may suit your needs a bit more.
If this answers my question, it’s not until after some other unrelated shit you forgot to put at the end instead of the beginning
No mental health slurs please. The proper term is ASPD, not “psychopath”
Rephrased that part but more in the direction of removing any clinical connotations, hope that’s good
Awesome, thanks!
deleted by creator
In PieFed, when you block someone they don’t see your posts or comments. So they can’t vote on it either.
The best I can do for you @[email protected] is make it so that votes from blocked people on Lemmy (which does show your posts to people you blocked) are not accepted. Making votes public so you can go down the rabbit hole of policing the votes on everything is not going to happen.
Please remember that we are building PieFed at significant personal cost and giving it away for the good of everyone. That comes with limitations on how much time we can put into it and how many people we can satisfy. There just isn’t time to build every possible feature and some features would negate the value and purpose of other features.
We’re doing our best here but if you don’t like it you have other places you can go.
I appreciate the reply. I hope piefed continues to grow and overtakes reddit’s usefulness for me again someday, as it potentially can.
Edit - as it stands, this is still the only fediverse app I’ve found useful, even if people here don’t want me to talk too much
You don’t need vote filtering. You need counselling/therapy. This is not intended as a dig and just my opinion obviously.
You don’t need reply filtering. You need more rational thought processes. This is intended as a dig, and it comes with me assuming you don’t tell people they “need counselling/therapy” when they make bad arguments to support unnecessary levels of reply filtering. You only do it to me when I make good arguments to support the exact level of vote filtering we should have.
I don’t know if your reply was intended as a dig, but you unintentionally gaslit me, and my turning it around on you was not only a return to correctness, but also rephrased to avoid gaslighting. Do you notice that? Are you capable of admitting any part of this paragraph is true, as a token of good faith?
My original post is exactly correct: the mental health impact on me (and probably others) will be much better with the first platform that functions like reddit or piefed, but with the aforementioned vote filtering. And it’s ridiculous that today we have this childish reply-filtering culture instead.
If you really don’t want downvotes, and their existence is harming your experience, then my suggestion would be to either run your own instance and disable downvotes at the instance level or to join an instance that disables downvotes (like blahaj).
I think pretty much everybody in the threadiverse seems to agree that voting certainly has some issues, but nobody agrees on a solution. Votes are a simple binary up/down and there can be a lot of nuance as to why somebody might choose to upvote one thing or downvote another thing. In other words, there are many different reasons somebody might hit the downvote button, some more helpful/harmful than others; being off-topic, spam, personal grudge, etc.
This was one of the things we were trying to address with something like emoji reactions. It is a much more expressive form of feedback without requiring somebody to overcome the barrier of actually authoring a reply. Also, as a side note, every emoji reaction is counted as an upvote to other fediverse platforms that don’t have emoji reactions (lemmy), even “negative” emoji like 👎. Also, emoji reactions do show the usernames of those who reacted that way when you hover over the reaction.
In general, most general users (of social media, not just the threadiverse) don’t really like their votes being public to every other user. This tends to come up every couple months when a post about lemvotes gets popular and sparks a discussion about it again. I have been in many discussions with Skavau about vote visibility in the past. I actually think that community moderators shouldn’t be able to view votes, reserving it just for instance admins. However, with the way lemmy allows mods to view votes, my stance is kind of moot and PieFed now also allows mods to view votes.
I don’t want to disable downvotes. I want to filter upvotes and downvotes from malicious usernames. I downvoted your comment, can’t do that if they’re disabled. Didn’t do it in bad faith, your comment actually seemed disingenuous.
Will read the rest of your comment if you confirm you understand the difference between disabling downvotes and filtering malicious voters
Asks for feature in software
Dismissive reply to, and ignores content of reply from one of the developers of said software
Good luck with that…
To bluntly answer your request, I am not going to put any of my time into implementing this feature (can’t speak for the other devs) as I don’t think it is a good one generally. Used responsibly, it might be better for how you specifically want to use social media, but I think this is too ripe for abuse if used maliciously. I have, in the past, advocated for less vote transparency instead of more. That is why I suggested to you an option of just disabling downvotes altogether as that is probably the closest you are going to get for the foreseeable future.
I feel like it was quite generous of me to read this, and I gained nothing from it. Not seeing the threshold met to read the other comment
I think if you run your own instance, when you ban people they are no longer able to vote on posts/comments from your instance
That gives them no chance to put statements on the line for accountability either
I’m thinking we might need a new fediverse app to properly integrate this vote filtering functionality, or some future nostr app
Someone said running a piefed instance lets you see who’s voting on content, so if true, the data is there to make it easy for a fediverse app to do this
Your feature request is pretty specific then. You could program it yourself, since all these projects are open source. You don’t need to make a whole new project, just add to the existing code.
I’m not a coder, but if nobody else does it before some kind of chat bot or AI, that stuff will end up getting it done in the end
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).
it has difficulties with content on PieFed
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 -
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.
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:-).
Social-Media style votes are broken in general. You can filter them out in PieFed. Put this in your CSS in the user settings:
.score { display: none; } .voting_buttons_new { display: none !important; }( adopted from: https://piefed.ca/post/26333 )
No clue who’s the Nazi here, did they do anything? Or is this just the average being pissed because someone else has different opinions?
OP, just use this if voting is such an issue.
It really shouldn’t be though. Comment votes don’t really matter IMO (post votes are helpful though).
Thank you & upvoted for the suggestion, but a CSS filter has
nomuch less effect, it’s like burying your head in the sand.Pseudonymous voting with its own filter would have an actual impact, people ganging up on someone with abuse would have the actual consequence of needing to spin up new accounts every time or lose their standing with the people they’re attacking. People who aren’t deemed malicious by each other would be able to see the sum of each other’s votes, which would suddenly give meaning to vote counts beyond a measure of how much visibility your post will get (which reddit now measures directly with a view counter anyway).
If you want to see the context of my post, feel free to look through my post history, it’s not hard to find many examples.
Edit - changed “no effect” to “much less” because this is all psychological, and burying head in the sand could be better than nothing. I’m not sure though
Yes, I’ve scrolled a bit through your past activity.
I’m not sure how you intend to pull it off. I mean you’d need to regularly fetch the reactions to your comments/posts, and then manually deal with all those people individually, and put them on some list. Which I suppose is quite a laborious process. And tomorrow it’s going to be 60% new users reacting to your comments, so it’s an everlasting battle against the windmills? At least in bigger communities.
For a smaller set of people we can block them. Not sure if that removes their vote from the score. But yeah, that removes their comments as well. Or quit a community and find a different one, either with people who also like arguing, or with more similar-minded people.
-Personally-, I think the votes just don’t work well. And I don’t think retrofiting something onto that is going to have a substancial effect. They’re social-media-style votes. People will upvote simple truths. Whatever is en vogue in a particular filter bubble. People will mess with them. And what gets the most upvotes here is memes and the daily news… While my favorite posts about microcontrollers and Linux get 4 votes combined. So the entire voting system here is kinda meaningless to me. I sort my feed by “New”, and largely ignore them. And I don’t think it’s salvageable. At least not without a good idea to go down to the roots of where it goes “wrong” and someone put in quite some effort.
But PieFed’s other features are nice. We get notes, more nuanced reactions, flairs/tags… I think I’m more with that. But I guess I somewhat share your opinion on how the voting system should be different.As far as dealing with the sheer volume of people, there are a couple things that would help
Automation - I think you could go surprisingly far with simple tools like “block all voters who upvote post x” or “block all voters who downvote post y” or “block all voters who upvote post x AND downvote post y”
Collective effort - like how Bluesky handles mute lists and stuff, people could co-manage lists of voters who fall into certain patterns, but this might encourage weird cult stuff so it’s better to see if individualized tools can be enough first
Still no idea if/how I’ll pull it off though. If I live long enough, I can finish any unfinished ideas, but life is dangerous sadly
it’s like burying your head in the sand.
That sounds like exactly what you asked for…?
Sounds like you didn’t read much of what you’re replying to because you’re trolling, or you read it and ignored it because you’re trolling
Considering PieFed keeps at least 1 extremely abusive / bad-faith-discussion-tactic-using person on staff, I don’t expect PieFed to fix this
Similar deal with reddit
A nostr-based reddit clone might be the one to fix this in the future
