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 ?
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Voting is fine the way it is.
Any instances with issues can change settings for themselves.
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Public. Lots of downvotes is information that could indicate that the commenter is lying, or just saying something unpopular. But either way, it’s information. Before youtube started hiding downvotes, it was easy to tell that a video had a misleading title based on downvotes. Now clickbait dominates the platform.
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
No. I agree that the slashdot method with more than just upvote/downvote is better. In a perfect world I imagine we could have every emoji be a reaction option, and then you could sort by putting an emoji in a bar at the top. In reality I imagine this would be a challenge from a backend perspective, but maybe like the top 5 or 10 emoji reactions could be an option for selection.
What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
I’ll do the opposite and say - please do not remove downvotes like Twitter/Bluesky/mastodon etc. Downvotes are super important. People need to be able to boo, the only place people aren’t allowed to boo are in church or at cult rallies. And that’s why those platforms are especially bad for misinformation, hyperbole, and overall depravity.
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
Remove all as a forced/default option on the main page. Back in the day before reddit had r/all, communities were much more diverse and niche, and this helped separate communities flourish in their own way. When r/all was added, the content started to resemble twitter, if not just becoming screenshots of twitter, on just about every sub. This actually improves discoverability because it would force users to branch out and look at subs instead of just looking at what’s on all.
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
I believe vote should be visible by anyone as the modlog. It allow us to mitigate raid, troll, mod abuse. However, i’m aware it could lead to potential issue as mod abuse, harrassement…
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
No. I’m not sastified because vote aim was to highlight content. Currently, It partly achieve that goal. The content is highlighted because it is popular. For me, there is some kind of social and cultural pressure.
So i think we can explore it. Slashdot seems a good example as it separate funny comment to more serious one and troll. I would like to highlight technical comment and good website source.
Having a list of blocked website and the reason would be great. We can also limit downvote to subscriber and certain users. PieFed already do that.
It would be great to add emojis, as in iceshrimp. It allow us to express our feeling :)
What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
For now, i only know slashdot and tournesol. I shared a link about quadratic vote because i find it more interesting than voting yes-no.
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?
Maybe a debate mode ?
For example, here, under this post, we are sharing the pro and con of the voting system and our thoughts.
- What if we have a nice board that sum up all our argument and analyse our link via a bias system ? As the website alternative to.
- Or we can also underline part of a comment and add link, comment, share our opinion. It would be a threaded quote system.
I hope we will see other example that can inspire us. :)
[email protected] 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.
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 in bad faith or harmful to the community, 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.
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.
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.
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.
🖐️ I have a dumb question
Aren’t votes on Lemmy private?
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
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.
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.
They’re not. Each post’s upvoters are visible via ActivityPub endpoints.
I like the downvotes disabled model.
It also means that the “active” sort algorithm doesn’t promote posts that get lots of “downvotes” -> engagement
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.
you can’t downvote just wrong information anymore.
If “wrong information” can be properly defined, then either you challenge it (by responding, calling it out) or by reporting it. Downvoting it just because it you think it is not appropriate is a recipe for creating echo chambers.
The problem then is that by responding, you’re engaging with it which typically helps it spread in the algorithms*. Ideally there should be multiple downvote options - maybe separate it out as “misinformation” vs “bad opinion” or something. Removing downvotes and banning users who disagree is the typical cult strategy (recall the classic cult sub, r/thedonald, was notorious for this). If you’re worried about downvotes being used to silence people, maybe another way to mitigate that would be a “sort by downvoted” option so that being downvoted a lot could actually put you at the top of at least that feed.
*On Lemmy, notice the following:
Active (default): Calculates a rank based on the score and time of the latest comment, with decay over time
The problem then is that by responding, you’re engaging with it which typically helps it spread in the algorithms*
But then the solution is to fix “the algorithms”. One more reason that I should say we should get rid of “votes” is that they are an artificial constraint created by the closed social media platforms that gate-keep and limit user choice. If “the alogorithms” are plentiful, easy to customize, and chosen by the user, then everyone is able to rank and sort the data as they see fit.
Removing downvotes and banning users who disagree is the typical cult strategy
The only ones with power to remove contents are moderators and admins. If moderation is transparent (as it should be), then it is easy to figure out if mods are are acting in good faith and according to the interests with the community. Then it is up to us as users to figure out if we should continue participating in that community or leave it behiind.
This sounded off, so I checked the docs.
…downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen.
It promotes downvoted posts?
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.
