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rimu@piefed.social

Improvement for the vote quota implementation (cake.kobel.fyi)

submitted 18 hours ago by squirrel@cake.kobel.fyi to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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After a couple days of discussions about the newly implemented vote quota, I'm kinda exhausted. It seems like a situation we won't ever agree on. Me personally, I don't want to argue like this over a piece of software that I have high regards for. It tears us apart, where we should work together.

It's okay if there is a quota on piefed.social the instance.
It's not okay if there is a default quota of 240 on PieFed the software - and thus for all instances.

I suggest it should be implemented like this:

It should not be a default value
It should be an empty input in the admin interface, where instance admins can set a vote quota if they want to, or leave it empty to disable the vote quota.
The /about page should display the set vote quota.

That way all instances can decide for themselves and users can see the instances' vote quota transparently.

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[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 2 points 12 hours ago

That post received only 16 upvotes, and many of those are likely to reflect the overall sentiment about the voting situation being disliked, or otherwise indication that the post is "relevant" to the community it is in.

I do not think of it as an indicator that thousands of people are running around the Threadiverse upvoting literally everything they see. In fact in Rimu's various analyses he indicates that is definitely not happening. Maybe 2-10 people, but not thousands, hundreds, or even tens.

Actually, at that point the user may look indistinguishable from a bot, and thereby be worthy of a ban from your instance for that reason? It's kinda an extremely low-key DDOS to do so!!

The VAST majority of people do seem to truly use voting as it was intended - to signal that more of such content should be continued to be added to the community?

So analogous then to the prom king & queen winning the votes. Ultimately it's going to be the popular kids rather than people who truly contribute or impact their environment, but it does still have SOME kind of a meaning? (The trouble with this style of reasoning is that the likes of Peter Thiel, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Hitler, Jeff Bezos, Stalin, Bill Gates, Putin, etc. are all "impactful" even if not "popular". So impactful != good, necessarily.)

At the end of the day though, it's your instance and you are entirely free to do as you wish with it. Again I think you may want to ban users that abuse the system in such a way - if they are making ALL votes meaningless then this is actively doing harm, right? (Also, someone could try reaching out to them and coaching them, but if they aren't on your instance then it makes sense to leave that to their home server, and just protect your own users?)