this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2026
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If you want to make personal use of a different sorting algorithm, that's entirely fine, but why take away the ability of the rest of us to use what we are used to?
Also, I think that sorting by All/New, or particularly New within the Topic Areas, is already a great way to discover content entirely independent of people's voting habits.
I would completly remove voting system because it completly miss its point. It is not very useful.
It doesn't help people finding content but tell people, company what we support on the largest userbase community : "I like this, i don't like this. Most of users here enjoyed this post."
"Yes, no, yes, yes, no." I think this is a binary thinking.
Those reaction doesn't help me at all. I think it is fine to enjoy or not the post and comment. But we can imagine something better than Reddit at shorting content.
For example, youtube's video have also a like/dislike bar. Why are we following and using the same tool made by big tech ? IMO, this system is designed to shoot us with a small dose of dopamine that boost our ego and profil us for advertissements since we know what you like.
They were mostly created to held our attention on screen...and deprive us from our sleep.
Maybe, we can change that and try something else like https://tournesol.app/
So first of all, it would be nice if this hypothetical "better" algorithm already existed, before we start limiting votes here & now, on this instance? Don't let perfect become the enemy of good?
Second, I think you've missed something wherein while each vote is individually binary, in aggregation they become a numerical value that is no longer binary - something that receives 1000 upvotes is significantly more popular than something that receives only 10.
Third, whether the current system is "good" or not is not something for us to judge? If people WANT something, then why prevent them from having it? Even if something else is "better"?
Sometimes people browse by New, and these people will not be impacted (on the side of receiving fewer votes than before this anti-feature was implemented), however many people desire instead to spend their time differently, and be alerted to what others have found to be "good". This is obviously not a perfect metric for what YOU may enjoy, but... it's a start?
We don't need to engage in binary thinking ourselves: a system can be more than simply "good, so keep it as-is" vs. "bad, so now get rid of it entirely or at least start limiting it", there are shades and nuances possible within all of this. Especially the knock-on effects, I mean events that transpire downstream and as a direct consequence of the upstream ones, even if logically they seem at first to be disconnected. e.g., what link is there between offering posts vs. votes - none? But if people leave an instance as a result of this change, then fewer post content can result, despite the seemingly disconnected nature of those two.
Voting makes the Threadiverse "welcoming". You call it dopamine but however it is implemented, it makes people feel good to be here, and to contribute to a community. Perhaps even a wider, global community, beyond what they could reach if they merely went outside to touch grass irl?
So yeah, make that better system first, and then offer it to people as an opt-in feature. However, the point of this post was to discuss a mandatory new feature that removes existing capabilities, NOW not at some future date when your mentioned hypothetical opt-in feature has been deployed to a production environment where people can use it here on PieFed. So you might want to put your comment here over into the original post discussing this new voting feature? Because it does not seem terribly relevant to me for it to be HERE, discussing just how mandatory this new feature should be made as? ... unless you truly do want the capabilities of others to be curtailed?
Why do you call it antifeature ? The vote quota is the equivalent of scaled feature.
It won't impact them. The vote quota is high and you miss the point. Ask yourself why it was created.
Let's take another example. We organize a metting with several people and two people are completly monopolizying the meeting and sharing their idea.
What if we try to balance a little speech duration during the meeting ? What if we ask those users who speak the most to stop and let other sharing their idea ? That's what we do in our anarchist meeting, we try to balance and limit power.
The voting quota is set above the average voting quota. You won't see its effect except if you belong of the top users that vote a lot.
So what are you arguing about ? It will only impact few users, not you.
Rude. Thank.
I called it an anti-feature bc voting is a feature, but now this works against that. It's a
You said
But I believe this is not the case, at least if I am understanding it correctly? Scaled sorting takes the existing votes and sorts them differently than Hot or New, but this new anti-feature will prevent the votes from being allowed to be submitted in the first place. People have already commented that they want to upvote some things - iirc it was a comment of Rimu's - but could not bc they had already reached their quote for the day.
I doubt I will reach the quota myself personally, but we will ALL be impacted by this change, I believe. It makes PieFed less "welcoming" to discard contributions made to it. It's a hard enough sell to get people to switch to here from Reddit, without such "features" giving them subtle hints that they aren't truly wanted here, and reminders that we are resource-starved while in comparison Reddit will bend over backwards to serve their needs (or at least pretend to).
I have asked not only myself but Rimu and everyone else, but I just don't get it. The various explanations are that it's "unfair", and that it will save on resources. However, while it truly is "unfair" that the likes of ThePicardManeuver, PugJesus, etc. have to submit the majority of content across the entire Threadiverse... that is simply how it is right now, and as unbalanced as it is, it seems preferable to limiting their contributions?
For that matter, why don't we say that it is "unfair" that Rimu makes all of the contributions to the PieFed sourcecode? Should we now act to limit Rimu's contributions, because others are not keeping up? OF COURSE NOT!!! Nor do we ask our heavy posters to limit the actual posts that they submit...? So how then did votes suddenly become undesirable?
The technical burden argument resonates much more strongly with me. But... Rimu says that it is not for that reason. If it were then I could understand it, but since it is not...
What then is the reason that this is being done? It surely CAN'T be the "unfairness" issue - see above, especially the comparison with Rimu's contributions - so what then IS the reason for it?
In your example, what if the two people talking the most were the only two adults in the room, and the rest were children? Or what of it were a technical meeting and they were the only two actual developers? Context matters so much there!!! Nothing in life is ever truly going to be "fair", but at least we all had equal ability to vote on content, before the change, but now we do not - some people have less ability to vote as they wish than others. Consider: someone works very hard all week, then has a single day to check social media, but they reach the cap and then cannot vote anymore - why is their right to do so limited, whereas someone who votes equally but more spread out over the course of a week curtailed? Or someone who works hard all semester long, then has a break after finals week - they want to go on a social media splurge, but cannot, whereas someone who submits 100 times the total amount of votes is allowed to do so, as long as they space it out into multiple days.
You talk as if before was "unfair" - when everyone had the same access to vote as everyone else - but I say that the new method is the truly unfair, when some types of access are favored over others. This is not friendly or welcoming to people who have circumstances that are different than others.
I would be okay with a "rate limiter", more than a "daily quota", as the perception of the former is much more fair than the latter.
This will impact me, you, and all of us. If you think more about what I've said you will see how. It is one thing to handle existing votes on a different manner (opt-in to doing so), while it is another to mandatorily reject submitted votes right at the source (NOT opt-in, nor opt-out either, except by migration to another instance I guess, if you can figure out how to find one that does differently, and hope that they do not change their minds about the situation later).