OpenStars

Whatever do you mean? NOTHING HAPPENED, capiche?

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?

The trouble I have with Lemmy.ml (this is relevant, I promise you:-) is not how it bans all criticism of Russia, North Korea, and China, but in its lack of transparency to never ACTUALLY STATE that this is their "real" set of rules, which differs rather profoundly from its own provided statement of being "A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developer". Overall that reads as extremely disingenuous to me - while to them, OF COURSE they are doing the "correct" thing, in ALL matters, and yet.. while I am not asking them to provide a justification, it would be nice to acknowledge in the light of day what policies are actually in place? It scares people away to have to discover that the hard way, and many seen to not land on other Lemmy instances afterwards but rather go back to Reddit or Bluesky instead.

Thus likewise I am against how this voting scheme is not currently implemented in a transparent manner. e.g. this noticeably reduces the Newbie-friendliness of an instance, does it not? Users coming over from Reddit will not expect it and, already being overwhelmed by "there being too much to read" (I don't personally agree but that is what THEY say, hence objectively true that this is their primary response), will get surprised and dismayed.

Also, if it helps to share, at first I wondered: what if the default were to be set to be a value higher than a human being is likely to reach (even someone recovering from an illness so indulging in social media more often than a usual balanced individual may casually & routinely do?). As a defense against bot accounts it may serve some value? Although then again, would merely limiting the bot be the best course of action here? Possibly detection and banning could be a better course of action, or even redirection into a honeypot, rather than steering their behavior to fall more into lines of human norms? So no, the more I think about it, the more that I see this not as a measure to separate bots from humans but rather to enforce conformity among human populations: neurodivergent or otherwise "unusual" people are told to get their own instance from now on, while this level of activity is all that is allowed in the main spaces (and even then, the votes cast and displayed internally within the neurodivergent spaces will be blocked upon entry into the main ones, having been throttled).

Anyway, the more transparently this can be handled the better.

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?)

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.

THIS CHANGE DOES AFFECT YOU.

"It does not affect me directly so I do not care" is not a good argument. e.g. if you drive rather than ride a bicycle to work, then you are still impacted by shutting down or opening up bike lanes - if nothing else by the increased/decreased traffic on the road that you do use.

This change affects us ALL - some users directly in the sense that they cannot offer as many contributions as they used to, while others indirectly by seeing an overall cooling effect with fewer votes overall across all posts, but particularly in niche ones where the impact of just 1-2 extra votes would have made all the difference. Posts that would have hit your Subscribed feed (not sure if you use that or not but it would be affected either way:-) are now going to languish, having no additional votes (beyond the OP's self one) to boost them there.

And if this change is extended to include comments as well - and why wouldn't it? How are they so different, really? - then likewise the Active filters will be impacted as well.

This does not make sense to me even on an abstract mathematical level.

How much does reducing these contributions save - 2x, 3x, 5x? To be on the safe side let's balloon that up and call it "10x". Even so this isn't a "storm", this seems barely sprinkling?

How many people do we hope to pull in from the likes of Reddit, Mastodon (not leaving it but either adding a PieFed account or at least introducing new traffic to PieFed instances, via users existing Mastodon account), Bluesky, X(hitter), etc. - 10x? Or even people switching from Lemmy servers as those go down, and people switch to PieFed? PieFed.social has <1.5k MAUs, fedisnfw.app has 3.1k, and the rest are all exclusively <0.25k.

The other commentor said 400k or 4M (edit: as a potential target audience to aim for), so conservatively if you are counting 400k as "the storm", then that's 100-fold higher traffic levels!! (And a target of 4M is 1000-fold.) A mere 10x decrease from actual contributions by users is nothing in comparison.

If we aim to grow by 1000x more MAUs, then perhaps we should work on more efficient network traffic sending - e.g. federate batches of votes (although this I recall was already done), though ~~person~~ perhaps this is a problem that should wait until we get closer? In chess you have to get through mid-game before end-game strategies begin to become relevant at all.

And for now PieFed looks like it needs all the engagement that it can get? There was a time only a few months ago when increased levels of contributions were being touted as a "GOOD thing"? While now, I guess posts and comments are, but votes are somehow not? This all makes my head spin though - where did this come from? How long until comments are no longer desired either? Is the aim to become an RSS reader / "news aggregator"? Is there some publication you can point us to read to help us understand why the sudden switch in behavior? In advance I doubt I'll agree with its premise but I would very much like to know more where any of this is coming from?

Also, why bother making PieFed pull in posts from Mastodon then, if additional traffic is "bad"? To be clear I am not calling Mastodon traffic as bad in the content sense, but numerically speaking... it IS a "storm", in the sense that it has >800k MAUs. If a PieFed instance cannot handle a mere 2-10x amount of traffic, then how could it hope to pull in... let's see, 800k/5k that's = 160-fold higher traffic stats from trying to pull in all Mastodon users. Tbf maybe that's not what you are trying to do in the first place, so ignore this part of my comment in that case.

Either way...

But how would anyone know which servers have done so?

Trial and error, and then it could still change at any time? I don't see it anywhere in the About sections e.g. https://feddit.online/about. Edit: and even after you've made an account, I see no method to arrive at a numeric depiction of the quota - it's merely depicted as a visual bar, but it doesn't say whether that represents 10, 100, or 1000 votes, so there is no way to figure that out except start voting and see how fast it fills up to reach the cap?

And the Instance Picker is already an absolute mess - e.g. see https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser, or try to decipher what "Defederation: Good" means (is that... high? low? loose? strict? "Good" for who - a tankie, banning any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea? or a former non-technical normal user coming from Reddit?), plus I see no mention of how a vote quota would be represented here (lowering "Newbie friendly" status I would presume, since this goes against expectations, as e.g. set by Reddit that does not place any limits upon engagements).

This new "anti-feature" is not very transparent at all.

Technically accurate!

Leia, when impersonating Boushh.