I prefer platforms that hide downvotes on my content because I don’t want to see negative vote counts on my own posts for peace of mind, yet I still want to see vote totals on other people’s content. Piefed (and Lemmy) should let users hide downvotes for their own posts while keeping voting visible elsewhere.
Also, both Lemmy and Piefed lack a good outlier filter. The Top filter floods me with memes and entertaining posts, while Lemmy’s scaled feed often shows too little of actual interest. An outlier filter that detects per-community outliers would surface more relevant content without drowning feeds in content from the popular communities.
A practical implementation would maintain a rolling baseline for each community by tracking the moving average and standard deviation of post scores at a fixed time offset (for example, one hour after submission). When a new post reaches that same offset, compute its z-score by subtracting the community’s average and dividing by the standard deviation. The filter algorithm then uses this z-score as the cross-community ranking signal: instead of sorting posts by raw score, it sorts by z-score, so posts that outperform their community’s usual activity (high positive z) rise to the top regardless of absolute score. This lets the algorithm compare posts from different communities on a common scale, surfacing outliers that are unusually engaging for their community and reducing the dominance of high-traffic communities.
Maybe change your perspective on downvotes?
Sometimes, people just don’t want to hear what you have to say, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Know that unpopular opinions aren’t wrong opinions, it’s just that lemmy is a giant echo chamber of smaller sub-echo chambers. It’s impossible to make everyone like everthing you say, but hiding the bad doesn’t make it less bad.
And it should go without mentioning, downvotes don’t even mean anything. There is zero value in upvotes/downvotes. So just take them for what they are- useless internet points that can be exploited by basement-dwelling mouth-breathers when they dislike something said. Whether it be because you spoke the truth, or just an opinion they disagree with.
It’s a lot better than living in a false world where it appears as if everything you say is loved by everyone.
Personally, I think the entire upvote/downvote thing is the dumbest thing to come to Internet forums, but that’s just my unpopular opinion.
It's funny how we did fine for so long without upvotes/downvotes, although this approach was always around (Slashdot).
Slashdot's implementation was better imo.