this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2026
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Out of the 37,000 people who voted for posts or comments in the last month, the 10 most prolific voters (0.02% of us) cast as many votes as the bottom 59%. Here's how that looks, visually:

A graph of everyone's votes. Someone cast 23k votes in one month

As you can see, a lot of people didn't cast many votes. Someone cast 23k votes, with a group of 13 each casting at least 10k votes.

"But of course most people aren't really engaged, most of those 37k people are just NPCs who don't really matter" you say, "Rimu you're just including them to make it seem worse than it is", you might say. Ok, cool, let's pretend the bottom 85% of us don't matter and just look at the top 5000 voters. Here's how the distribution looks among them:

WlRGvo0zAuUBGIq.png

Still super unbalanced. Let's analyze this a bit.

Among those 5000, the top 147 (2.94%) cast as many votes as all the others (4853 people) combined. Among those 5000, the average number of votes cast in a month is 1142. Among the top 147, the average number of votes cast in a month is 6868.

hat2t3kJtVFgsOZ.png

How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?

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[โ€“] OpenStars@piefed.social 4 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

Not true, imho. The first comment yes, maybe the second and third as well, but most comments on Reddit seem devoid of actual meaning, having devolved into merely:

^This

And my ax!

I also choose this guy's husband

I totally agree with you, buddy

Hey pal I'm not your buddy

... and so on. Isn't an upvote far more preferable? One can simply see the aggregated +1 effect, plus also the emoji reactions if any were added, but beyond that, why would someone comment unless they had something meaningful to say - beyond mere assent.

Downvotes are a bit different - it would be far more helpful to see WHY that was offered, but after the first reply or so that would get old too, and it becomes preferable again to see like "-50", rather than have to wade through replies showing pig butts actively pooping - as Hexbears (in-?)famously do to one another, in large part due to downvotes having been disabled, for exactly the reason you cite here that people prefer longer-form interactions with one another.

Some people might prefer the comments, but I think most people here would prefer simply the overall vote counts and move on? Like a very popular comment might receive +100 upvotes and 10 comment replies to it? Receiving 50 upvotes and 50 replies might be overwhelming! Yet worthwhile if their content needed words to express the concept? Just not comments that should have been votes!?

An analogy might be a phone call vs. an email or text - sometimes the former is good but proper respect and decorum predisposes people in modern times to preferentially aim for the latter instead.

Edit: also, why not upvote someone's comment and also reply to it? Maximum friendliness & interactionability!! :-P