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rimu@piefed.social

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

submitted 4 days 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 13 points 4 days ago (1 children)

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.

[+] rimu@piefed.social -11 points 3 days ago (2 children)

This change affects Snoopy in a good way - his votes are no longer being drowned in a flood of indiscriminate votes that water down the effect of votes from more selective people like him.

[–] OpenStars@piefed.social 11 points 3 days ago

Okay but historically, limiting votes does not end well.

So maybe implement ranked choice voting instead? j/k as far as this proposed solution but I hope you see what I mean here in terms of the underlying issue: democracy itself offers both problems and solutions to those who use it, hence why it is failing all across the globe.

Also, at least up until now, people have been offered a full CHOICE as to how much votes affect them, personally. Sorting by New ignores votes entirely, while sorting by Top used to consider all votes, but now will consider only some of them (if half are being discarded, some by the vote quota itself and others by people changing their behavior as a result of needing to constrain their votes, or at least hearing the signal loud and clear that lots and lots of votes are undesirable, hence they stop offering them). I haven't thought about how this impacts users of Scaled sorting, which I myself never use, personally speaking.

[–] illi@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago

This doesn't track. On one side you say this will directly affect incredibly small number of people but this incredibly small number of people also flood posts with their one vote? Wouldn't that be incredibly small number of votes per post?