Some will cheer, some will be mildly disappointed. But I'm out, I think.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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I think I might be out of the loop. What's happening...?
There is a new rule metering the number of votes that can be cast by a user. You can see yours on your profile.
That's.... really weird.
On the surface the reasoning behind it makes sense, but there is also something about it (that I can't quite point out yet) that rubs me the wrong way.
It doesn't make sense though. It was presented as this unequal distribution thing where a few users cast the most amount of votes, but that really doesn't matter because each user still only gets one vote per post or comment. No one's opinion is outsized or disproportionate just because they vote on a lot of things.
It was really bad statistics from the start. It was framed sorta like wealth disparity, using the same kind of chart, but it's categorically not the same thing.
That sounds like the PieFed admins are just going to make it worse. Now there's going to be first user advantage, with the first comments on a thread getting preferrential treatment
I don't see how. Unless you mean people rationing their votes are less likely to scroll as far down?
But yeah this place is going to be desolate without pugjesus, and I wonder how many more people are gonna leave once users rationing votes results in content receiving less engagement.
Overall, just a terrible decision in my opinion
Based on the stats shown in Rimu's post, the monthly average vote count of the top 5000 of prolific voters was 1142, and among the top 147 prolific voters, their average monthly was 6868.
With a 240 daily limit, that comes out to 7200 votes per month, which is already above the average of the most prolific voters.
Those 147 top voters may be effected if they only voted sporadically throughout the month (so they vote like, 500 one day and 700 another, but with some rest days of no voting in-between), and those posting above that average who definitely would be effected appear to only total about 60 people.
So for 99% of the userbase, they would not need to consider rationing votes at all.
Ok, so in the announcement post they talk about mostly technical reasons for this. But from the linked post it does in fact sound like the aim is to throttle most active members because they have too much influence?
This is what rubbed me the wrong way and I just couldn't figure out why. We all have one upvote to give, some people just give it way more of them - so in comes the great equalizer in the form of the daily quota.
I hope you pardon my exagerated metaphor, but this is like limiting free speech for journalists, because they excercise the right of free speech way more than others.
It's "just" votes so I'm hesitant to call this censorship but... this does feel like a first step. Will there be daily post quotas too because some people post more than others?
where does the policy change actually impact the user then? I guess at maximum we can't upvote more that 240 things a day (comment or post). I think that's more than the vast majority of users do per day, right?
The point isn't about how many users are likely to hit the daily limit, the point is how having a daily limit might cause people to start rationing their votes. Instead of doling them out however they see fit, they might start thinking "hmm, but is this worth spending a vote on?"
Overall, that can have a chilling effect on voting in general, lowering engagement and reducing the motivation to post (if you only get a handful of upvotes on each post, it might feel "dead" and seem to have no point. It's encouraging to see several dozen users like your post). And that can expand to a chilling effect on posting.
Also, if someone has a disability or is recovering from illness or surgery then they're more likely to spend more time on here, meaning they're more likely to reach the vote quota. This disproportionally impacts them.
Sure, 240 a day is high, but it's not unreasonable for a human to reach, and it's nowhere near "obvious bot" territory.
Based on the charts rimu shared, there are so few users who actually reach "obvious bot" territory that it's impossible for them to not highlight themselves, and they should be easy enough to handle on a case-by-case basis. We're talking less than 10 accounts. Admins can look at each one to examine their activity, and if they're a bot they can remove the account.
There's no reason to limit people's votes.
i guess it's an anti-botting measure where they can't distinguish a power user from an automated system?
There are so few accounts that have that much activity on them that admins could easily handle them on a case-by-case basis.
This doesn't get rid of the bot accounts, it only limits their voting activity like everyone elses, which will make them harder to detect.
It will make it easier for a bot farm to outvote the humans.
I get that whilst also dancing on the idea that perhaps a power user shouldn't post so much? This is decentralized social media, there really shouldn't be an aim to maximise here: You post, you like, you don't like.
If the aim is to farm engagement and thus a "power user" is born, then I suspect their motives or at least implore them to touch grass more often
Farming engagement has no incentive. It can't be monetized here, there's no karma. There would be no point.
Power users on the fediverse aren't doing it for personal gain, they're doing it to enrich the fediverse and make it a more attractive alternative to corporate social media.
We see so many complaints that it's dead here, or there aren't enough communities, or it's hard to find the right community for something, or if the community exists it might be dead. That's a lot of people's rationale for not switching from reddit.
Power users here are trying to fix that. It's an enormous task and more than a single user or a handful of users can do, but they're doing their part and in many cases carrying more than their share of the burden. This change is kind of a slap in the face to them.
I'm not so sure as I recall a power user on Reddit who consistently hit the front page as he figured out how to engage users (best times to post, which topics, phrasing, secondary accounts for initial boost). I forget his name, but he effectively was researching how to grab attention and then I think even went to marketing firms with his research on his viral methods.
At the time I recall people saying to me "it's just karma, it has no value" but attention was the value, and attention is something that companies can and will pay money for. Lemmy is not necesarily immune to this gamification of content
Reddit is different for multiple reasons.
It has karma, the fediverse doesn't.
It has millions of daily users, the fediverse doesn't.
It's a publicly traded company with a profit motive, the fediverse isn't.
It allows paid advertisements, the fediverse doesn't.
There's therefore a monetary incentive to farming karma on reddit, there isn't on the fediverse.
Some people farm karma on reddit accounts just to sell them to advertisers or propagandists. This wouldn't work on the fediverse for the above reasons, and because there's no market for it for the same reasons.
Reddit feeds are governed by closed-source algorithms designed by a centralized company, fediverse feeds are not.
And lastly, you said yourself that the guy used secondary accounts to boost himself. This is voting abuse and should be dealt with whenever it can be positively identified.
That's the thing - Rimu openly admits that he doesn't think that the power voters are bots. The issue isn't distinguishing us. It's just that Rimu doesn't like so many votes being cast by so few users. Shit man, if I encounter two active discussions in a day (admittedly not a daily occurrence on the sometimes-sleepy Fediverse), I'll be close to hitting the 240 limit simply by having an opinion on the majority of comments.
Shit, my vote quota is half-used-up today just from this comment section. I haven't even posted or browsed anything else.
As someone with a laundry list of physical and mental ailments, my 'touching grass' time is extremely limit, and general I reserve the monumental effort there for important issues - like keeping up with the social events of my actual friends, or participating in local politics in my increasingly-fucked-and-fascist country. "Touch grass, it's more fun than shitposting about history!" doesn't really apply for me.
All social media pretty much operates on a 90/9/1 division. Only 1% of users actively post. Only a fraction of that 1% are power users like PugJesus. Killing power users won't accomplish a different division of labour where more people post, it will only accomplish killing the ecosystem as a whole.
You thought the Fediverse was dead now? Wait until the power users disappear.
This is what I'm saying. Posting/voting isn't a limited resource that can be distributed unfairly. People do it or don't do it as much or as little as they want. Why restrict that on an ecosystem that you want to grow?
If the issue is compute, or resources to run the compute, or admins to maintain the compute environments, then focusing on those issues would be better. Ask for donations to add a new server, encourage people who can to set up their own servers to distribute the load, request that more people play an active role as admins. But restricting engagement/activity of your users sounds like the beginning of the end of your ecosystem...
Yeah, I can't seem to see what it accomplishes except to make the few users that reach it kinda mad. It seems like an experiment at best to see what kind of effect it will have on hot/all.
I don't get why the feature is necessary. Rimu should make it optional and not on by default.
It is optional in that each piefed instance can choose to turn it off, but its not per user.
Wait, like total votes ever? Like you hit it and you can never vote again?? 😭
No, just over a set period of time.
Ohhh, that's way more tolerable! Thanks for letting me know, got worried there lol.
I think it was YouTube back in the day that used to have a max number of total likes per account? After which, it would appear as if liking worked from your end, but it didn't actually do anything on the backend. I was afraid we had one of those situations.
youtube still has a limit on upvotes, i am pretty sure it's 5000. once you have 5k they remove your oldest ones.
Oof, I hate it...
This is correct at the moment. One can check by going to your their Liked Videos playlist.
WHAT?!*
Mate, who the hell cares about minor shizzle like that. Are you serious...?
The combination of the irritation (being unable to upvote replies to your own material being particularly grating) and what it suggests about the future of the instance.
I actually planned on continuing to post as-usual (upvoting with alts, annoying as that would be) after I discovered it, but when the reasoning came out I knew it was the canary in the coal mine.