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rimu@piefed.social

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

submitted 5 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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[–] wonderingwanderer@sopuli.xyz 14 points 3 days ago

I've learned this week that because of some, it's become a much less meaningful indicator.

This is the part I don't get. How does it become less meaningful? Because one user votes thousands of times a day, and several dozen users vote hundreds of times a day?

The fact remains that on each individual post or comment, any given account can only vote one time. If someone has multiple accounts and votes multiple times on the same content, that would be voter abuse and should be handled accordingly, but that doesn't seem to be what this is about.

How is it unfair to anybody that different users vote at different rates? Everyone has the same options for every post or comment: upvote, downvote, or neither. (Side note: this is a ternary mechanism, not binary as I saw someone else describe it). If one person votes on a hundred different posts, their influence on any single post isn't outsized compared to someone who votes on a dozen posts. Each one's vote still only counts once per post or comment.

I think this has utility, especially in the comments, because it helps sort content loosely based on what members of that community want to see or don't want to see. It's subjective, sure, but it's also organic, and honestly that's how it should be.

Like others have mentioned, I wouldn't want to ration my votes. I don't think about how many I give out, I just upvote or I downvote or neither based on the content. No matter how much content I vote on, I still only have one vote per, so what's the issue?

I can also see how this would have a chilling effect overall when users start rationing their votes. It becomes less of an infinite resource to dole out liberally and more something to spend wisely. We'll have to start thinking "hmm, this is good/bad, but is it worth spending a vote on to cast my opinion?"

As a result, content won't receive as many votes. And that'll be disappointing, cause it can be gratifying to see that a lot of people agree with your comment, or that they think your post is worth more people seeing.

If you only ever get a handful of votes on anything, it might start to feel like "What's the point? Why keep posting?" And then the chilling effect might not only effect votes, but even posts as well.

I've already seen at least one well-known user who posts great content say they might leave the threadiverse over this. Is that really what we want? Is it worth it just to prevent a handful of accounts from voting hundreds of times a day?