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rimu@piefed.social

What I think Piefed is missing: an outlier filter and a setting to disable downvotes on your own posts. (reddthat.com)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social

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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.

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[–] rimu@piefed.social 11 points 1 week ago

Just now I have added CSS classes which will make it possible to target custom CSS at your own posts/comments. Please see https://piefed.social/c/piefed_css/p/1612593/my-post-and-my-comment-classes-on-content-you-ve-authored

[–] rimu@piefed.social 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

PieFed doesn't show vote counts, just the total. I will add a CSS class to posts so people can use custom CSS to change the look of their own posts, possibly including hiding vote counts.

The outlier algorithm sounds very interesting. But have you tried the PieFed scaled sort? It's different from Lemmy's one.

I don't see any PieFed accounts named PumpkinDrama. How much have you used PieFed?

[–] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

PieFed scaled sort does seem better. Where can I see the implementation or read how it works in plain english?

I only have around 50 posts and comments and have used it a handful of times a month for a year. I didn’t like seeing my attitude so low either; that seems like a way to drive people away if they have controversial opinions. People use votes as a like/dislike button, so deriving attitude from votes doesn’t make sense.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Scaled is just the normal 'hot' sort, plus a bit extra depending on how many subscribers the post community has compared to the largest communities (where "largest" is the average of the top 25).

Check out https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/app/models.py#L812

It works better than Lemmy's IMO, but is still clunky and prone to surfacing super old content in very unpopular communities. Your weighted/outlier-based approach sounds like it would work better or at least worth trying.

People use votes as a like/dislike button

Yes and that is a pretty bad attitude, tbh. People who do that should have a low attitude score, that's how we know it's working. ;-)

[–] PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yes and that is a pretty bad attitude, tbh. People who do that should have a low attitude score, that’s how we know it’s working. ;-)

I thought it measured votes received rather than votes given. A tooltip explaining what it means would be nice, and CSS to hide my own attitude as well.

[–] Rhoeri@piefed.world 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Agent_Karyo@piefed.world 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It's funny how we did fine for so long without upvotes/downvotes, although this approach was always around (Slashdot).

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago

Slashdot's implementation was better imo.