This is a good discussion to have. But then where are the graphs for posts and comments?

It feels like we've discussed this before. If 3 accounts make up >95% of the "post" form of contributions to the Threadiverse then that is indicative of an unhealthy community... though the solution seems to not be to throttle ThePicardManeuver, PugJesus, etc. and rather for the rest of us to step up and contribute more post content to this place?

And likewise for comments - why would a newcomer bother submitting posts when nobody comments on them? - and for votes too? What is stopping you from upvoting every single reply to any of your comments, regardless of whether you personally agree with the statements or not? SHOULD votes even be used as a "like" (agreement) button? 👍

We all use this place in different ways. Some are friendly, others ask provocative questions, some barely interact at all and many don't even, simply lurking in the shadows. It's the 90-9-1 rule: 90% lurk, 9% comment, only 1% post content. Here on the Threadiverse we are even more unbalanced. But... we get by.

What I still don't understand is why people's contributions - posts, comments, or votes - are somehow "bad"? The fact that people vote way less than they could seems irrelevant to me? We all have (or rather, HAD) the same access to voting (or commenting, or posting) the same as everyone else. Wasn't that the epitome of "fairness" as in full "equity"?

A better answer imho, which PieFed already offers, is to place restrictions not on the amount of votes but rather on the kind - as in, if a community so desires, only count votes from subscribed members when doing sorting and such, which prevents drive-by influencers arriving at posts via All who haven't bothered to read the community rules from overwhelming the legitimate members who want to have a discussion in peace. Making communities fully private also works to this end, but limits discovery whereas merely restricting voting in this manner keeps the positive discovery aspects but just limits the deleterious effects solely in regards to voting. We saw this in Reddit a ton when the 3rd party app devs were being harassed and all of a sudden people who we had never seen or heard before started responding to polls asking if our communities should go dark for the protest actions (which ultimately proved non-viable, hence why we moved here, giving up on Reddit as a lost cause) - that was terribly unfriendly of them to astroturf like that.

But merely to limit the vote amounts - I still don't get "WHY" that is supposed to be a benefit? Again as opposed to voting being considered a "good" thing and people should do MORE of it?

This looks like a healthy distribution. In the olden days of reddit (before the proliferation of bots) they had a very rigid pattern of the 90%/10%. If you had 1,000 users, 100 would cast votes. Of those 100, 10 would also comment. Of those 10, 1 would also submit posts. Across multiple years and various communities, this ratio tended to present itself.

I calculated a rough average for myself: ~150 votes per day, that's ~4500 votes per month. If someone knows a tool that displays exact numbers, please let me know.

But yesterday I've exceeded piefed.social's limit of 240 votes at 5pm. (I'm selfhosting and can change the quota for my instance, but the piefed.social limit affects remote users too). I wasn't very active on Saturday so I had 6 pages of posts to catch up on Sunday, sorted by New Subscribed.

The Fediverse needs more good, constructive and fun content. If a post is good I upvote it, if multiple comments are good, I upvote them as well. That's a lot of votes for positive stuff I like to see more of. Upvoting encourages users to post more. If less and less people upvote my contributions, I'll stop posting.

I engage in wholesome communities like !dailygames@lemmy.zip where I upvote a lot of games and comments, because I like to see more people playing and interacting. Or !askouija@lemmy.world where I upvote questions that are fun and all single letter comments that form the answer, that's easily 10 votes per post. Another example would be !ich_iel@feddit.org where the memes are fun and the comments are even more fun.

Yesterday I've reached a limit by upvoting positive content and it doesn't feel good at all. I didn't do anything malicious. By upvoting a lot, I signalled to the posters and commenters that I like what they shared and hopefully encouraged them to continue contributing to this place.

I understand why this was implemented, but in my opinion it hits the wrong people. Limiting votes in the Fediverse sends a wrong signal. We need more participation, not less.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule

and/or

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle

depending on POV

That is interesting data, thanks for presenting it.

I have to say I'm not that concerned about it, as long as there is no vote manipulation via multiple accounts involved. Everybody has one voice in each post and I don't see a problem with some people using that voice more often. Hell, I am trying to upvote every post that isn't something I don't like in order to increase engagement. So I might even be one of the top 5 percent or so. And I'm certainly not doing it out of malicious ness or trying to manipulate what others can see (besides the normal up and down vote effect)

my feed view is not based on public voting so I don't really care.

Would you be able to make a stacked histogram where upvotes and downvotes are a separate colour please? Either as a absolute or percentage values would work. I have a nagging suspicion it would show some interesting patterns.

No matter how many votes they make, they can only influence each post by one point, so it seems unimportant.

Unless you have evidence of vote botting?

Also, does this include the automatic upvote made when posting? If so those could just be the feed following bots that some instances have.

This looks like a Zipfian distribution. It’s a very widely observed phenomenon in many different fields.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law

I'm somewhat interested in these megavoters, mainly just in regard to if they're real people or not and the personality of someone that seemingly votes on everything they come across. I'm curious if they interact otherwise or are just silently voting and nothing more.

I'm not really concerned as voting doesn't seem to mean all too much here. I sort Top 6 Hr, but there's a small enough pool of posts that I generally end up scrolling down to single digits as it is. Also, from the handful of times I used other instances, the vote totals don't sync up anyway due to differences in federation details, so instance would still have an impact on what difference these votes have.

If anyone is also using a social media platform as their sole source of important information, I feel some potential vote manipulation is the least of that person's problems with gathering reliable data.

Very cool stats though, I really enjoy posts like these.

the beauty of the fediverse is everyone can chose how they connect. I subscribe to piefed/lemmy communities from my hubzilla instance and receive chronological posts so there is 0 influence of anyone on what i see.

Each account has one vote per post/comment and if they up voted everything then everything would just have one more vote and same for the reverse. Unless most of them are voting nearly the same way it will just get lost in the noise.

It also matters when they vote. Early votes have more impact than later votes. If early voters are a representative sample of the general voting trends then they are doing a service by raising what people in general want to see and filtering out what people in general don't.

As long as they are manually voting with a single account I don't really care.

I guess I had made an assumption that most of the people on Lemmy and piefed were the type who chose to be here because they didn't want votes or algos choosing what they see. As such, I figured that basically everyone here sorted by some chronological order rather than by votes.

Are you tracking this metric?

I am indifferent because anything but Sort by New isn't enough of a dopamine drip (and that's not a Lemmy-specific problem).

I think don't watch the most upvoted content because i prefer chronological order :)

Edit : So i understand your point with the vote quota, it's a good idea. :)

Would rate limiting solve the problem?

Having most voted content at the top allow me not to see much of communities where there is a lot of automatically published content but low engagement.
Engagement is a proxy for quality. Not the best proxy but as I block communities I'm not interested in but which have engagement I discover slowly more and more niche communities with a little pool of active users but proper human-made content and engagement.

I wonder where I appear in these graphs. Honestly, I have no idea.

I feel like I cannot make a decision on this without knowing who the top 10 users are.