Out of the 37,000 people who voted for posts or comments in the last month, the 10 most prolific voters (0.02% of us) cast as many votes as the bottom 59%. Here’s how that looks, visually:
As you can see, a lot of people didn’t cast many votes. Someone cast 23k votes, with a group of 13 each casting at least 10k votes.
“But of course most people aren’t really engaged, most of those 37k people are just NPCs who don’t really matter” you say, “Rimu you’re just including them to make it seem worse than it is”, you might say. Ok, cool, let’s pretend the bottom 85% of us don’t matter and just look at the top 5000 voters. Here’s how the distribution looks among them:
Still super unbalanced. Let’s analyze this a bit.
Among those 5000, the top 147 (2.94%) cast as many votes as all the others (4853 people) combined. Among those 5000, the average number of votes cast in a month is 1142. Among the top 147, the average number of votes cast in a month is 6868.
How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?
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.
You can also downvote everything you don’t upvote, effectively making your voice count twice. I did that on Reddit when I was much more of a moron than I am today. I’m fairly certain there are more people like this.
Had to downvote you. I didn’t particularly want to, but I also wasn’t going to upvote, so them’s the rules I’m afraid.
When I took a look at lemvotes.org, I came to realise that there really are serial downvoters. Care to explain what goes on inside a head like that?
In the mind of that person they’re contributing to „correct” viewpoints being „on top” so that other people know what viewpoint is „correct”.
And there’s only one correct truth which deserves the upvote. Anything other than that should be downvoted so that the truth will rise higher, right?
I think submitting over 750 upvotes a day is a pretty clear sign that a bot is involved in one way or another.
There are some chronically ill people who are unable to work here who spend much of their day on this platform. They can easily exceed 750 votes. These also tend to be a big chunk of the people who post a lot and run communities and keep this place running and not feeling empty. Feels odd to punish it IMO.
If they are real people manually voting, then by all means they shouldn’t be limited by built-in assumptions.
At the same time, at a rate of 750 votes a day, even someone spending 16 hours a day on Lemmy would only have 76.8 seconds per vote to read a headline, read the article (ideally), and interact with the post, before immediately going to the next one.
While many posts don’t need that much time for a complete interaction, much more likely under the scenario of such mass voting is many votes with minimal to no interaction. If someone is using Lemmy to that extent, I would encourage them to redirect some of their voting efforts into thinking of more things to post or comment, as interaction—beyond just voting—is the beating heart of any such platform.
The votes could also be on comments. 750 per day still seems kind crazy when you break it down like that, but that’s literally one account.
The top 147 accounts average about 229 votes per day, and the top 5000 average about 38.
That’s not that unreasonable…
I agree that most cases are going to just be active users, and such activity should be encouraged, not discouraged.
As a well-designed bot can mimic (to an extent) the activity of a real user, however, I think it’s still important to ensure that all such users aren’t interacting with others in an automated manner, or otherwise consistently engaging in mass-voting or brigading.
Yeah I mean any account with that much activity is gonna highlight itself on a platform this small. It should be easy enough for admins to look at them case-by-case to see if their activity is bot-like.
Instances can ban obvious bot accounts and brigadiers. If an instance refuses to address a problem account or is a sanctuary for problem accounts, other instances can defederate from those.
Overall this seems like a non-issue here. This isn’t reddit. Maybe in the future it’ll be a bigger problem though
Average or Median?
Many votes are on comments, meme posts, etc. I know some people mainly use the threadi for articles but that’s just one use case. Averaging one vote every ~10 seconds doesn’t seem odd to me, and if you do that you reach your quota in 2 hours 5 minutes per day. Which for someone who spends half their day on here is nothing.
Exactly!
I’m not a bot; just a loser.
I think what they mean is, it skews what is considered a majority’s opinion. Regardless of whether its fair or unfair to use your one vote, what you get on your feed is not a representive of the majority’s opinion.
Not just that, there are topic that dont even make it to your feed or that someone thinks is too niche or controversial to post about even if aren’t. For example, dispite the internet being a large part of people’s life, all around the world. You dont hear what effect that has on people’s cultural identity and sense of self. To be flooded with US polictics, and culture.
People say that Americans make up the majority of the English speaking side of the Internet, but as the rest of the world’s access grows, I dont think that minority is so small anymore.
Or course not - did anyone think that it was?
Reading the Threadiverse, 99.9% of the world is (1) Linux, (2) politics, (3) leftist in-fighting, (4) schadenfreude over rightist missteps, (5) (just before any Western election) asking why aren’t centrists voting more, (6) GNU Linus and (7) comics.
e.g. “sports” doesn’t even crack the top 100 topics, much less top 10. The Threadiverse is a VERY biased subset of the wider world!!!
People vote for what appeals to them. Get out and vote more, folks!
I am not talking about The wider world. Lemmy is in itself a community, that isn’t represented by what get vote to top feeds. Its like if you looked only at r/memes extrapolated what the Average reddit life and views look like.
People are different. Non-technical normal folks like sports - we here don’t, collectively, yet some people here actually do want sports content.
But it won’t ever rise to the top posts, like it does on Reddit (I presume, tbh I don’t want to go look to check:-P).
Some people even like USA politics? Others don’t. Nobody presumes that we are all the same.
I was agreeing with you that “what you get on your feed is not a representive of the majority’s opinion.”, while adding that I doubt that anyone presumes that it is - we know that we are different, from others, and from one another.