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?
I feel like I cannot make a decision on this without knowing who the top 10 users are.
That would just cause those 10 people to hate me. I don’t want to anger the people who determine what gets seen and what gets buried. That demonstrates the whole problem with having 10 people controlling everything - it’s a power imbalance.
Anyway you would not recognize most of them. The people who vote a ton are not the same people who comment and post a lot.
The way you presented this is as a kind of fight: what do YOU think of THEM that influence YOUR content (implied: without your CONSENT).
But… it’s just people voting, and commenting, and posting - all normal activities that people have done since before any of the Fediverse existed?
This all seems so incongruous, as in what two days ago was considered a virtuous activity all of a sudden is seen as “bad”, and already (not under discussion to maybe possibly potentially be done at some future date) throttled.
I would have preferred a greater rather than lesser amount of transparency and control. Like if a recipient does not like one of these top-10 voters, can they opt-out of that control by blocking them? And if so, how can an individual find out who these mass-vote-controllers are, short of spinning up their own instance thereby exposing themselves to all the frustrations that any public-facing interfaces have in the modern era.
But maybe we WANT these people to control what we see - if we like what they are doing and enjoy the work having been done for us already, each day before we even log in to check the content available on today’s feed?
That is part of my answer to your OP question btw: I don’t know what I think yet about someone else controlling my feed, unless I had the data to be able to make an informed decision? I already presumed that either people were doing so - for Popular feeds - or else I knew that I could bypass that anytime I wanted, simply by browsing All.
So I am uncertain what “new information” this post is adding to my previous understanding of how matters work on the Threadiverse? I suppose it definitively rules out anything remotely resembling a more even distribution, but I would have rather assumed a Power Law curve from the start. Do these accounts upvote any action taken by Russia and downvote any response by Ukraine? In that case I am VERY interested!! Though now that they are throttled, won’t they simply switch to multiple accounts and continue relatively unimpeded?
Things I would guess are upvoted: Linux-praising tech news, USA politics, memes, pictures of cats, calls for guillotining hundreds if not thousands of people world-wide, including even the janitorial staff at Meta who aren’t ideologically pure enough, unlike us here who use <correct answer> btw.
Things I would guess are ignored: anything requiring additional effort to parse rather than continuing to doomscroll mindlessly, like poetry.
But I thought all this a couple days ago too, so my thinking doesn’t seem to have changed in the slightest after seeing these graphs? Pulling the curtain back only this far isn’t enough for me to be able to DO anything with any of this new information?
Hence your rapid implementation of this new “feature” mainly comes across as having a “Just trust me bro” mindset behind it. Less “democratic” and more “authoritarian”? (From a process standpoint I mean.)
This, exactly. At certain times of day, I’m the first upvoter on a lot of posts I see. But I’m also often the first person to downvote spam and report it to moderators, so people have less spam in their timeline. Moderators don’t instantly check reports, so it can take a couple hours for spam to be removed. Which is totally fine, all moderators are volunteers here. That’s why downvoting spam is important. And by doing this, I’m getting closer and closer to a vote quota that stops me from doing the thing I thought was good for the Threadiverse.
I also mentioned elsewhere that the FIRST up- or down-vote carries car more weight than the hundredth or thousandth. You are doing a true service to the Threadiverse - as too does someone who makes 23k upvotes (over a one month timeperiod I would guess?), but the effect of each & every one of your votes is so much HIGHER than the other scenario there: they aren’t so readily comparable, you making perhaps 1k highly effective votes vs. someone else adding background by making >20 times more votes total, yet increasing the counts from 100 to 101 or negligibly decreasing from 100 to 99, rather than you altering the entire future trajectory of the content item from 1 to 2 (DOUBLING its score) or from 1 to 0.
So if I were to be “afraid” of voters “manipulating” the content that I see - ignoring for a moment how I could browse by All/New or Local/New and thereby entirely ignore any effect anyone (other than mods) has upon what I see - then shouldn’t I be much more afraid of YOU, whose votes are highly effective? More so than someone who merely votes a lot?
I suppose the two scenarios are not mutually exclusive - someone could vote a lot and also do so in a highly effective manner that even more greatly impacts how others view content, using the default Subscribed/Top sort, but in that case it’s the effectiveness far more than the amount that has by far the greater impact upon what I see than merely the total number of votes. And not enough information was given in the OP graphs to be able to understand the situation, or to find out more (unless someone runs their own instance and can look further).
Btw thank you for your service! The Threadiverse needs people like you:-), doing what you are doing!:-)
I doubt that. Each of them only gets one vote anyway.
I’m a week late to this discussion but, Piefed doesn’t have algorithmic sorting like Reddit, so does it matter? After reading most comments in this thread, it seems like most people (myself included) sort their main feeds by Subscribed/New. Occasionally I will also sort by Popular/New or Popular/Hot just to see what’s ticking in communities I don’t subscribe to.
Respectfully, I don’t think this is a great idea, Rimu. The 240 number seems arbitrary and personally, I do not feel as if I am being manipulated, or influenced on this platform by someone who happens to upvote a bunch.