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 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!:-)