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 appreciate the through response :) Also, I really like your community and posts. Voyager says I’ve upvoted you 1,800 times and the Owl of the Year competition is great.
One of the reasons I don’t comment much is usually someone has already written a similar thing to what I would say. So, instead of essentially duplicating the comment or putting a (in my opinion) worthless comment like “This” or similar, I’ll just upvote and move on. As Squirrel and OpenStars already wrote something covering my perspective, I wouldn’t have commented on this post, if you have asked specifically about high upvoters.
As I’m writing this I just realized part of the reason why I don’t comment/post more is that usually I’m using an app on a phone and its a pain to go back and forth to reference information in different posts/sources/links.
I get your point about blocking, but I feel there are enough posts and comment in the threadiverse that wading through everything on an off chance something, in a usually uninteresting (to me) community, isn’t worth it. I’m alright missing some good content to better weed out the (to me) irritating/negative/bad (elon vs melon). I would rather spend my limited time supporting good content where I know I’m more likely to find it.
Also, one of the reasons I use “New” in the “All” feed is so I can support/encourage new or inconsistent communities (and find new subscribed).
I think you are definitely right about a good comment being worth more than an upvote, and pretty much follow your behavior with regards to posters who haven’t provided any commentary on a link. While I may appreciate the link, I’m not going to try and kickstart a discussion with someone who I see as not having put in the effort to start a discussion on their own post. Again, I see it as my time could be better spent elsewhere.
I would say every voting methodology should be welcome in the fediverse (except for downvoting things you aren’t interested in, asshole move in my opinion). Agree they are complementary approaches :)
As I say a few paragraphs above, if I’m going to post or comment I want it to be something that contributes and people will appreciate (not duplicating other peoples comments or posts). As it definitely sucks to put a bunch of effort into something and then not have anyone upvote or comment on it. See my second (inactive) modded community PolicesForAll for what happens with little to no support.
Haha. Our conversation has made make a few more comments than I normally would :)
Oooo, I can’t complain about 1800 upvotes! I must be doing something right. 😄
I’m more than fine with “ooh I like this” comments from people who have never commented on my stuff before. I just like to see who is checking in really. I browse the lemvotes lists from time to time to see who my regular lurkers are. I still appreciate them, and would of course love them to interact with me, but I’m still happy that they’re here having fun even if it’s just observing. I try to stay positive and encouraging though to show it’s safe to comment with questions or simple and silly things. I started off knowing nothing about the owls, and I’m still no real expert, so I want the community to be as approachable as possible. I try to keep it clear it’s our group, not my group. That said, as you say, there is something to not talking just for the sake of talking. If everything went: i love this owl - i also love this guy’s owl - this! - etc, that would be pretty lame.
I also waited until I was back at my laptop to reply since the response was going to be longer! I have a lot of down time during the day, so that lets me do more in depth responses. I don’t want to short change people on info!
We have a real simplistic voting system, which makes it approachable, but IMO, not the most useful. There are lots of posts I wish I could upvote in a “thanks for sharing” way, but also downvote in a “I hate this thing is happening” way. I feel weird upvoting something that gets me riled up! Similarly, it feels conflicting to upvote a post where I think the bulk of the comments are bad takes. The OP did a good job, but fervent people with different and often what I feel ignorant or incitive views overrun the comments, and I don’t want to steer people to that kind of mess. But at that point the voting would take up as much time as reading the posts if it were so granular.
I did make an effort to upvote more people yesterday, so we’ve had a positive effect on each other! Supporting each other is what makes a small place like the Fediverse work and feel real in an age of mega-sites.
Yeah, the first comment, even if it’s simple, is nice/worthwhile. After that, I would want comments on my posts to have substance.
I agree, a better voting system seems like it should be possible. Even if it just separates subscriber votes vs non-subscribers, I think it would be an improvement.
I already ran out of votes (took me under an hour, upvoting comments makes it go real quick). So, maybe I can come back tomorrow upvote you, to show anyone who may come to this thread later that I thought your comment was worthwhile.
I’m not going to change my voting habits so, maybe I’ll switch back to Lemmy or maybe the Piefed fork the anarchists are working on. I’m going to see if .zip admins will change/remove the limit before I make any decisions.
It does seem strange there’s a cap. I never would have imagined there was one. Maybe a downvote cap, but it’s someone going to get mad at you for being too positive? 😁
Yeah, I’m with you. Don’t know why you would limit a legitimate user’s enthusiasm. A downvote cap would not be the worst, but at the point, I think, just flag the user and have a discussion with them, if they are legitimate and not a bot.
I’m having a discussion with Rimu in another thread about it at the moment. To the data I’m pulling, it looks like the cap severely reduces posts and comments…
Good! I hope Rimu is able to be helpful. I haven’t had too much interaction with them, but I like that they’re open and communicative about development and issues when I do see posts from them.
I used to sing Rimu’s praises in the past. After some more recent events in the threadiverse, I’ve become much more tepid about him.
The discussion seems like it’s ended with, to me, him not actually engaging with what I’m saying and the data I’m showing him. He’s repeating roughly the same thing over and over. I explain that that’s not accurate and why, then we repeat…
Sadly, it’s pretty much what I expected from following along with his previous controversial moves.
I think if the anarchists ever get a proper piefed fork working, it may help temper Rimu’s actions and help him be more receptive and collaborative.
That is a shame. I remember some drama going on between the anarchists and Rimu, but I don’t remember what exactly about. It feels like that was a couple months ago, so I’d have hoped it had calmed down, but I can see how that would make him a bit tougher to work with.
I feel like I recall the political discourse being much more civil 3 years ago, but it could just be rose colored glasses by now. I have no idea what I am politically anymore, so I seem to get along pretty well with all sides, but they also greatly drive me insane with what I feel are bad takes at the same time. I just stick to talking about animals and maybe books and TV anymore.
The exact specifics escape me too, but I recall implementating a specific rule about bias-ing data in my fedilytics community specifically because of something Rimu posted.
Yeah, I hoped after that stuff happened a few months back and Rimu said he was going to step back and not be so active as an admin, things would get better. Maybe those events made him more ridgid, but either way, he doesn’t seem to be open to potentially being wrong about something. Tough to work/collaborate with people like that.
Hmm, not sure. I think you’re right and it was calmer then, but the world was in a significantly different place then too (people are very stressed now, often rightfully so).
I get you, I generally stay away from the politics (large block list), but after listening to the “Revolutions” podcast by Mike Duncan, with the season he did on the Russian revolution (season 10), I can’t take any marx-Leninist (ml) or Stalinist seriously. They were so ridiculously incompetent and corrupt, and they only took power because people were exhausted and thought they were a joke (so didn’t push them out when they could have).
Side note, if you like History, the “Revolutions” podcast is amazing. Real hits its stride in season 3 (French revolution). The earlier (English and American) revolutions don’t have the depth of the other seasons (starting at season 3). Mike talks about how he had an idea for the podcast and it just wasn’t working for season 1 and 2 so he changed things up and it works great.
Haha. I get you, half my post upvotes go to animal pictures.