I’m not running to be the next red or blue Fuhrer, I’m trying to discuss topics online.
So I don’t need a majority. I don’t need to appeal to the lowest common denominator. It’s not an election. I only need people with the mental health to discuss things in good faith.
The voting system on reddit and piefed is designed to heavily amplify the terror of how stupid people are.
I already have to try to figure out how to not die while people sabotage the atmosphere with climate change and sabotage modern medicine with anti-intellectualism. So upvotes and downvotes shouldn’t make much difference, and intuitively, I would say upvotes and downvotes aren’t a big deal. They’re just reminders of how denialists and anti-intellectuals that want to kill themselves and me are much more common than friendly people, which is the much bigger problem in itself than reminders of it.
But I was on reddit from a young age, and I never spent time away from it until the past couple years of adulthood, and now I’ve learned my intuition is wrong. Being buried in downvotes and spammed with lies that get upvotes, while telling the truth, has a very different psychological effect from just being spammed with lies while telling the truth. Now that I can see how different it actually feels, it seems like it’s damaged me deeply over the years.
And there’s a very easy fix for the psychological factors: filtering. The same way you can remove replies from your view if they come from me in good faith, I should be able to remove votes from my view if they come from people I know act in bad faith. In fact, filtering replies is basically useless and overserved already (allowing people to manipulate the feed by removing other people’s posts from everyone’s view instead of just their own). Whereas filtering votes would actually be useful.
This would require being able to see who’s voted on a post, obviously. In all my years on reddit, I never had a strong opinion on whether reddit votes should be anonymous but now I do - they should not. They should be pseudonymous, meaning someone could still Sybil attack me if they really felt like it, but I would still detect it and deal with it pretty quickly.
There are at least 3 major benefits to this:
- I can find out if people whose opinions are actually worth caring about hate one of my posts (they probably do sometimes, but I’d probably have no idea with the current system)
- Instead of being frustrated or angry when people flood me with downvotes or flood those abusing me with upvotes, I can take it as an opportunity to identify more bad-faith voters to filter, which would feel completely different psychologically. The reminder of being outnumbered by idiots no longer comes with a reminder that they systemically make it impossible to fight back against them in many ways; instead, it becomes a reminder of the ways intelligent people can fight back with superiority.
- Sorting could also be implemented, so my front page could include any posts that were buried in downvotes by known lie supporters / honesty haters
The Nazis will pretend the point of this is to play pretend and enjoy positive vote scores by pretending they’re not from filtering negative votes. But no, that is not really a benefit for adults and it is also none of the benefits I listed above, and it’s sad that this paragraph is needed.
But people are childish, and that paragraph was needed, because people somehow struggle with the difference between looking for people to discuss topics with online, and debating for an election. It should be pretty simple to comprehend me saying those are 2 different things, but people struggle with stuff like that.
I previously had a post about piefed’s design and community making me want to stop viewing / commenting on other people’s content and just use it as a place to dump my own, with minimal discussion. I was talked out of it and deleted that post, but I’m back to it now. As long as the voting system is designed to psychologically traumatize me, while I’m surrounded by people who will laugh at that statement and abuse me more over it, it seems like the only point to this place is to drive traffic to my nostr key, and commenting on other people’s posts isn’t an effective enough traffic driver here.
It seems like it’s probably more worthwhile to comment on reddit, because reddit has a bigger audience and more chance someone is impacted or learns something from a discussion, at the cost of the psychological impact on me.
Theoretically downvoting data is entirely public, so it’s mainly a choice of each UI to either show it or not. Most do not, but some do.
There is https://lemvotes.org/, although I find that extremely often it has difficulties with content on PieFed, I do not know why. It would indeed be nice to get that limitation resolved, for those who need access to it.
I think some 3rd party apps do show you exactly who has downvoted some item of content - I recall seeing screenshots even - but I don’t use any mobile apps right now and don’t recall which ones might do it. Also it might be a mod-only view.
The Tesseract alternative UI for Lemmy would also do it, but there too there are some limitations (which I don’t recall, except that it is not currently compatible with PieFed).
Also if you started your own instance then you would have full access to that data. I am not sure by what mechanism, like a UI option or a CLI database command or what.
I will add that I have thought along similar lines, but in practice it tends to be far more hassle than it is worth. Like when someone replies with a rather toxic comment, and so I go through their recent history to see if they provide any value at all or if I am better to simply erase their existence from my view of the Threadiverse, and more often than not lately I see them offering helpful posts and replies in other contexts. Everyone has bad / off-days.
So in the end I simply blocked the largest Lemmy communities - especially News and Politics ones - and that solved a large fraction of my issue with encountering toxicity. And blocking all users from lemmy.ml, who perhaps due to existing inside their repressive echo chamber seemed the most likely category of people to consistently reply with batshit insane logic, which I simply do not need in my life. Anyway, some communities are simply inherently more toxic than others, so find the ones that are worthwhile (uplifting, kind, relevant, etc.) and enjoy those - plus ofc be the change that you want to see in the world (as best you can at any rate).
In PieFed, when you block someone they don’t see your posts or comments. So they can’t vote on it either.
The best I can do for you @[email protected] is make it so that votes from blocked people on Lemmy (which does show your posts to people you blocked) are not accepted. Making votes public so you can go down the rabbit hole of policing the votes on everything is not going to happen.
Please remember that we are building PieFed at significant personal cost and giving it away for the good of everyone. That comes with limitations on how much time we can put into it and how many people we can satisfy. There just isn’t time to build every possible feature and some features would negate the value and purpose of other features.
We’re doing our best here but if you don’t like it you have other places you can go.
Bro, reading all this sounds like you aren’t cut out for social media and its associated ills. You should probably disconnect for awhile because this shit is clearly taking a toll on your mental health.
You don’t need vote filtering. You need counselling/therapy. This is not intended as a dig and just my opinion obviously.
If you really don’t want downvotes, and their existence is harming your experience, then my suggestion would be to either run your own instance and disable downvotes at the instance level or to join an instance that disables downvotes (like blahaj).
I think pretty much everybody in the threadiverse seems to agree that voting certainly has some issues, but nobody agrees on a solution. Votes are a simple binary up/down and there can be a lot of nuance as to why somebody might choose to upvote one thing or downvote another thing. In other words, there are many different reasons somebody might hit the downvote button, some more helpful/harmful than others; being off-topic, spam, personal grudge, etc.
This was one of the things we were trying to address with something like emoji reactions. It is a much more expressive form of feedback without requiring somebody to overcome the barrier of actually authoring a reply. Also, as a side note, every emoji reaction is counted as an upvote to other fediverse platforms that don’t have emoji reactions (lemmy), even “negative” emoji like 👎. Also, emoji reactions do show the usernames of those who reacted that way when you hover over the reaction.
In general, most general users (of social media, not just the threadiverse) don’t really like their votes being public to every other user. This tends to come up every couple months when a post about lemvotes gets popular and sparks a discussion about it again. I have been in many discussions with Skavau about vote visibility in the past. I actually think that community moderators shouldn’t be able to view votes, reserving it just for instance admins. However, with the way lemmy allows mods to view votes, my stance is kind of moot and PieFed now also allows mods to view votes.
