On the surface the reasoning behind it makes sense, but there is also something about it (that I can’t quite point out yet) that rubs me the wrong way.
It doesn’t make sense though. It was presented as this unequal distribution thing where a few users cast the most amount of votes, but that really doesn’t matter because each user still only gets one vote per post or comment. No one’s opinion is outsized or disproportionate just because they vote on a lot of things.
It was really bad statistics from the start. It was framed sorta like wealth disparity, using the same kind of chart, but it’s categorically not the same thing.
but that really doesn’t matter because each user still only gets one vote per post or comment.
where does the policy change actually impact the user then? I guess at maximum we can’t upvote more that 240 things a day (comment or post). I think that’s more than the vast majority of users do per day, right?
The point isn’t about how many users are likely to hit the daily limit, the point is how having a daily limit might cause people to start rationing their votes. Instead of doling them out however they see fit, they might start thinking “hmm, but is this worth spending a vote on?”
Overall, that can have a chilling effect on voting in general, lowering engagement and reducing the motivation to post (if you only get a handful of upvotes on each post, it might feel “dead” and seem to have no point. It’s encouraging to see several dozen users like your post). And that can expand to a chilling effect on posting.
Also, if someone has a disability or is recovering from illness or surgery then they’re more likely to spend more time on here, meaning they’re more likely to reach the vote quota. This disproportionally impacts them.
Sure, 240 a day is high, but it’s not unreasonable for a human to reach, and it’s nowhere near “obvious bot” territory.
Based on the charts rimu shared, there are so few users who actually reach “obvious bot” territory that it’s impossible for them to not highlight themselves, and they should be easy enough to handle on a case-by-case basis. We’re talking less than 10 accounts. Admins can look at each one to examine their activity, and if they’re a bot they can remove the account.
I get that whilst also dancing on the idea that perhaps a power user shouldn’t post so much? This is decentralized social media, there really shouldn’t be an aim to maximise here: You post, you like, you don’t like.
If the aim is to farm engagement and thus a “power user” is born, then I suspect their motives or at least implore them to touch grass more often.
I’m making a lot of judgements here, and probably deserve any downvotes I get here - but if your posting habits are indistinguishable from a bot, then question your posting habits
Farming engagement has no incentive. It can’t be monetized here, there’s no karma. There would be no point.
Power users on the fediverse aren’t doing it for personal gain, they’re doing it to enrich the fediverse and make it a more attractive alternative to corporate social media.
We see so many complaints that it’s dead here, or there aren’t enough communities, or it’s hard to find the right community for something, or if the community exists it might be dead. That’s a lot of people’s rationale for not switching from reddit.
Power users here are trying to fix that. It’s an enormous task and more than a single user or a handful of users can do, but they’re doing their part and in many cases carrying more than their share of the burden. This change is kind of a slap in the face to them.
I’m not so sure as I recall a power user on Reddit who consistently hit the front page as he figured out how to engage users (best times to post, which topics, phrasing, secondary accounts for initial boost). I forget his name, but he effectively was researching how to grab attention and then I think even went to marketing firms with his research on his viral methods.
At the time I recall people saying to me “it’s just karma, it has no value” but attention was the value, and attention is something that companies can and will pay money for. Lemmy is not necesarily immune to this gamification of content
That’s the thing - Rimu openly admits that he doesn’t think that the power voters are bots. The issue isn’t distinguishing us. It’s just that Rimu doesn’t like so many votes being cast by so few users. Shit man, if I encounter two active discussions in a day (admittedly not a daily occurrence on the sometimes-sleepy Fediverse), I’ll be close to hitting the 240 limit simply by having an opinion on the majority of comments.
Shit, my vote quota is half-used-up today just from this comment section. I haven’t even posted or browsed anything else.
As someone with a laundry list of physical and mental ailments, my ‘touching grass’ time is extremely limit, and general I reserve the monumental effort there for important issues - like keeping up with the social events of my actual friends, or participating in local politics in my increasingly-fucked-and-fascist country. “Touch grass, it’s more fun than shitposting about history!” doesn’t really apply for me.
All social media pretty much operates on a 90/9/1 division. Only 1% of users actively post. Only a fraction of that 1% are power users like PugJesus. Killing power users won’t accomplish a different division of labour where more people post, it will only accomplish killing the ecosystem as a whole.
You thought the Fediverse was dead now? Wait until the power users disappear.
This is what I’m saying. Posting/voting isn’t a limited resource that can be distributed unfairly. People do it or don’t do it as much or as little as they want. Why restrict that on an ecosystem that you want to grow?
If the issue is compute, or resources to run the compute, or admins to maintain the compute environments, then focusing on those issues would be better. Ask for donations to add a new server, encourage people who can to set up their own servers to distribute the load, request that more people play an active role as admins. But restricting engagement/activity of your users sounds like the beginning of the end of your ecosystem…
Yeah, I can’t seem to see what it accomplishes except to make the few users that reach it kinda mad. It seems like an experiment at best to see what kind of effect it will have on hot/all.
Ohhh, that’s way more tolerable! Thanks for letting me know, got worried there lol.
I think it was YouTube back in the day that used to have a max number of total likes per account? After which, it would appear as if liking worked from your end, but it didn’t actually do anything on the backend. I was afraid we had one of those situations.
The combination of the irritation (being unable to upvote replies to your own material being particularly grating) and what it suggests about the future of the instance.
I actually planned on continuing to post as-usual (upvoting with alts, annoying as that would be) after I discovered it, but when the reasoning came out I knew it was the canary in the coal mine.
Man, I literally hit the cap before it was even announced. I went to the Matrix channel, confused as hell, and got told it was intentional.
The cap is 240 votes. I almost hit the cap just upvoting most of the comments here yesterday. If I participated in any real discussions outside of my own comms, I would almost certainly hit the daily cap on that given day.
The issue was not abuse, and Rimu didn’t say it was abuse in that sense. The issue was always that Rimu doesn’t think that a small minority should be more active in participating on here than the majority.
Rimu doesn’t think that a small minority should be more active in participating on here than the majority.
So it was a massive outrage, not worthy of the dev’s time to at least offer an explanation, and yet one more example of the right-wing dev / runner-path. Really?
All this on their own time, with hundreds of their free hours known and logged…?
So it was a massive outrage, not worthy of the dev’s time to at least offer an explanation, and yet one more example of the right-wing dev / runner-path. Really?
What?
At no point did I say that Rimu was right-wing in any sense or say that he shouldn’t have offered an explanation?
This is a shitty administration decision, it will have shitty effects on the instance long-term, and, especially, it affects me, personally, in a shitty way that I’m not willing to put up with. That’s it.
Sorry about my original reply on this one, mate. It sucked.
The cap is 240 votes. I almost hit the cap just upvoting most of the comments here yesterday. If I participated in any real discussions outside of my own comms, I would almost certainly hit the daily cap on that given day.
Damn, I certainly can’t imagine voting 240x in a single day. There might remotely be that number of opportunities in my subscribed stream, but that would be like me forming an opinion upon every-goldurn thing that I possibly saw in that day. And beyond, really?
I mean, sure I suspect I’m like you and others, giving a friendly updoot upon loads of stuff that I was only neutral upon, but it was for the ‘good’ of the FV, but… 240x per day, y’all?
Damn, I certainly can’t imagine voting 240x in a single day. There might remotely be that number of opportunities in my subscribed stream, but that would be like me forming an opinion upon every-goldurn thing that I possibly saw in that day. And beyond, really?
There are 303 comments in this post alone. If I have an opinion on 2/3s of them, I’m almost at the cap.
~300 comment posts are not the norm on the Fediverse, but I see a fair number of ~80 comment posts. If I run across two or three of them, suddenly I would have very few other opportunities to upvote.
Considering, on top of that, I post quite a bit and get a fair number of comments on each (I had ~90 comment replies to my posts on a pretty normal day’s output on HistoryMemes alone), it doesn’t take much browsing to hit 240 votes.
I think I might be out of the loop. What’s happening…?
There is a new rule metering the number of votes that can be cast by a user. You can see yours on your profile.
That’s… really weird.
On the surface the reasoning behind it makes sense, but there is also something about it (that I can’t quite point out yet) that rubs me the wrong way.
It doesn’t make sense though. It was presented as this unequal distribution thing where a few users cast the most amount of votes, but that really doesn’t matter because each user still only gets one vote per post or comment. No one’s opinion is outsized or disproportionate just because they vote on a lot of things.
It was really bad statistics from the start. It was framed sorta like wealth disparity, using the same kind of chart, but it’s categorically not the same thing.
where does the policy change actually impact the user then? I guess at maximum we can’t upvote more that 240 things a day (comment or post). I think that’s more than the vast majority of users do per day, right?
The point isn’t about how many users are likely to hit the daily limit, the point is how having a daily limit might cause people to start rationing their votes. Instead of doling them out however they see fit, they might start thinking “hmm, but is this worth spending a vote on?”
Overall, that can have a chilling effect on voting in general, lowering engagement and reducing the motivation to post (if you only get a handful of upvotes on each post, it might feel “dead” and seem to have no point. It’s encouraging to see several dozen users like your post). And that can expand to a chilling effect on posting.
Also, if someone has a disability or is recovering from illness or surgery then they’re more likely to spend more time on here, meaning they’re more likely to reach the vote quota. This disproportionally impacts them.
Sure, 240 a day is high, but it’s not unreasonable for a human to reach, and it’s nowhere near “obvious bot” territory.
Based on the charts rimu shared, there are so few users who actually reach “obvious bot” territory that it’s impossible for them to not highlight themselves, and they should be easy enough to handle on a case-by-case basis. We’re talking less than 10 accounts. Admins can look at each one to examine their activity, and if they’re a bot they can remove the account.
There’s no reason to limit people’s votes.
i guess it’s an anti-botting measure where they can’t distinguish a power user from an automated system?
There are so few accounts that have that much activity on them that admins could easily handle them on a case-by-case basis.
This doesn’t get rid of the bot accounts, it only limits their voting activity like everyone elses, which will make them harder to detect.
I get that whilst also dancing on the idea that perhaps a power user shouldn’t post so much? This is decentralized social media, there really shouldn’t be an aim to maximise here: You post, you like, you don’t like.
If the aim is to farm engagement and thus a “power user” is born, then I suspect their motives or at least implore them to touch grass more often.
I’m making a lot of judgements here, and probably deserve any downvotes I get here - but if your posting habits are indistinguishable from a bot, then question your posting habits
Farming engagement has no incentive. It can’t be monetized here, there’s no karma. There would be no point.
Power users on the fediverse aren’t doing it for personal gain, they’re doing it to enrich the fediverse and make it a more attractive alternative to corporate social media.
We see so many complaints that it’s dead here, or there aren’t enough communities, or it’s hard to find the right community for something, or if the community exists it might be dead. That’s a lot of people’s rationale for not switching from reddit.
Power users here are trying to fix that. It’s an enormous task and more than a single user or a handful of users can do, but they’re doing their part and in many cases carrying more than their share of the burden. This change is kind of a slap in the face to them.
I’m not so sure as I recall a power user on Reddit who consistently hit the front page as he figured out how to engage users (best times to post, which topics, phrasing, secondary accounts for initial boost). I forget his name, but he effectively was researching how to grab attention and then I think even went to marketing firms with his research on his viral methods.
At the time I recall people saying to me “it’s just karma, it has no value” but attention was the value, and attention is something that companies can and will pay money for. Lemmy is not necesarily immune to this gamification of content
That’s the thing - Rimu openly admits that he doesn’t think that the power voters are bots. The issue isn’t distinguishing us. It’s just that Rimu doesn’t like so many votes being cast by so few users. Shit man, if I encounter two active discussions in a day (admittedly not a daily occurrence on the sometimes-sleepy Fediverse), I’ll be close to hitting the 240 limit simply by having an opinion on the majority of comments.
Shit, my vote quota is half-used-up today just from this comment section. I haven’t even posted or browsed anything else.
As someone with a laundry list of physical and mental ailments, my ‘touching grass’ time is extremely limit, and general I reserve the monumental effort there for important issues - like keeping up with the social events of my actual friends, or participating in local politics in my increasingly-fucked-and-fascist country. “Touch grass, it’s more fun than shitposting about history!” doesn’t really apply for me.
All social media pretty much operates on a 90/9/1 division. Only 1% of users actively post. Only a fraction of that 1% are power users like PugJesus. Killing power users won’t accomplish a different division of labour where more people post, it will only accomplish killing the ecosystem as a whole.
You thought the Fediverse was dead now? Wait until the power users disappear.
This is what I’m saying. Posting/voting isn’t a limited resource that can be distributed unfairly. People do it or don’t do it as much or as little as they want. Why restrict that on an ecosystem that you want to grow?
If the issue is compute, or resources to run the compute, or admins to maintain the compute environments, then focusing on those issues would be better. Ask for donations to add a new server, encourage people who can to set up their own servers to distribute the load, request that more people play an active role as admins. But restricting engagement/activity of your users sounds like the beginning of the end of your ecosystem…
Yeah, I can’t seem to see what it accomplishes except to make the few users that reach it kinda mad. It seems like an experiment at best to see what kind of effect it will have on hot/all.
Wait, like total votes ever? Like you hit it and you can never vote again?? 😭
No, just over a set period of time.
Ohhh, that’s way more tolerable! Thanks for letting me know, got worried there lol.
I think it was YouTube back in the day that used to have a max number of total likes per account? After which, it would appear as if liking worked from your end, but it didn’t actually do anything on the backend. I was afraid we had one of those situations.
youtube still has a limit on upvotes, i am pretty sure it’s 5000. once you have 5k they remove your oldest ones.
This is correct at the moment. One can check by going to your their Liked Videos playlist.
Oof, I hate it…
I don’t get why the feature is necessary. Rimu should make it optional and not on by default.
It is optional in that each piefed instance can choose to turn it off, but its not per user.
WHAT?!*
Mate, who the hell cares about minor shizzle like that. Are you serious…?
The combination of the irritation (being unable to upvote replies to your own material being particularly grating) and what it suggests about the future of the instance.
I actually planned on continuing to post as-usual (upvoting with alts, annoying as that would be) after I discovered it, but when the reasoning came out I knew it was the canary in the coal mine.
But… it was about a cap for those who chronically abused such…?
Man, I literally hit the cap before it was even announced. I went to the Matrix channel, confused as hell, and got told it was intentional.
The cap is 240 votes. I almost hit the cap just upvoting most of the comments here yesterday. If I participated in any real discussions outside of my own comms, I would almost certainly hit the daily cap on that given day.
The issue was not abuse, and Rimu didn’t say it was abuse in that sense. The issue was always that Rimu doesn’t think that a small minority should be more active in participating on here than the majority.
So it was a massive outrage, not worthy of the dev’s time to at least offer an explanation, and yet one more example of the right-wing dev / runner-path. Really?
All this on their own time, with hundreds of their free hours known and logged…?
What?
At no point did I say that Rimu was right-wing in any sense or say that he shouldn’t have offered an explanation?
This is a shitty administration decision, it will have shitty effects on the instance long-term, and, especially, it affects me, personally, in a shitty way that I’m not willing to put up with. That’s it.
Okay, sorry if I misunderstood.
But, I guess I just… don’t understand why the PF dev experimenting with voter caps is such a major issue?!
This is easily the most baffling reaction I’ve ever seen across the Fediverse.
Sorry about my original reply on this one, mate. It sucked.
Damn, I certainly can’t imagine voting 240x in a single day. There might remotely be that number of opportunities in my subscribed stream, but that would be like me forming an opinion upon every-goldurn thing that I possibly saw in that day. And beyond, really?
I mean, sure I suspect I’m like you and others, giving a friendly updoot upon loads of stuff that I was only neutral upon, but it was for the ‘good’ of the FV, but… 240x per day, y’all?
There are 303 comments in this post alone. If I have an opinion on 2/3s of them, I’m almost at the cap.
~300 comment posts are not the norm on the Fediverse, but I see a fair number of ~80 comment posts. If I run across two or three of them, suddenly I would have very few other opportunities to upvote.
Considering, on top of that, I post quite a bit and get a fair number of comments on each (I had ~90 comment replies to my posts on a pretty normal day’s output on HistoryMemes alone), it doesn’t take much browsing to hit 240 votes.
Alright, you’re right.
I’d forgotten about the post / comment type of vote.
Yes, of course you’re right.
(altho that’s still a lot voting, mate!!)
I wonder… is there a technical difference upon such votes across ActivityPub/Fediverse?