Comment on On the relevance of upvotes in relation to quality and discussion
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 11 hours ago
Honestly, I’ve begun to think the upvote/downvote model is a bad fit for the fediverse in general:
*Different instances have different rules around it, and in some cases (for example, an instance disabling downvoting) this might give a modest advantage in the sorting for content on that instance
*Instances have to trust votes by other instances, and while an obvious manipulation could be defederated, that has to be noticed first
*Votes are more publicly visible than on a place like reddit, potentially leading to something like a downvote being a catalyst for incivility towards the downvoter by whoever posted something
Honestly what I would do with Lemmy voting is just make vote counts mostly not federate. Have instances send a single up, down, or neither vote depending on if the net number on their insurance passes a certain up or downvote threshold, just so people on private instances have something to sort by, and have the score of a post or comment otherwise just go off of whatever the users within an instance vote. Then, an individual instance could have whatever rules or restrictions on voting it wanted, without worry over if that gets its votes drowned out by the wider network or seen as vote manipulation.
Skavau@piefed.social 10 hours ago
That means that most /all/ content on every single fediverse instance will be hugely biased in favour of local content.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 9 hours ago
If one wanted to ensure that external content is still easily visible, one could always have things set up so that posts on local communities only appears in local and subscribed, and only posts from outside appear in all (though it might need to be renamed to better fit such a layout I suppose)
Skavau@piefed.social 9 hours ago
Well, sure, that would stop that - but I don’t see what benefit this gives the fediverse really. You would actually be giving small privately hosted instances enormous voting power across the fediverse, so grants opportunity for manipulation.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 9 hours ago
thats fair I suppose, though in practice id assume that making a whole bunch of individual instances is probably more difficult than making a much of accounts on one instance that you control, and thus vote manipulation in this manner should have a higher barrier to entry?