Voting in the threadiverse

Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Snoopy@jlai.lu⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

Hi i want to explore the various way we can highlight content. Currently we use vote to show our approval, discontent…and we can couple it with a bot for moderation. Or hide post below a certain score…

Some instance completly removed downvote as beehaw. Piefed is experimenting private vote. On other fediverse software, there is no downvote and we use emojis to express our feelings.

You also have website as slashdot.or where you can tell that comment was insightfull or a troll, or funny…

There is also also website that compare software or video as tournesol.app

Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?
Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?
What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?
What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?

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sevon@lemmy.kde.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
As much as I wish votes could be private, obfuscating them would make troll instances harder to notice. I think I hate it the most that the current model gives the illusion of being private, when it isn’t.

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- SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  Yea, the best solution is:
  
  Keep votes “semi-public” (visible to mods/admins) to aid in moderation and avoid vote manipulation.
  
  Make it very clear to users that votes are not private.
  
  As long as users know that votes are not private, it should be okay.
  
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  - Skavau@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Public voting, or at least semi public-voting helps cultivate a high-trust culture on-site in my opinion. And being able to remove repeat offending downvoters who do it nonetheless is very useful.
    
    I managed to discover the serial downvoters on my old lemm.ee comm and when I banned them (about 4 of them?) it had a huge impact. They didn't all downvote /everything/ but they downvoted a lot of things, and no contribution. And if they got in early, they could sink new threads. As that kind of behaviour now is more-or-less confined to non-interacting support/troll accounts, it's much rarer of a problem. Unlike Reddit when a lot of threads can quickly get downvote buried instantly for seemingly no reason.
    
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  - doctortran@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    Problem is, if it’s visible to mods, it’s effectively public.
    
    This also presumes mods are, by default, inherently non-biased, held to a standard, and never have vendettas of their own.
    
    Of all the many things reddit did poorly, choosing not to let mods see votes was an excellent decision.
    
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fdrc_lm@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
🖐️ I have a dumb question

Aren’t votes on Lemmy private?

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- TheFool@infosec.pub ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  They really aren’t Here are yours :)
  
  I think this is a huge problem but I also don’t think things are going to change
  
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  - fdrc_lm@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Yeah, that’s concerning. However after being on the Fediverse for a while, I understand that the freedom from corporations comes in a trade-off with privacy, and even if I’m not tech savvy I’m convinced this isn’t going to change. Maybe there should more understanding about this, and we should put online only things we are totally ok with being publicly available and share private stuff only in specific places such as encrypted chats
    
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- sevon@lemmy.kde.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  They aren’t shown to users, no, but because votes are federated, they’re freely accessible to anyone willing to put in some effort.
  
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- CaptainBasculin@lemmy.bascul.in ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  They’re not. Each post’s upvoters are visible via ActivityPub endpoints.
  
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  - lena@gregtech.eu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    There are no endpoints from which the votes can be fetched. One would have to make an instance to receive the Like or Dislike activities.
    
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FundMECFSResearch@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I like the downvotes disabled model.

It also means that the “active” sort algorithm doesn’t promote posts that get lots of “downvotes” -> engagement

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- Creat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  That also means you can’t downvote just wrong information anymore. Look at YouTube, which disabled down votes and nothing got better. And their votes weren’t even public.
  
  I think that’s a terrible idea.
  
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  - rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    you can’t downvote just wrong information anymore.
    
    If “wrong information” can be properly defined, then either you challenge it (by responding, calling it out) or by reporting it. Downvoting it just because it you think it is not appropriate is a recipe for creating echo chambers.
    
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- sevon@lemmy.kde.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  This sounded off, so I checked the docs.
  
  …downvote posts so that they are less likely to be seen.
  
  join-lemmy.org/docs/…/03-votes-and-ranking.html
  
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- sevon@lemmy.kde.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  It promotes downvoted posts?
  
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julian@community.nodebb.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
@snoopy@jlai.lu personally, since I create AP enabled software I am on the side of votes being public data. We already have enough issues with votes being out of sync with each other. Mixing in private voting is just asking for trouble.

Emoji reactions are neat, although niche to those softwares that utilise it. They allow for greater expression which is nice. They're useless for deriving value (for ranking purposes) unless you assign value to them.

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rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?

Making them private is absolute idiotic. People participating in a discussion forum are willing to engage in a public conversation, if you are not willing to respond in public, then don’t respond at all. And if you think that the original comment is bad/harmful/offensive, report it and move on.

Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?

“Votes” are not real votes. It’s just a terrible misnomer for “Liking” and “Disliking”. I think we should get rid of votes altogether and use the real vocabulary.

I’d also would like a system where users could define their own scoring algorithm, and I would like to assign different weights depending on the person and the topic/community. I for one think that downvotes (dislikes) should only be counted if you are a member of the community and if you have made a positive contribution to the discussion.

What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?

I’d like to be able to follow people just to see what they are liking/commenting on.

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kayky@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Voting is fine the way it is.

Any instances with issues can change settings for themselves.

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PixelPilgrim@lemmings.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I thought about how to game this. If you’re running the election you’d make the number of points really small so that people would have to choose between an agenda item or several or your pick or you do a prime number times a perfect square, for example 5×9 that way voters can’t put more than 9 in any category without it not resulting in a perfect integer. Of course you say that resulting vote could result in integer values.

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last_philosopher@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ? Public. Lots of downvotes is information that could indicate that the commenter is lying, or just saying something unpopular. But either way, it’s information.

Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ? No. I agree that the slashdot method with more than just upvote/downvote is better. In a perfect world I imagine we could have every emoji be a reaction option, and then you could sort by putting an emoji in a bar at the top. In reality I imagine this would be a challenge from a backend perspective, but maybe like the top 5 or 10 emoji reactions could be an option for selection.

What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ? I’ll do the opposite and say - please do not remove downvotes like Twitter/Bluesky/mastodon etc. Downvotes are super important. People need to be able to boo, the only place people aren’t allowed to boo are in church or at cult rallies.

What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ? Remove all as a forced/default option on the main page. Back in the day before reddit had r/all, communities were much more diverse and niche, and this helped separate communities flourish in their own way. When r/all was added, the content started to resemble twitter, if not just becoming screenshots of twitter, on just about every sub.

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SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I honestly personally preferred Reddit’s sorting algorithm. Lemmy’s algorithm is a bit too slow to update for my taste. This is kind of part of Lemmy’s design though. My problem with Reddit was never it’s sorting algorithm (honestly that was a big part of its strength!), it was just all the ways they enshittified later on.

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Snoopy@jlai.lu ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Do you think vote sould be private ? Public ? And why ?

I believe vote should be visible by anyone as the modlog. It allow us to mitigate raid, troll, mod abuse. However, i’m aware it could lead to potential issue as mod abuse, harrassement…

Are you sastified with the current voting system ? And why ?

No. I’m not sastified because vote aim was to highlight content. Currently, It partly achieve that goal. The content is highlighted because it is popular. For me, there is some kind of social and cultural pressure.

So i think we can explore it. Slashdot seems a good example as it separate funny comment to more serious one and troll. I would like to highlight technical comment and good website source.

Having a list of blocked website and the reason would be great. We can also limit downvote to subscriber and certain users. PieFed already do that.

It would be great to add emojis, as in iceshrimp. It allow us to express our feeling :)

What other interesting software/website that tried something different do you know ?

For now, i only know slashdot and tournesol. I shared a link about quadratic vote because i find it more interesting than voting yes-no.

What way do you imagine to highlight content and improve search, discoverability ?

Maybe a debate mode ?

For example, here, under this post, we are sharing the pro and con of the voting system and our thoughts.

What if we have a nice board that sum up all our argument and analyse our link via a bias system ? As the website alternative to.

Or we can also underline part of a comment and add link, comment, share our opinion. It would be a threaded quote system.

I hope we will see other example that can inspire us. :)
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