On the relevance of upvotes in relation to quality and discussion

Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Pro@programming.dev⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

I treat social media as pure discussion platform to advance understanding or getting to know new stuff.

There had been something on my mind lately which I wanted to discuss as a way to improve the upvotes relevance to the quality of the post and the amount of discussion.

Let’s apply quality control on upvotes, so any post can get only 20 upvotes till it gets a specific amount of comments then the limit could be pumped up to 40 upvotes till it gets more comments.

Why I am bringing this up, you might ask? The linked post by me is the peek proof of my point.

It’s pretty clear no one read the linked article and despite that, the post is the top post in the technology community. There is no comments discussing directly the story and from the face of it, There does not seem to be any indicator that any one benefited from this.

I skimmed over the story and shared it in the hopes to basically learn new stuff, get relevant recommendations or basically read some direct discussions.

In any way, I think my described system to handle upvotes would highly improve Lemmy, taking into consideration that numbers used are only for demonstration and the used numbers will need to be figured out separately.

Should this system be implemented into Lemmy?

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Comments

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JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
It’s pretty clear no one read the linked article

This is the root problem. Upvoting and downvoting headlines on the basis of vibes. It adds zero value. It’s a waste of everyone’s time, not least the upvoters and (especially) downvoters themselves, who get nothing out of it but the tiniest of vacuous dopamine hits. It’s the original sin of social media.

My preferred solutions:

no voting at all without a registered click on the linked article

no commenting at all without including a verifiable quote from the linked article

Deep-seated problems call for radical solutions. Both of these are technically feasible.
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- Skavau@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  no commenting at all without including a verifiable quote from the linked article
  
  How is this feasible?
  
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  - JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    On posting, crawl the link and cache its content. Compare with quote on the basis of some generous threshold of similarity.
    
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- rimu@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  So every comment would have a quote? lol
  
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rimu@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Upvotes without reading do suck but comments without reading are worse. I’ve been considering adding a highlight/boost on comments where the author has clicked the link.

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- Pro@suppo.fi ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  You can’t do that with different clients.
  
  Simply put, you can’t force all the clients which currently support piefed to respect that.
  
  You can control the server, you can’t control the clients.
  
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    If clients want the get into an adversarial relationship with the project they’re piggybacking off, they will lose.
    
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- Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  How would you be able to know that?
  
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  - mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    A quick js + db change boom done.
    
    But it may confuse users depending on the implementation.
    
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  - rimu@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    I have ways
    
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  - Nemo@slrpnk.net ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    check the username
    
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TORFdot0@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Rather than hard-coding an upvote to comment ratio, changing the default sort to effectively put a ceiling on how raw upvotes per comment might be a better way of accomplishing the same goal. And lets it be optional.

An upvote is essentially a boost/re-post on mastodon which says I like this content and think it should be shared. Comments or discussion aren’t always needed for content to be good

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CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨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.

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- Skavau@piefed.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  That means that most /all/ content on every single fediverse instance will be hugely biased in favour of local content.
  
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  - CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨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)
    
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vk6flab@lemmy.radio ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
So … you are basing you hypothesis on an article about Pedophile hunters written in German (or Swiss if you want to get frisky) that you linked using an English headline and summary in a software development community?

I’m surprised that your post wasn’t removed.

I’m mentioning this because it hardly seems like a genuine attempt to learn anything and any assertions you make about voting behaviour has to be suspect at best, not to mention that it’s based on a single example, hardly ever the hallmark of solid statistical analysis.

Let’s move on to the attempted “fix”.

You’re attempting to achieve what exactly?

A relationship between votes and comments?

How do you know how the users decide what to read, vote or comment on? You see a relationship with ordering by votes, I read whatever comes past on my “All feed” and vote when I think the pod warrants it. The two are not the same.

In other words, your proposal seems based on a very poor foundation and I’m voting accordingly.

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- Pro@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Jordan Peterson? Is that you?
  
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artiman@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Would love this in piefed

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- Blaze@lemmy.zip ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Same. Could you create a ticket with that idea on codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/issues ?
  
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  - artiman@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    alright will do
    
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rimu@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
The proposed solution assumes a linear relationship between number of votes and number of comments. But depending on the post there might not be much to say. Especially with bad content.

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- Pro@programming.dev ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  Any real examples?
  
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Skavau@piefed.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
Something to be considered down-the-line when Piefed is the dominant partner in the Fediverse. Otherwise all this has the impact of is suppressing Piefed posts on Piefed.

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mesamunefire@piefed.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I feel like this would over complicate things. We are pretty small as is.

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Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I dont think this should be implemented because I dont see how that would improve anything. I think that people are burnt out right now with what’s going on in the world and it reflects in the comments. Compare comments now with this time last year and the energy is very different.

I read a lot of the articles that are posted and so many are complete garbage and it makes me not care about reading the article. Like do I really care about some idiot journalists opinion on how ai can’t answer how many Rs in strawberry or do I just want to shit on ai in the comments.

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- JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  
  do I just want to shit on ai in the comments
  
  Laudable honesty. The problem is that other people have to read the shit.
  
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  - Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    My point is there is nothing to read. Some of the articles posted are so low quality they add nothing more than the headline. But they are still worth commenting on became people want to talk about the topic generally
    
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SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

Let’s apply quality control on upvotes, so any post can get only 20 upvotes till it gets a specific amount of comments then the limit could be pumped up to 40 upvotes till it gets more comments, etc…

Ultimately this is just limiting ways that people can vote. Voting is the democratic way to sort posts. I don’t think you can limit without ultimately influencing the system in unintended bad ways, since that will restrict how people can vote. Just let people vote.

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- JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  But to vote without engaging with the actual content is just to “sort” posts based on feelings. Who cares?
  
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  - SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    This is like requiring people to read a specific text book before they vote in real life elections. I hope you can see the problem with that.
    
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- Pro@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  As I said, this is not to control people upvotes, but rather to control the quality of upvotes.
  
  The system I am laying down here is pretty simple and would need to be actually worked on to get it to a final implementation.
  
  Something I did not talk about is the downvotes and how we can control it’s quality.
  
  Simply put, I don’t care how you as a user vote, but I care about the sorting algorithm that sort postes based on upvotes and would be improved by the proposed change.
  
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hendrik@palaver.p3x.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
I don't see how that post would be a good example to advocate for the approach. It has 23 comments, quite a lot compared to other posts. So it'd stipp end up with a high ranking and it wordn't really change the overall picture...

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- Pro@programming.dev ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  A lot of comments came after the high amount of upvotes.
  
  In simpler terms, upvotes boosted the comments which allowed the comments to keep getting more irrelevant.
  
  What I am arguing for here in general is a quality control for votes, which is desperately needed here on Lemmy.
  
  As of now, any quality control system would work better than no quality control system at all.
  
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