It’s been a couple weeks and I wanted to add another perspective about this.

I noticed a user downvoting posts, https://lemvotes.org/user/FarStare@lemmy.dbzer0.com if it helps to have specifics. In the more than one full year of existing, they have never once contributed via making a post, never once commenting even, just doling out up- and down-votes in roughly equal proportion, and even those nearly exclusively via posts but almost never comments.

I am not concerned about receiving votes from PugJesus - either up or down, as PugJesus has earned the right to speak on behalf of the community. But who is this other person who is influencing how others see my content? Are they male or female? Do they have a degree of some kind? Do they primarily visit meme communities, as the vote pattern might suggest, or other communities as well?

So how do I feel about people who use the Threadiverse more than others? My answer is more complex and nuanced than simply yay or nay. I might prefer the opposite of the implemented feature even - the more someone posts (including comments?), the more upvotes they are allowed to make? Have they not earned such?

Also, if votes were exposed, each individual could decide for themselves how they wanted to make use of voting - perhaps someone would ban PugJesus, or conversely write special code (a 3rd party app / API recipient?) to highlight posts that PugJesus upvoted (isn’t that how “boosting” works? at least re-tweeting does).

It’s really difficult to guess what someone wants, as each person wants different things. Which is why ultimately in an effort to make things more fair & equitable, the solution can end up making it less so.

I like the follow-up suggestion to leave this new option OFF by default, so that an instance admin would have to specifically opt-in, perhaps as part of an overall suite of features limiting things like posts and comments as well. Although really, I think other approaches might work better - e.g. why would someone want to limit themselves to “some” of PugJesus’ content, wouldn’t they rather simply have it all or else ban him from the instance and therefore have none? I am not seeing the benefit realistically of having “some”, especially when the delimiter is not based on community or overall content but simply what time of day (based on an arbitrary threshold for when they starts and ends to restart the next period) the votes are cast?

Lemmy’s issues are pretty gigantic as well - to the point where many people outright refuse to fund its further development, thus impacting the future of the Threadiverse (one example is the inordinate amount of time spent performing moderation activities rather than actually working on adding features to the codebase).

Anyway, it’s good to have multiple alternative options - having more software implementations of the ActivityPub Protocol is unquestionably a good thing imho.

The social engineering though is NOT a good thing imho - fortunately it’s an option that can be disabled, though unfortunately it is opt-out rather than opt-in, and not transparently handled at all.

Sadly, users of PieFed instances that implement this default without actively opting out will not receive your upvotes:-(. But thank you for your service!! You are kind to have offered them regardless!!

No, this affects each and every PieFed instance that upgrades to v1.7 (I sent you in a different reply here the exact lines of code). PugJesus’ instance PieFed.social uses the now-default value of 240 as the daily vote quota. Admins may opt-out by setting the quota differently, however this will only impact votes accepted on your current instance. It will not affect votes accepted by other PieFed instances. e.g. if your instance uses 500 rather than 240, then someone looking at the identical content from PieFed.social will not see any of the second half of your daily votes: you will be able to OFFER them, and Lemmy will receive all of them, but each PieFed instance chooses itself how much it will receive or not.

And btw this information is not presented anywhere to show what these values are across each instance. Like the caps on posts and comments, it is silently effective, but not transparent in the least. So like the whole argument about whether defederations destroy the foundational principles of the ActivityPub Protocol-using Threadiverse, this new issue too is going to wreak havoc on the acceptance of PieFed in the wider Threadiverse & Fediverse communities. :-(

All votes, up or down, whether from Lemmy or the local or a different PieFed instance, are now restricted by an admin-set quota value. This was quietly reported outside of Matrix channels, buried into part of the 1.7 release of the code - see the exact relevant line at https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/commit/7e10e92de2cf271088b76a31d725cad67afe08aa/app/activitypub/routes.py#L2335.

This value can be adjusted however the admins desire (e.g. the PieFed.zip admins say they have set it to a ridiculously high value to essentially disable it, and other PieFed instances are coming out strongly against it), but by default is set at 240 (https://codeberg.org/rimu/pyfedi/src/branch/main/config.py#L191, thanks to flamingos@feddit.uk for reporting these lines of code). As in you can vote 240 times per day before you are blocked from doing so further. Logged-in PieFed users can see how much of their local instance quota they’ve used so far, but (i) no numeric values are presented, only a visual bar where you have to guess at where you are (e.g. do I have 10 votes left now? 100? 2?), (b) this will only show you the LOCAL instance quota - not the quotas of OTHER instances, and in particular the vote quota seems applied to incoming votes from Lemmy, Mbin, Mastodon, nodeBB, etc. platforms as well as PieFed instances, and © none of this is explained anywhere, on any page, e.g. there is currently no way to tell which instances use those quotas, nor what values they are currently set at.

And I thought I recalled hearing that there are caps already on posts and comments too, but I haven’t studied the code and I think this is not well known, if it is even true rather than me misremembering or misunderstanding something. PieFed seems to be going to some effort to limit its users ability to interact with the Threadiverse. Which obviously for some admins is going to be a big plus, to keep costs down by silencing all the “noise” from messy human interactions (although I don’t fully understand this: if that is what you want then why not just stop pulling in votes altogether, and simply sort by New?) but the manner in which this implementation has been rolled out… leaves PieFed open to an immense amount of criticism.

Many posts about it lately but here’s a good start:

Good summary: https://piefed.zip/c/home@piefed.zip/p/1635935/can-we-remove-the-vote-limiter-implemented-in-v1-7

“main” post: https://piefed.social/c/fediverse@piefed.social/p/2190040/who-decides-what-you-see-on-the-fediverse-a-look-at-voting-patterns

addressing the controversy: https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/2200155/improvement-for-the-vote-quota-implementation

Though with a difference that multiple centers exist, rather than exclusively one.

Also for those of us in the USA there are so many other life-threatening additional considerations to add: e.g. if we join Piefed.ca then what happens when the USA decides to invade Canada, so either communication gets cut off or people who use this social media get rounded up onto a convention camp?

PieFed is another federated threaded forum software like Lemmy, though just within the last week greatly surprised people by switching gears to be less like traditional social media that welcomes lots of engagement. The changes were not announced in advance, not something that can be opted out of (except by migration to another instance, which is what PugJesus is saying he will not consider doing) and are quite unpopular overall.

None of THAT background stuff will affect you on Lemmy.World, except that you’ll see a quieter network overall, especially now that PugJesus is leaving us.

Overall it is perhaps best to use the Threadiverse not as your sole or possibly even primary social media but as one among several, as this one is struggling (post).

Others have calculated and said that this is false. Remember we are not discussing merely votes on posts but also comments. Someone mentioned that the quota could be reached in two hours at a vote every 10 seconds. I cannot even see the numeric value of the vote quota so I am relying on the math of others who have studied this in greater depth.

This OP was not about whether you personally ever vote for content or not, but about how to manage other people who do want to use that feature.

I am in the latter category: mildly disappointed. 😞

Maybe a little more than mildly, tbh 😭.

Fwiw Piefed.zip won’t have a voting limit added right away (source).

Okay but historically, limiting votes does not end well.

So maybe implement ranked choice voting instead? j/k as far as this proposed solution but I hope you see what I mean here in terms of the underlying issue: democracy itself offers both problems and solutions to those who use it, hence why it is failing all across the globe.

Also, at least up until now, people have been offered a full CHOICE as to how much votes affect them, personally. Sorting by New ignores votes entirely, while sorting by Top used to consider all votes, but now will consider only some of them (if half are being discarded, some by the vote quota itself and others by people changing their behavior as a result of needing to constrain their votes, or at least hearing the signal loud and clear that lots and lots of votes are undesirable, hence they stop offering them). I haven’t thought about how this impacts users of Scaled sorting, which I myself never use, personally speaking.

I disagree: votes are whatever the recipient makes of them.

Voting controls who sees what content

Sorting by New - even comments underneath a post - prevents the votes from controlling who sees what.

it’s not kudos for content authors

Again, that’s not up to you. Perhaps you meant that it “shouldn’t” be that way? But none of us get to decide how others actually feel about things.

More to the point, votes reflect an “engagement” - a post that people upvote is one that they are saying is relevant, whether they enjoyed the content or not, while a fantastic item of content that receives hardly any votes…

is content that will in the future go to other platforms.

“almost”?!?

Would it be hilarious or no if this ends up being what started WWIII?

This will become our new catchphrase:-)

Much better than: “Do you even Fedi, braugh?”

Counterpoint: vim isn’t quite invisible, yet is the BEST tool 🔥

(which also… yeah pretty much goes mostly invisible)

It’s like running Linux, btw

When the flight started, it was an aisle seat!!

(/s btw, so there’s no confusion)

I called it an anti-feature bc voting is a feature, but now this works against that. It’s a

mandatory new feature that removes existing capabilities

You said

The vote quota is the equivalent of scaled feature.

But I believe this is not the case, at least if I am understanding it correctly? Scaled sorting takes the existing votes and sorts them differently than Hot or New, but this new anti-feature will prevent the votes from being allowed to be submitted in the first place. People have already commented that they want to upvote some things - iirc it was a comment of Rimu’s - but could not bc they had already reached their quote for the day.

I doubt I will reach the quota myself personally, but we will ALL be impacted by this change, I believe. It makes PieFed less “welcoming” to discard contributions made to it. It’s a hard enough sell to get people to switch to here from Reddit, without such “features” giving them subtle hints that they aren’t truly wanted here, and reminders that we are resource-starved while in comparison Reddit will bend over backwards to serve their needs (or at least pretend to).

Ask yourself why it was created.

I have asked not only myself but Rimu and everyone else, but I just don’t get it. The various explanations are that it’s “unfair”, and that it will save on resources. However, while it truly is “unfair” that the likes of ThePicardManeuver, PugJesus, etc. have to submit the majority of content across the entire Threadiverse… that is simply how it is right now, and as unbalanced as it is, it seems preferable to limiting their contributions?

For that matter, why don’t we say that it is “unfair” that Rimu makes all of the contributions to the PieFed sourcecode? Should we now act to limit Rimu’s contributions, because others are not keeping up? OF COURSE NOT!!! Nor do we ask our heavy posters to limit the actual posts that they submit…? So how then did votes suddenly become undesirable?

The technical burden argument resonates much more strongly with me. But… Rimu says that it is not for that reason. If it were then I could understand it, but since it is not…

What then is the reason that this is being done? It surely CAN’T be the “unfairness” issue - see above, especially the comparison with Rimu’s contributions - so what then IS the reason for it?

In your example, what if the two people talking the most were the only two adults in the room, and the rest were children? Or what of it were a technical meeting and they were the only two actual developers? Context matters so much there!!! Nothing in life is ever truly going to be “fair”, but at least we all had equal ability to vote on content, before the change, but now we do not - some people have less ability to vote as they wish than others. Consider: someone works very hard all week, then has a single day to check social media, but they reach the cap and then cannot vote anymore - why is their right to do so limited, whereas someone who votes equally but more spread out over the course of a week curtailed? Or someone who works hard all semester long, then has a break after finals week - they want to go on a social media splurge, but cannot, whereas someone who submits 100 times the total amount of votes is allowed to do so, as long as they space it out into multiple days.

You talk as if before was “unfair” - when everyone had the same access to vote as everyone else - but I say that the new method is the truly unfair, when some types of access are favored over others. This is not friendly or welcoming to people who have circumstances that are different than others.

I would be okay with a “rate limiter”, more than a “daily quota”, as the perception of the former is much more fair than the latter.

This will impact me, you, and all of us. If you think more about what I’ve said you will see how. It is one thing to handle existing votes on a different manner (opt-in to doing so), while it is another to mandatorily reject submitted votes right at the source (NOT opt-in, nor opt-out either, except by migration to another instance I guess, if you can figure out how to find one that does differently, and hope that they do not change their minds about the situation later).