I’d like to invite you all to share your thoughts and ideas about Lemmy. This feedback thread is a great place to do that, as it allows for easier discussions than Github thanks to the tree-like comment structure. This is also where the community is at.
Here’s how you can participate:
- Post one top-level comment per complaint or suggestion about Lemmy.
- Reply to comments with your own ideas or links to Github issues related to the complaints.
- Be specific and constructive. Avoid vague wishes and focus on specific issues that can be fixed.
- This thread is a chance for us to not only identify the biggest pain points but also work together to find the best solutions.
By creating this periodic post, we can:
- Track progress on issues raised in previous threads.
- See how many issues have been resolved over time.
- Gauge whether the developers are responsive to user feedback.
Your input may be valuable in helping prioritize development efforts and ensuring that Lemmy continues to meet the needs of its community. Let’s work together to make Lemmy even better!
Downvotes are an inherently unequal proposition, as they are now implemented. This allows everything from near and dear friends who respectfully disagree to randos with day-one accounts who don’t even know what a community is all about, to brigading events organized in a larger community (possibly on Reddit or in Matrix or Discord or such). e.g. iirc I can user-block someone or even an entire instance, but in retaliation they can see my profile and downvote everything I have ever done, or have a bot do so within seconds of new material coming out. Which would affect its discoverability.
Potential solutions would be to make them no longer anonymous, and/or when you block a user or an instance then they can no longer downvote that content - just like a user-level defederation. As it is now, user-level blocks are extremely weak and even notifications can be delivered by simply tagging someone’s username.
There are instances where downvotes are disabled, if you don’t like them you can just use an instance like that.
Downvotes are public and not anonymous, but they are hidden in Lemmy ui. Afaik you can see who downvotes your posts from Piefed or Mbin. See this thread: https://lemmy.world/post/18805474 or this: https://piefed.social/post/205362
MBIN makes upvotes visible, but PieFed doesn’t. The thread you linked to is about PieFed anonymising votes, so they aren’t revealed on instances like MBIN.
Lemmy: exactly - so you can either have all of downvotes or none of them, by picking such an instance, but there is really nothing in-between. Yet another example of “in-between” could be to show like downvotes from only members already subscribed to the community.
Mbin iirc doesn’t allow downvoting at all and instead has its own system of “reduces”, which does not federate at all with Lemmy, but instead acts as just another form of it. And yes those are publicly visible, which puts it ahead of Lemmy in this respect.
Piefed does the exact opposite of what I’m suggesting, even going so far as to hide the identity of downvoters from remote admins, who may need to know such things in order to ban someone who is being consistently abusive. I don’t think this is a good experiment. Anonymous polling results would be awesome though, so it depends on which type of “voting” we are talking about here.
Mostly what I mean is that someone who posts content to the Fediverse has to expose themselves in order to do that. Whereas downvoting goes against that principle, allowing someone to do what looks to 99.99% of Fedizens as an entirely anonymous procedure.
Also, a viewer can block a poster whose content they dislike and thereby never have to hear from them again, but not vice versa - the recipient has no choice but to receive votes (up or down). Except, as you mentioned, by going to an instance that disables them entirely. Which does not help all the enormous number of members already in instances such as Lemmy.world.
Hence the roles of content creator vs. viewer are unequal, skewed in favor of the downvoters having more power than the posters. Which can inhibit content creation, and given how lack of content (especially niche) is the primary issue with the Fediverse, it seems like making the roles more equal would help.
Thank you for the clarification, I understand what is your issue now
A more robust approach could involve combining multiple user engagement metrics like votes, reading time and number of comments, along with a system that sorts posts depending on how they compare to their community averages. This system would be less susceptible to manipulation by new accounts or brigading, as it would require genuine engagement across multiple factors to influence a post’s ranking.
Incorporating User Engagement Metrics in Lemmy’s Sorting Algorithms
In general I find that the comments that tend to contain the highest proportion of batshit insanity across the entire Fediverse - I’m talking reminding me of what it was like to argue with Magats on Reddit - are those from lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and lemmy.ml. e.g., ignoring 90% of what I say while hyper-focusing on a single thing, which they manage to twist into sounding as if I said the exact opposite, while demanding that I provide proof of all of my points, and ofc offering none of their own proof in return, plus what “proof” is offered ends up supporting my own point rather than theirs… It’s fucking exhausting.
And moreover it’s relentless. So it would seem that my options are to either move to Lemmy.cafe - the only one who has defederated from all of the big 3 - or block such people one by one, or just put up with it, since user blocking those instances does virtually nothing. Also, they could easily create an alt, on let’s say lemmy.world, to accomplish their anonymized downvoting fetishes.:-P
Do you recall if people are allowed to vote on your content after you’ve blocked them? Even if so though, those user blocks of instances (as compared to user blocks of users) would not block downvotes (they don’t even block showing of content, plus notifications can even still be sent just by tagging the recipient’s username), so someone who downvotes but never speaks up by commenting would go unnoticed.
Anyway, my own preferences aside, I’m trying to think of what would encourage people to post content more often, and reducing the overall level of toxicity present in the Fediverse seems like it would greatly help with that (even if that ends up being something that you have to curate yourself via blocklists, with mods and admins being unwilling and unable to keep up with such).