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Lemmy vote aggregation idea (sopuli.xyz)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

24 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Alright, this one will be weird but I’m coming to accept I might be way further on the spectrum than I thought. Reader beware, it’s probably dumb but kind of amusing and fun to think about.

We are currently dealing with various kinds of vote manipulation and that affects visibility of things even if we don’t care about imaginary points. As long as they are used for sorting they’re not that imaginary because I can sort by new but most will not have time and will want to peek. Now, the main issue here are the extremes - instances used to flood votes or weirdos stalking other users.

Currently Lemmy/Piefed/Mbin create a federated network but votes are still kind of a direct democracy. What if that democracy was federated too? One can think of this as federating consensus. There are two approaches to implementing this but the idea boils down to either outside instances aggregating votes made on their side and sending final voting result on a scale -1/0/1 or alternatively this aggregation could be done by the hosting community.

What this solves:

Flooding is harder because you need to keep on making instances.
People have more motivation to join smaller instances because that way their vote matters more.
People have more motivation to join interest / theme / location based instances so that their vote is aggregated with similar people.
Weirdos will set up their own instances meaning even more decentralisation.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

My pet peeve is people downvoting in communities they aren't subscribed to about posts they aren't interested in. They just sort by new, and when they see something they don't like, they smash that downvote button without even looking at the post or contents.

Part of it is because we all have unlimited votes; people vote without thinking. It would be different if everyone had a finite number of votes to use. And you get awarded a few votes for making a comment or post. Maybe award extra votes for commenting in small communities.

This would serve 2 purposes. 1.) People would use their votes a lot more thoughtfully. 2.) It would encourage people to comment and post more.

The downside is that someone could set up a bot to spam posts and comments into a dead community just to rack up votes.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I was thinking of this too but then you need to keep track of who’s allowed to vote and that’s weird thing to federate even conceptually.

Something along similar lines is how they do it on Slashdot where users are randomly assigned limited number of points to be used for voting which makes them more precious in general. Tildes is also interesting in that regard because while there are no downvotes there, trusted users can apply labels that serve as something between a reason for downvote and a report. For example comment can be tagged as „noise” for not bringing anything to discussion which automatically ranks it below other comments but not removes it entirely. This prevents jokes being the top reply which is nice. Nothing against jokes but it depends on what kind of content you want others too see on your platform.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

I agree, some seems to think there's still an algorithm learning their preferences, or that the little 'down' arrow is to go to the next post..