Well, I’m too weak and sick to try to zoom in with my traditional power-glove diplomacy, so what do you figure you’ll do then, mate?

As I said in the post.

I’m leaving. I’m out. This is it for me.

I just don’t have the energy to undertake another instance migration with all my comms.

I’ll go back to doomscrolling Tumblr and playing more games, I suppose.

(altho that’s still a lot voting, mate!!)

Sure, but it’s maybe two hours of browsing. I don’t browse for two hours every day, but when I do, I would like to not be frustrated by the experience.

Not a ‘fraud’, in any way. Just a bad decision, and possibly poorly thought out in addition.

I know nothing about the technical side, though the fact that Rimu pivoted to a different explanation when pressed has me skeptical. But it very well could be that voting uses up some significant amount of ‘the commons’ in federating votes. I suspect the actual impact is minimal, though, considering that Piefed.social is the only instance that has even broached the issue, so far as I know, in the three years I’ve been on the Fediverse. And, as mentioned before, it’s trivial to ‘get around’, resulting in the same vote-federation burden as large numbers of votes with one account.

The other explanation offered by Rimu, which I regard as much more likely, is Rimu’s claim that it’s in some way unfair for a small number of users to make up such a large proportion of the Fediverse’s activity. I take him at his word on this - I think he genuinely believes that. No fraud involved. Just a view that power users are some form of ‘influencer’ whose activity is undesirable because it ‘sways’ the community towards the opinions of the most active users.

Rimu, I suspect, thinks that cutting down the tall poppies will just create a more even distribution. Instead, I suspect, it will either result in the former distribution proportion reasserting itself, just with a lower cap and a lower average (thus requiring another reduction of the cap, to ensure a small number of users don’t ‘dominate’ the activity - repeat ad infinitum, or until the instance is dead); or the ‘more even’ distribution being significantly lower in general from decreased activity, as the core function of social media - interaction with others - generates more activity from others as a knock-on effect. It’s self-feeding.

Or self-starving, in this case.

Damn, I certainly can’t imagine voting 240x in a single day. There might remotely be that number of opportunities in my subscribed stream, but that would be like me forming an opinion upon every-goldurn thing that I possibly saw in that day. And beyond, really?

There are 303 comments in this post alone. If I have an opinion on 2/3s of them, I’m almost at the cap.

~300 comment posts are not the norm on the Fediverse, but I see a fair number of ~80 comment posts. If I run across two or three of them, suddenly I would have very few other opportunities to upvote.

Considering, on top of that, I post quite a bit and get a fair number of comments on each (I had ~90 comment replies to my posts on a pretty normal day’s output on HistoryMemes alone), it doesn’t take much browsing to hit 240 votes.

Huh. Are we really defining “power users” as ones who vote a whole bunch every day? Because I’d never in a million years chance on that angle.

Power users are those who use a system a disproportionately large amount. Rimu explicitly said it was because the distribution of activity between the most active users (ten or so of us, if memory serves) and the majority.

This is not actually unusual in any online community, but it was apparently worth Rimu’s ire, even after being advised against it by several people, including a fellow Fediverse admin.

That’s not quite true as I understand it. No, I do believe the changes directly help with the stated goals of keeping down vote-brigading / botting and such. That’s some important shizzle that needs to happen no matter the implementation.

Rimu explicitly said that he didn’t think that the top ten users who he was targeting were bots or coordinated. Furthermore, as other people have pointed out, it’s trivially easy to set up a bot to circumvent the voting limit. The only people this punishes are people who are actually interested in interacting with the Fediverse on one account - in other words, the people least likely to be bots or bad actors.

For sure I didn’t realise that some here hit their vote limit, but what are the metrics on that?

I don’t know about the metrics, but I noted in my goodbye thread numerous users whose ‘vote quota’ bars were filled up. Most of them weren’t Piefed.social users, so they won’t even be aware that their votes are being rejected by Piefed.social. Their vote is shadow-banned, in a sense.

Is it maybe better for the cap to be lifted in to a sort of zone that meets both requirements?

What ‘other requirement’ is there, if the problem was not and has never been botting or bad actors? The only two justifications offered by Rimu have been that it’s a ‘bad use’ of ‘the commons’ for people to vote so much; and that a small number of users should not make up such a large proportion of the Fediverse’s activity.

PJ, is just possible that you keeping up the unholy pace of contributing amazing content here on a daily basis possibly weared on you over time? Personally I know it’s been for me, altho I work in a different format. But three years is a hell of a long time to contribute to a free internet project intended for the public good.

No, not at all. Fact is, I miss it terribly, even only a week out. I miss posting much more than voting and browsing, even. But I’m also not going to be half-in and half-out, generating content but stripped of the ability to interact with the content of others on my own terms - terms that I’ve been interacting on for the past three years, and that has never been a problem - in any instance - until now. “I upvote what I like” is apparently no longer acceptable on Piefed.social, if you’re online ‘too much’.

So I always said you lot were just funny words on a screen to me, but I did tear up a little reading your comments. I guess I’ll miss a number of you. It made me feel better about the time I spent here posting, and worse about leaving.

I wish I had it in me to keep going like the last few times.

Thanks. To all (or, rather, the vast majority) of you. It was because of you that I enjoyed my time on the Fediverse so much.

1. Because it has a bizarre, but coherent, justification that suggests outright hostility towards ‘power users’.

2. Because it was dropped suddenly, without warning or prior suggestion that it was in any way incoming, to the point where other Piefed instance admins were surprised by its introduction (as an opt-out feature, not opt-in).

3. Because it enshittifies the user experience of active accounts for no real gain. Shit, man, several users here, in this very thread, hit the vote limit. The ones who are on non-Piefed.social accounts probably won’t realize that their subsequent votes aren’t being counted by Piefed.social because they ‘voted too much’.

I’ll probably go back to doomscrolling Tumblr and the like. I was a lurker on Reddit for years - while I don’t intend to go back to Reddit, lurking is what my social media consumption was before the Fediverse, and it seems that is probably what it will be after.

Honestly, only HistoryRuins/InhabitedBeauty really felt joblike (and I only started those because I couldn’t find where to put a handful of cool pictures - and then didn’t want the comms to die of inactivity, so I kept up the daily posting DX), and to a lesser degree, Shermanposting (mostly because I started to run dry and had to search ever-deeper for new Sherman memes XD), and HistoryArtifacts insofar as I fucking hate sourcing but recognize that you kind of have to with artifacts.

Everything else, I loved doing, honestly.

But I can’t do it even on the comms I enjoy posting in with low feedback all over again. The conversations are one of the best parts of posting. I could do this as-is for three more years, but… I can’t start from scratch again. That is too joblike.

I did it the first three times because I wanted to help the Fediverse grow, but… a guy’s got limits, unfortunately.

So it was a massive outrage, not worthy of the dev’s time to at least offer an explanation, and yet one more example of the right-wing dev / runner-path. Really?

What?

At no point did I say that Rimu was right-wing in any sense or say that he shouldn’t have offered an explanation?

This is a shitty administration decision, it will have shitty effects on the instance long-term, and, especially, it affects me, personally, in a shitty way that I’m not willing to put up with. That’s it.

Man, I literally hit the cap before it was even announced. I went to the Matrix channel, confused as hell, and got told it was intentional.

The cap is 240 votes. I almost hit the cap just upvoting most of the comments here yesterday. If I participated in any real discussions outside of my own comms, I would almost certainly hit the daily cap on that given day.

The issue was not abuse, and Rimu didn’t say it was abuse in that sense. The issue was always that Rimu doesn’t think that a small minority should be more active in participating on here than the majority.

The combination of the irritation (being unable to upvote replies to your own material being particularly grating) and what it suggests about the future of the instance.

I actually planned on continuing to post as-usual (upvoting with alts, annoying as that would be) after I discovered it, but when the reasoning came out I knew it was the canary in the coal mine.

Yeah, I agree. Institutions running instances would be much more reliable. Unfortunately, we play the game with the cards we have, not the cards we want.

In general, I agree that a comment usually means more than a vote.

But that’s not really the question here - the question here is whether restricting voting because some people vote ‘too much’ is in any way a reasonable point of view for an instance on the Threadiverse. As Rimu himself pointed out, the primary targets of this are ten ‘top’ voters, who are hardly going to be placing more comments to ‘replace’ their lost votes.

Assuming, of course, comments aren’t next to be limited, since that’s also an ‘outsized influence’ from a ‘small minority’.

Whilst I sense the sarcasm of your tone, I do largely agree that post and comment caps would likely dampen the effect of overactive subs (filtering out political posts by curating my subscriptions is a chore…)

… most of those political posts aren’t done by the same people. They’re ‘overactive’ because many Fediverse users are heavily political. So limiting the number of individual user posts or comments would do jack shit for that.

Anyway, to get to the crux of it: I’d be sad if you leave, but not sad if you posted a little less

Sorry that I want to participate in a community on my own terms. You won’t have to worry about that frightening level of autonomy from me on here anymore.

but if the level of discourse had an upper cap which easily contains the habits of a semi-active user, then I generally welcome it.

Again, your commenting far outstrips that of a semi-active user. Perhaps you should be advocating for a comment limit based on the average user as well.

You should probably advocate for a post limit based on the average poster too. Wouldn’t want it to be unfair, after all. And posts are MUCH more visible than votes or comments.

I have a feeling that this impacts largely a minority of one.

It was geared towards the muzzling of ten ‘top’ users (10, mind you, is some ~2% of the daily users of Piefed.social to begin with), but under the presumption that their votes are evenly spread out, day-by-day.

In reality, most people aren’t on the Fediverse every day - they come in, participate in a discussion or three, and then might not be back for a few days. So it’s easy to hit the limit, as it is a daily limit, simply by being active in a discussion.

I feel like critical mass is very much possible and sustainable in this medium. I remember watching Reddit communities hit critical mass, and it was generally similar to the curve here, just on a faster scale.

The issue is the instability, and the instability is largely because of poor planning (God love Ernest, and I hear he’s doing better health-wise now, but he shouldn’t have been running the instance basically solo to begin with) and decisions.

If we post a lot, why not

Okay, so you don’t actually think I misinterpreted the vote quota, unlike your original objection.

Yet we are both the top posters but that’s not a good thing. I think that’s a good way to limit the power we have on the fediverse and let other people express their opinion.

Whose opinion am I preventing from being expressed? What finite resource is being used up?

Even if we know jot thing, share lot things, i wouldn’t mind if someone told me to slow down.

By making any comments at all, you’re already in the top 1% of users. Wanna guess how high up you are by making almost (gasp) a whole comment a day?

I think you ought to be muzzled. For fairness sake, of course!

And i don’t know where you got this idea that it was different. Since the beggining piefed tell how much hour we are connected and have a blocklist on far right website.

What the fuck does that have to do with crippling your own growth and intentionally enshittifying the experience of your users?

I consider it as part of our wellness to limit use of our screentime. But maybe you need it much more than us to escape this reality and be with the people you love.

Hey. Father Knows Best, and users are just children, right? Us lowly users need to be told how much ‘screen time’ is ‘appropriate’ for us. Thanks, I’m so glad I’m being parented by a fucking admin while trying to destress from keeping my own life together and powering through local politics on enough anti-anxiety meds to kill a horse. Thanks for taking this from me, this will really improve my mental health. /s

I’m sorry I spend a few hours a day shitposting while I do other things, the same amount of time as it’d take to watch a movie, reading a few chapters of a book, or a few episodes of a TV show in the background. Clearly my crippled ass should be doing ‘real person’ things, like contact sports. And my friends should stop having ‘lives’ and ‘schedules’ and simply be available whenever I’m free (this I agree with, tbf, but is unlikely to come about).

That’s both the curse and the joy of free software. I alway moved to follow my value even thought i lose a lot everytime. In a sense that’s also why i dom’t blame reddit users, they have enough and don’t want to change. They just want to be there. Sorry if the recent change didn’t fit your need. I though a pylova account would be enough for you. :(

If you’re so concerned about the ‘average user’, then maybe you should consider what less ‘power users’ making content will cause the ‘average user’ to do. That is to say, participate even less - or abandon the Fediverse entirely.

But hey, as long as you show those power users what-for, kneecapping your own project is a small price to pay, right?

Maybe you have an alternative idea to suggest but mind that’s not a post quota but a vote quota. Anyway, i understand if people desagree, i didn’t suggest it but i agree with the core idea, the reasons behind it. If there is a counterargument, i can my opinion.

“If there is a counterargument”?

Fuck, there are nothing but counterarguments.

“Why do we want to restrict participation when the Fediverse’s core issue at present is low activity?”

“Why are we restricting something that does not consume a meaningfully limited resource and which is primarily oriented towards boosting the visibility of other content?”

“Why did we not take a basic class in statistics or do a quick fucking search for common activity distributions?”

“What benefit do we reasonably expect to see from this policy?”

A post quota was already proposed, and that’s one of the reasons why I no longer trust Piefed.social. This isn’t a one-off thing, this is an implementation of long-considered values.

Honestly, as I said elsewhere, I could do it if it was just my user profile. Communities are the real issue. Building up activity to the point where I’m not always the only person posting takes months of constant activity, every time.

I just don’t have it in me again.

Man, you comment far more than the average user, much less the ‘silent majority’. The average user doesn’t upvote much; they comment even less. Would it be ‘fairer’ for your comments to be limited? After all, you’re a ‘vocal minority’ whose activity is swaying the Fediverse. Wouldn’t it be ‘fairer’ if you participated less, regardless of the fact that your participation does not actually consume (meaningfully) limited resources or space?