this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Asklemmy
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There shouldn’t be votes. Activitypub itself shouldn’t have votes but I can understand the broader community around it wanting them to kludge in functionality of places they’re trying to ape.
If you’re coming from Reddit or wherever though and don’t see this as a perfect opportunity to get rid of the part of the site all the problems stem from or are enabled by, I don’t know what to say.
Get rid of the votes.
How do you sort the content without votes? How do you pick out the good stuff from the spam?
You read it and when it’s good you respond with a contribution or expansion on the ideas presented.
Maybe you quote the post but write nothing, or put an emoji nodding and smiling and pointing at the quoted text.
When something’s spam you either ignore it or tell that person to fuck off. Maybe you report their posts, then a mod drops in and confirms that they should fuck off and either gently corrects them or bans them with whatever level of granularity is appropriate.
Are you willing to accept the assumption that bad content (e.g., spam, advertising, trolling, low effort posts) is far more common than good content (I.e.., high effort posts)?
If you are, then it seems to me that your system would involve a lot more people interacting with a lot more bad content than they do good content. Down votes are a mechanism that let's one person's time wasted interacting with bad content reduce the probability that everyone else will have to waste their time on that content.
No, that assumption is wrong. That phenomenon didn’t become common and problematic until systems to remove the human element were put in place. Like voting.
Think of the forum you go to for your niche hobby. No, not the subreddit or lemmy !, the forum with all those old guys (they are guys for my hobby) with signatures that have pictures of their pets and Miata and a proud listing of the equipment they use to do their thing. Do those places have problems with spam, advertising, trolling or low effort posts?
Of course not! Spam gets removed, advertising is relegated to the buy/sell/trade subforum, trolling is accepted or moderated out based on the community’s preference and ditto for posting effort.
Votes are very important if you’re trying to create a system that encourages a parasocial relationship between users. If you don’t want to encourage a parasocial interaction then there’s not much reason for votes.
Interesting perspective. Thanks for genuinely engaging, by the way.
I worry that the mechanisms you describe might not work as the number of users gets large. Check out "Eternal September" if you don't know about it already. Niche forums might be able to run like that just because they will never have too many members. For forums which many people are interested in (e.g., cat memes), this might not be possible. They may need a mechanism for high-grading content.
forgive me for swinging at the low hanging fruit, but:
if only there were some system that allowed users to switch to different servers when they get tired of the one theyre on.
september was a problem on usenet because it was a huge platform everybody was on. the structure of federated systems is inherently secure from septembers of yore and behaves like old forum splits. look at whats happening on world right now, it's having problems and people are leaving for other servers.
if all of facebook for example suddenly got sprayed onto a federated system, people who didn't want to be around that would just move to servers that enforced their norms or didn't federate with the newbies.
there is no need for content grading unless we just want to have that particular "internet as tv" parasocial relationship.
Fair enough, but that still doesn't address the problem for people who do want to be on a large server---full of many people who share their cat meme interests---and see mostly high quality content.
Wanting to be in a forum with thousands or millions of other enthusiasts is a legitimate use case for this kind of social media platform. In that use case, I don't know of any other way but voting to efficiently filter low quality content. "Just leave" avoids the problem rather than solving it, by denying people the opportunity to do the thing that most people go to Reddit for: to be part of huge communities and just see the good threads and comments.
Well now that’s a horse of a different phenotype. A person who wants to be in a giant platform shouldn’t leave when the aol users come barging in.
But voting isn’t required for that size of system to work. Consider a big forum: the cat memes thread might be a hundred thousand pages long and might have an images only button so you only ever see the memes, none of the commentary. Do you need a voting system to keep the quality up? No! When someone posts bad memes they’re told to get it right by all the other people.
I think one of the parts of Reddit (and most social media tbh) that you’re not really engaging with is that most users don’t post. Most users don’t put up pictures of themselves or share the most recent thing they ate or comment on someone else’s. Most users don’t fire off a two sentence missive when someone cuts them off in traffic or repost someone else’s so all their friends will see it. Most people using social media don’t post. And that’s fine.
So when you have a platform with that situation and you’re making money off of ads you want technologies that push engagement. For some platforms it was bigger more aggregated front pages (digg, slashdot, Reddit) and some more subtle ones used the conflict algorithm. That’s why we never saw votes before the age of social media, there wasn’t a reason to have them.
But when you’re not trying to sell ads and go public and get acquired and retire at 30 a multi-millionaire, that’s a “solution” (it messes up more stuff than it fixes) in search of a “problem” (there was never a dearth of good posts and everyone could find them).
We don’t need to extensive metrics to have a good, big, high quality community.