I’m super impressed by the features I’m discovering using Piefed! I’m going to be experimenting a lot with the keyword filter particularly. Here are some ideas we might add to make Piefed even better. Share you own in the replies.
Some of these options where too long to make it a poll.
Allow restricting posting and commenting to subscribers: https://lemmy.world/comment/18549782
My ideal default would be, users have to subscribe to vote, because drive-by downvotes are very common, and keep niche communities from getting anywhere in the
All
feed.I think maybe only subscribers should be allowed to downvote, but anyone should be able to upvote
Another reason is to avoid the Reddit problem of people upvoting of off-topic posts by people who don’t pay attention to what community it’s posted in. I don’t think Piefed/Lemmy/etc. has those kind of users (yet) but it’s good future-proofing.
Currently the most popular suggestion is to have a "upvote this post and all it’s cross posts” function, which would make that problem worse…
Yeah, I’m not sure why people want that. In all honestly I wouldn’t implement it if it were me, but if you do I suggest restricting it to communities with the same topic, or maybe even restricting it to communities with the exact same name.
There often are multiple communities for the same thing. Rust for example. The result is that in some interest fields posts are often cross-posted to a bunch of same communities. With Piefed displaying all comments from all cross-posts, there is little need to switch between communities. But if the post is good, I feel it should receive a vote not only in the community that just happened to be on top of the feed
On the other hand, sometimes posts get traction because a lot of people upvote them from All
Why not just remove down votes from the post ranking algorithms entirely, since they seem to be the cause of a bunch of consternation anyway?
Eh, a good community owner will catch the repeat downvoters and ban them. It does exist, but if you’re on top of your community you will be able to stop it.
I do not want people banned for voting activity. How is this even an idea with traction? Votes are not real, they can’t hurt you. If we are so concerned about the impact of down votes on communities then just remove them from the rank calculations.
If we need to ban people for using the goddamn site mechanics then perhaps those mechanics are just flawed.
I’ve already explained this, because people value a high-trust community culture. People don’t like it when bots, or even individual accounts go to a community and downvote everything on there and keep doing it because they can. It can be corrosive and damaging to new communities viability.
That’s another option, but this is what the wider fediverse has gone with currently - regarding downvotes as credible when used fairly.
But again, it’s up to community moderators here - not instance owners. Some communities won’t care, some will only care if its repeated downvote activity with no interaction, and others will be really bad about it.
Right, so we are going to twist ourselves in circles and allow/enable censorship just for using the site, over a single mechanic which doesn’t need to impact anything in the first place? Am I taking crazy pills here? This is such a dumb issue with an easy and obvious solution.
“It’s really annoying how this door shocks me every time I use it. I could just disconnect the power source, but whining about it is easier.”
People already fairly and unfairly censored all over the website by community owners for how they use a community. There are unjust bans all the time.
Removing downvotes would also have an impact on how content trends, so its not quite as easy as you’re alleging here.
Notably a handful of instances do disable downvotes, like blahaj if I recall.
I’m not saying disable down votes. I’m saying make them placebos. Let people “do an engagement” or whatever to give them a sense of pride and accomplishment, but just eliminate them from the actual engagement calculation. There are plenty of other metrics for ranking posts.
Well all the same, visible or not - it would still have an impact as ragebait posts would trend. I don’t think that upvote/downvote system myself is nuanced enough anyway, but whilst we have it, it is what it is.
Not if always done by what looks to be random accounts, and also that takes effort, which gets harder as a community grows in size.
Yeah, I suppose in my experience - most of the downvoters that caused problems were persistent. You’ll never stop downvote noise though. But that also goes for upvote noise.
Unless you limit all votes to only count from subscribers. It would not stop dedicated trolls who simply subscribe purely in order to manipulate votes, but it would halt all casual drive-by noise.
I mean if you limited votes purely to subscribers as a new community, you’d get nowhere because no post would trend for anyone new to find the community.
Hrm… might still be worth it?
Or switch a community only after it increases to a certain size or at least passes an age threshold.
Or only allow votes from “trusted” instances, where moderation practices are actually enforced and serial abusers are detected and banned.
I think it should be completely up to community owners. I have no problem with them being able to make that choice.