Some will cheer, some will be mildly disappointed. But I'm out, I think.
this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2026
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And the long version is here. The reasoning is flawed because the impact of votes on the public discourse has diminishing returns, if someone is voting on so much content they're most likely voting on stuff people wouldn't see regardless of their vote; in the meantime I bet most of that "tail" of users who vote only a bit focus mostly on posts that show up in the front page.
I also think this is the wrong way to do it. It would be more sensible to encourage other users to speak their mind more often, than to arbitrarily limit how much is "too much voting".
Or, it would be fine to discard people's votes in the sense of a new scoring algorithm that discounts them. That would be opt-in to a new feature that those of us who don't want it could simply ignore.
But to arbitrarily simply THROW VOTES AWAY? Damn that's unfriendly. Especially when the culture on the Threadiverse has been absolutely begging for activity since before the Rexodus even, while now all of a sudden in less than a week that virtue turned sour and actively became a vice?
Tbf there may be stuff that I am unaware of - like a coordinated campaign to make Russia look good at Ukraine's expense? THAT I think most people could agree with deserves shutting down. But upvotes of cat pictures? LET THE CAT-VOTES COMMENCE! i.e. a signal, conveying that...
Even if the top voters were a problem (I don't think they are), there are multiple ways to address this than to stop them from voting past a certain limit. For example, a pop-up asking if you really want to issue yet another vote that day, if you voted past a certain limit; it would get old really fast, but not outright prevent you from saying what you want.
If votes were made public, then people could make informed decisions on whether to block the top voters - up or down. Votes are inherently public data anyway, just hidden from view by most interfaces.
Alternately, we already have an Attitude score, just add a new Engagement score to highlight people who engage more vs. less? If people want to block users who engage a ton with posts, they can again make an INFORMED DECISION as to whether they want to do so.
As it is now though, PieFed hides downvotes (merging them together with upvotes), blocks lemvotes.org to hide all voting data from PieFed.social, and now full-on throws these additional contributions into the garbage bin. All of which would be fine, if they had been transparently performed. However, I note the language of "Newbie friendly: Yes" for Piefed.social at https://piefed.social/auth/instance_chooser, which would seem to imply that someone coming in from Reddit could readily adopt this as their social media platform? The truth though is that they need to read a fair bit about the culture and various sub-cultures here, and most importantly read the unwritten rules, like how this is not aimed to be a social media replacement (which is HUGE news to me btw!!!), and instead... I dunno exactly, but maybe it's aiming to become a Mastodon replacement? Or an old-school forum board one, just federated? It can be whatever it wants, but IMHO it needs to actually SAY WHAT THAT IS, or else risk immense disappointment when people find out the hard way.
As PugJesus did, though many others now will be spared that, by avoiding PieFed in the future?
And I need to face facts myself: we are a Linux forum, and we will never be anything else. I've gone back to Reddit over the last couple of days and rediscovered what having CONTENT is like!! Whole swaths of events happening in the world that you never hear so much as a whisper about here. Rarely - I could count on one or two hands - you see someone sharing true OC like a comic artist, but the vast majority of "content" in this place seems to just be circle-jerking. Do you think I am wrong in these musings? The ONE thing that (I thought) it had going for it was it being more open and welcoming. And maybe some instances - like blahaj - still are, but PieFed.social seems to be signaling HARD that it is not interested in "fluff", and now wants to be serious (like Mastodon), despite having next to no actual content to offer in that regard? I desperately wish that I am wrong here...
I also think votes should be public. Because of what you said, plus encouraging mindful voting; if someone knows they'll be called out for upvoting crap or downvoting good stuff, they'll be more likely to not do it. It isn't a flawless idea though, I do know it might encourage mob mentality; and I believe that mob mentality is probably the reason PieFed went the opposite direction, trying to make votes as private as possible. But frankly, I don't know either what PieFed is "trying" to be.
On the "Fediverse forums" being a Linux forum, I think users here talk more about politics than Linux. That said your main point is completely correct, content diversity here is only a tiny fraction of what it is in Reddit, not just because of the smaller userbase but because people here are a bit more similar in what they want to discuss (I hope this makes sense).
I no longer feel that I know this either. Maybe it wants to become more like nodeBB and Mastodon? It's definitely a departure from Reddit though, which again is fine but that fact being unannounced is what troubles me. Plus in the past Rimu has marketed it as a replacement for Lemmy, though I suppose that is up to heavy interpretation.
What are its core values and principles? And if not like Reddit, then why Reddit-shaped? Its visualization leads people to have certain EXPECTATIONS, whether it desires that to have occurred or not. Form typically follows function, so if deviating from them... what then?
Rimu would seem to vehemently disagree. And legitimately people's needs fluctuate - sometimes you just want to unwind by watching some memes, while other times you can be more in the mood for a deeper conversation. Part of what I am saying here is that a more Reddit-esque general purpose solution has worked out well for us all so far. Now it seems like Rimu is wanting to offer additional "specialization", both by building it straight into the code (this recent controversy due to it having been offered as an opt-out rather than opt-in feature!!!), and by - with zero advanced warning & barely having announced it at all - suddenly deploying onto the flagship instance PieFed.social.
As we aim to "specialize", suddenly all these questions begin to become crucial (such as who are we and what do we want out of this platform), which previously when we were still more general-purpose were irrelevant.
On a general-purpose platform, we all got along just fine. But now if some things are "bad" that were previously "good", conflict inevitably arises.
And it's so confusing to people how sudden this all is, as it takes them time to absorb it all - e.g. how much of this specialization is able to be be set aside, like will PieFed.zip and .ca and .world be more welcoming to memes / "low-effort" content? while in contrast is PieFed.social now no longer mere not desiring such but becoming actively hostile to it? and making that the DEFAULT behavior in the code no less!!! We thus now need statements from PieFed.ca, .zip, .world etc. as to whether they support this new trend towards active hostility towards heavy upvoters. But again, this is all so new and sudden, that I would wager that many PieFed admins didn't even know this was coming up, so are unprepared for this.
This sudden deployment is a MAJOR part of the problem. Especially buried as it is in a v1.7 - like this hasn't been treated as the major backwards compatibility breaking change that it is, like I could see something like this in a 2.0, but buried in a 1.7 with hardly any explanation at all?
I would like Rimu to read more Machiavelli. It would help PieFed survive longer.