this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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On the relevance of upvotes in relation to quality and discussion (programming.dev)
submitted 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) by Pro@programming.dev to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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I treat social media as pure discussion platform to advance understanding or to know new stuff.

There had been something on my mind lately which I wanted to discuss as a way to improve the upvotes relevance to the quality of the post and the amount of discussion.

Let's apply quality control on upvotes, so any post can get only 20 upvotes till it gets a specific amount of comments then the limit could be pumped up to 40 upvotes till it gets more comments, etc...

Why I am bringing this up, you might ask? The linked post by me is the peek proof of my point.

It's pretty clear no one read the linked article and despite that, the post is the top post in the technology community. There is no comments discussing directly the story and from the face of it, There does not seem to be any indicator that any one benefited from this.

I skimmed over the story and shared it in the hopes to basically learn new stuff, get relevant recommendations or basically read some direct discussions.

In any way, I think my described system to handle upvotes would highly improve Lemmy, taking into consideration that numbers used are only for demonstration and the used numbers will need to be figured out separately.

Should this system be implemented into Lemmy?

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[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Honestly, I've begun to think the upvote/downvote model is a bad fit for the fediverse in general:

*Different instances have different rules around it, and in some cases (for example, an instance disabling downvoting) this might give a modest advantage in the sorting for content on that instance

*Instances have to trust votes by other instances, and while an obvious manipulation could be defederated, that has to be noticed first

*Votes are more publicly visible than on a place like reddit, potentially leading to something like a downvote being a catalyst for incivility towards the downvoter by whoever posted something

Honestly what I would do with Lemmy voting is just make vote counts mostly not federate. Have instances send a single up, down, or neither vote depending on if the net number on their insurance passes a certain up or downvote threshold, just so people on private instances have something to sort by, and have the score of a post or comment otherwise just go off of whatever the users within an instance vote. Then, an individual instance could have whatever rules or restrictions on voting it wanted, without worry over if that gets its votes drowned out by the wider network or seen as vote manipulation.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That means that most /all/ content on every single fediverse instance will be hugely biased in favour of local content.

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If one wanted to ensure that external content is still easily visible, one could always have things set up so that posts on local communities only appears in local and subscribed, and only posts from outside appear in all (though it might need to be renamed to better fit such a layout I suppose)

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Well, sure, that would stop that - but I don't see what benefit this gives the fediverse really. You would actually be giving small privately hosted instances enormous voting power across the fediverse, so grants opportunity for manipulation in its own right.

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

thats fair I suppose, though in practice id assume that making a whole bunch of individual instances is probably more difficult than making a much of accounts on one instance that you control, and thus vote manipulation in this manner should have a higher barrier to entry?

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I mean to be fair, a user could simply make accounts across the hundreds of tiny forgotten fediverse servers that exist and upvote and downvote from there, skewing results.

[–] CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 1 points 3 days ago

Hmm, that is fair. I would suggest making votes not federate at all in that case, except doing that would make single person or very small instances effectively be limited to sorting by new