Then again, if there's a method to it and logic behind it, maybe these active downvoters are doing everybody a favour by screening content and downvoting things they consider to be of little value?
I don't know. It would be interesting to hear their motivation for sure.
PieFed shows us that he has an "attitude" of -40%, which I guess means that of 200 catloaf votes 140 will point downwards. So I guess at least it's nothing personal, he or she is just an active downvoter of things. I guess we all enjoy spending our time differently.
A cool potential feature would be weighted downvotes - giving downvotes form users with higher attitude scores (in PieFed terms) greater significance. But I'm derailing.
Yeah, I think your point is absolutely well made. And it's a good reason to, even if features like this are implemented widely, we shouldn't boast too much about voting being anonymous. It's just too difficult or impossible to make it bullet proof.
I don't think the automatic upvotes to your own posts count as real upvotes. At least they don't federate, so they shouldn't pose too much of a problem. I think they're just there to keep people from trying to upvote their own content.
It will never be foolproof for users coming from smaller instances, even with changing IDs. If you see a downvote coming from PieFed.social you already have it narrowed down to not too many users, and the rest you can probably infer based on who contributes to a given discussion.
Still, I think it's enough to be effective most of the time.
I was wondering what attitude was, but I never got around to checking it out in the documentation. I was wondering why PieFed insisted my attitude wasn't 100%. Makes sense now - I guess it just isn't!
(maybe a clickable question mark next to the attitude score explaining briefly what it is could be useful at some point)
It makes sense that Mastodon will dominate in terms of shares, as the platform is built around that.
I'm posting from PieFed, where boosting is not an option, but your post is perfectly integrated. :)
Sounds like you've got your priorities in other - enjoy it for all it's worth! :)
You'll need a GitHub account, unfortunately. (ActivityPub support in GitLab will be amazing for fediverse projects)
Ah. Part of me agrees, another part of me thinks we've been calling threaded messages threads for decades and I don't feel comfortable letting meta ruin it.
Threads doesn't really communicate with what's referred to as the Threadiverse anyway. Sometimes to mbin I guess, but only profiles that are actively invited by being followed by users on an instance. So I'm not sure this would change all that much.
I think one of the best things we have are users like @craftyindividual@lemm.ee and @anon6789@lemmy.world who almost single-handedly curate fantastic communities of content they're passionate about.
It's a huge job, and not something one could easily ask of anyone. So I don't have a quick fix how to attract more people like them or anything like that. But I think people doing these kinds of efforts deserve a shout-out.
I'm not very worried personally. I like it here, and it seems healthy enough in my eyes. I see people ask quite specific questions about many diverse topics and get incredibly helpeful answers, and I've been in that position myself as well. That doesn't mean it's not worth discussing the state of the community though, and I'm curious what people have on their minds. :)
If other people want to pay and be paid, that's fine, but for a lot of people in the open source sphere it leaves a bit of a bad taste.
Basically it becomes something very different once it's a product you're selling. I'm honestly not sure it's a good advice - your users will rightfully expect a lot more from you if they pay for the product, and you'll probably not make enough money for it to really make sense. So it'll be more work, more obligations, and monetary incentives won't be strong enough for it to make sense.
Encouraging users to make donations to cover the cost of operation, on the other hand, makes all the sense in the world.