this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Lemmy

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Should Mastodon votes be federated into Lemmy? (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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I am concerned that Mastodon's unary-vote system (favorites), and Lemmy's binary-vote system (upvotes with downvotes) are mutually exclusive.

In a unary-vote system, a post's vote count generally has little use beyond expressing the post's absolute popularity/engagement, whereas, in a binary vote system, a post's vote count can be used to gauge opinions, such as its level of quality, trust, or agreement. This difference in usage makes me concerned that the votes federated from Mastodon will water down the votes originating from Lemmy.

Currently, I can think of two possible solutions to this:

  1. Lemmy de-federates any votes originating from Mastodon (might be tricky as it would rely on all instances following suit)
  2. Add an option for the user to toggle within their settings allowing them to toggle off non-binary votes.
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[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Downvotes are often disproportionately used to silence members of vulnerable groups when they post in shared spaces so some instances already ignore them.

Upvotes from the microfediverse is a non issue

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 20 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Downvotes are also often appropriately used to silence fascists spewing hate.

[–] ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

If fascists are getting downvoted but not banned, you need to find a new instance

[–] DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe 8 points 11 months ago

I agree, that's why Beehaw sucks. You can spew all kinds of hateful garbage but as long as you use the right dogwhistles to have a veneer of civility people will blindly upvote it because all they see is positive reactions.

[–] Kalcifer@sh.itjust.works 1 points 11 months ago

It does appear that downvotes have the effect of burying posts:

Score = Upvotes - Downvotes
Rank = ScaleFactor * log(Max(1, 3 + Score)) / (Time + 2)^Gravity

Perhaps this could be an argument for adding a more diverse set of voting options. For example, a service could have votes separated into emotional categories (e.g. voting with emojis similar to what facebook has). One could then tailor the algorithm to reduce the algorithmic weight of negative emotions (e.g. angry emojis), as, conjecturally, people are more likely to negatively vote on something than to positively vote on it.