p3x.deThe Voting Quota has ruined my workflow
So, I used to vote on posts constantly—not really to give karma, but as a quick way to mark them as read to get them out of my feed. It was perfect: a single click, much faster than actually opening the post. But now with the new voting quota in place, I can’t do that anymore without hitting the limit. According to discussions on the instance, the quota was implemented to limit voting activity, and it’s already affecting users who vote frequently.
The “Hide posts I’ve interacted with” setting is still there, but it relies on that interaction happening . What am I supposed to do now? Opening each post to mark it as read is significantly slower. Is there another way to mark posts as read in bulk that I’m missing, or is this just how it’s going to be now?
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It may just be me, but I don’t think this is what voting is intended for.
Yeah, I think so, too. It’s not really helpful for OP in any way. But the quota seems to do what it’s designed to do. Make it more difficult for people to do weird things with the voting buttons. Reminds me a bit of xkcd #1172 "Workflow".
I agree, the way OP is using voting isn’t really what it’s intended for and the “mark read on scroll” is a better option for what they want.
However, what damage are they doing? They are basically giving encouragement to everyone to keep posting. If the worry is bandwidth, Piefed is only at ~5k and the threadiverse at ~40k. If bandwidth is a problem now, how will the platform scale to 400k or 4M active users?
I would upvote your and Nusm’s comments, because they contribute to the discussion, but I already hit my limit for the day (took under an hour). If you want more of my perspective. OpenStars and Squirrel also provide their viewpoint on the situation in the post (I don’t know how to specifically link to my comments so you got a link to someone who replied to me).
Imagine you’re sailing a boat across a large ocean. You can do your maintenance and take care of small problems now while the weather is calm or you can wait until the storm arrives and then run around like a headless chicken and probably sink.
I don’t know the back end situation, but I imagine, all other things being kept the same, this change maybe makes a low single digit effect on bandwidth.
I would disagree that this a problem at this scale. I would argue unlimited voting is a boon at this scale. It makes the threadiverse more “alive”, and encourages people to post and comment more.
At a large scale, I could see unlimited voting being a concern for bandwidth, but at that point the threadiverse is “alive” enough to sustain itself (and a discussion could be had then).
For a thought experiment, instead of limiting the top (x)% of voters, instead let’s eliminate them. What % of total voting is lost? Based on the numbers in your post a few days ago, 0.12% of people average over 240 votes a day and account for 6.43% of total votes. Removing them, you lose ~6.5% of activity. Doesn’t seem like much. In reality though, it’s going to make everyone who votes ‘a lot’, vote less. My guess a 15% drop in votes. That 15% less encouragement to people to keep posting and commenting. That may not mean much at large scores, but removing the single upvote someone gets for their effort contributing can/has killed people’s motivation to keep contributing (personnel experience).
I imagine many of the people who vote a lot also post and comment a lot too. So your probably going to lose some non negligible % of posts and comments too.
The threadiverse MAUs is holding relatively steady (+/- 10%) over the last year (not great, not terrible). Now start decreasing activity by 10-20%. Seems like a recipe for a downward feedback loop to me.
Also, something to consider, those heavy voters are probably the platform’s most enthusiastic users. So, in essense, you’d be muzzling your best supports to solve a theoretic future problem.
Also, to note, I couldn’t encourage your contribution to the discussion (upvote) in the hopes you’d be encouraged to do so more, because I can’t.
A final thought/critique, why not ask the heavy voters why they are heavy voters? You could find people like OP who need to learn about a feature (mark read on scroll) and after directing them to that, developers could work on UI changes to encourage people to use that feature (rather than limiting everyone).
To your other comment about your prior post:I’m aware of the post and the discussion in it. I participated in it and had a nice discussion with anon6789@lemmy.world (Superbowl community mod). I think OpenStars and Squirrel shared similar sentiments in that post.Edit: I only saw the notification of your other comment and thought you responded a second time to my comment in this thread.
That’s a partial picture of what’s happening. The other part is the other activity (comments and posts):
I am missing the data of Piefed.social for 2026-07-07 (but that seems to be the worst weekday for the previous week so probably not going to help that average).
Overall, it seems like piefed.social has less packets becuase there’s less activity overall (my previous comment’s point).
It does seem piefed.social has had a spike in DAU since the update, but that seems to be falling off relatively quickly:
This does not make sense to me even on an abstract mathematical level.
How much does reducing these contributions save - 2x, 3x, 5x? To be on the safe side let’s balloon that up and call it “10x”. Even so this isn’t a “storm”, this seems barely sprinkling?
How many people do we hope to pull in from the likes of Reddit, Mastodon (not leaving it but either adding a PieFed account or at least introducing new traffic to PieFed instances, via users existing Mastodon account), Bluesky, X(hitter), etc. - 10x? Or even people switching from Lemmy servers as those go down, and people switch to PieFed? PieFed.social has <1.5k MAUs, fedisnfw.app has 3.1k, and the rest are all exclusively <0.25k.
The other commentor said 400k or 4M (edit: as a potential target audience to aim for), so conservatively if you are counting 400k as “the storm”, then that’s 100-fold higher traffic levels!! (And a target of 4M is 1000-fold.) A mere 10x decrease from actual contributions by users is nothing in comparison.
If we aim to grow by 1000x more MAUs, then perhaps we should work on more efficient network traffic sending - e.g. federate batches of votes (although this I recall was already done), though
personperhaps this is a problem that should wait until we get closer? In chess you have to get through mid-game before end-game strategies begin to become relevant at all.And for now PieFed looks like it needs all the engagement that it can get? There was a time only a few months ago when increased levels of contributions were being touted as a “GOOD thing”? While now, I guess posts and comments are, but votes are somehow not? This all makes my head spin though - where did this come from? How long until comments are no longer desired either? Is the aim to become an RSS reader / “news aggregator”? Is there some publication you can point us to read to help us understand why the sudden switch in behavior? In advance I doubt I’ll agree with its premise but I would very much like to know more where any of this is coming from?
Also, why bother making PieFed pull in posts from Mastodon then, if additional traffic is “bad”? To be clear I am not calling Mastodon traffic as bad in the content sense, but numerically speaking… it IS a “storm”, in the sense that it has >800k MAUs. If a PieFed instance cannot handle a mere 2-10x amount of traffic, then how could it hope to pull in… let’s see, 800k/5k that’s = 160-fold higher traffic stats from trying to pull in all Mastodon users. Tbf maybe that’s not what you are trying to do in the first place, so ignore this part of my comment in that case.
You could export your settings and switch to an instance with a higher vote quota. It can be changed by admins from the default 240 to any number by setting
VOTE_QUOTAin .env.dockerBut how would anyone know which servers have done so?
Trial and error, and then it could still change at any time? I don’t see it anywhere in the About sections e.g. https://feddit.online/about. Edit: and even after you’ve made an account, I see no method to arrive at a numeric depiction of the quota - it’s merely depicted as a visual bar, but it doesn’t say whether that represents 10, 100, or 1000 votes, so there is no way to figure that out except start voting and see how fast it fills up to reach the cap?
And the Instance Picker is already an absolute mess - e.g. see https://piefed.zip/auth/instance_chooser, or try to decipher what “Defederation: Good” means (is that… high? low? loose? strict? “Good” for who - a tankie, banning any criticism of Russia, China, or North Korea? or a former non-technical normal user coming from Reddit?), plus I see no mention of how a vote quota would be represented here (lowering “Newbie friendly” status I would presume, since this goes against expectations, as e.g. set by Reddit that does not place any limits upon engagements).
This new “anti-feature” is not very transparent at all.
I’m horrified that you’re using Piefed for work.
Have you considered using Piefed client that has „mark all as read” button or „mark as read on scroll” features? Voyager does this, I’m pretty sure many others do. Another approach is to browse content sorted by new. In such setup all you need to know is if content is above or below your scrolling position. Hopefully these can make your work less tedious.
Mark Read on Scroll is definitely the way to go for something like this
Ah, that was not intended!
I’ve made it so that when a vote is rejected the post is still marked as having been read.
In future when you use a LLM to write posts you must tick the ‘AI generated’ checkbox in the ‘More options’ part of the form. It’s the rules.
Just curious what clues you see that it’s AI text?
I ran it through two different detectors and one said 100%, and the other said 0%.
Don’t use the 0% one ;-)
I often copy and paste post bodies into https://gptzero.me, that one is great.
Whenever you see an emdash, especially with no spaces before or after it, that’s a pretty strong tell. But I never take action or level an accusation on that alone until I’ve run it through gptzero.
GPT and GLM are the no-spaces emdashers. Claude and Deepseek both put spaces around it.
I use em dashes all the time but always with spaces, and the ones I use are fake. Just two regular dashes. I didn’t notice the lack of spaces – certainly a bit odd!
Edit: looks like my
--gets translated to an actual em dash in the web gui so that’s cool.Oh cool – I think I might start using emdashes a bit now, too!
what about 3 dashes — oooo
4 dashes —-
5 —– what even is that?
6 —— is that 2 emdashes?