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The 730 people who upvoted this post do care.
The problem is that lemmy.ml hosts too many popular communities. There are people who want them gone from their feeds but also don't want their Lemmy experience to become empty and boring.
The solution is to build up more attractive alternatives of those communities elsewhere, not endlessly campaign the existing users to just drop them. I understand that awareness of why people want alternatives is important for those alternatives to have a chance at attracting users, and being discovered in the first place. I just have yet to actually see these alternatives receive the care they (imo) require to justify switching to them.
The current fedidb stats, to me, state that 488 people is, colloquially speaking, nobody.
Maybe it's too soon to make such a judgement call, we'll see over the next few days as people get the chance to see this post.
Agreed. Maybe I should try creating and managing a community some day. (hopefully this didn't come off as sarcastic)
This is a wildly misleading and unfair comparison. Let's take the Trump verdict as an example. The most upvoted post about this had ~2700 upvotes. But that's only 6% of the MAU! Is that "nobody"? Obviously not. 2k upvotes is a huge deal on a rather small community like Lemmy. How often do you see posts with more than 3k upvotes?
~500 upvotes is already a moderately large number of upvotes. You need to compare this number with how many upvotes a post typically gets.
Fwiw (our disagreement aside), moderating a community anywhere online can be a very rewarding, and very thankless job. And it really can be a thing that feels like a job if the community is active enough.
But I would still recommend at least trying it for a few months to see if whatever subject matter you make it around draws users. That's when you get a real feel for moderation, and have the best chance at helping the overall fediverse work well.
I also think that moderating a big community would change your mind at least partially regarding vote numbers as a measure of anything significant. There's behind the curtain stuff that usually gives a better indication of how a given post/subject is being received by the individual community. It depends on the tools available, and lemmy is a wee bit scant on tools to help moderators gain understanding of the population of their C/; but it's still eye opening.
The biggest thing I think you'd notice in comparing people interacting with a given post is that most votes happen because of a title. People scroll past, see a title, and vote based on that. And that's the ones that bother to vote. A lot of people don't. They'll click a link, maybe open that post and read comments, but just not care enough to do anything else at all. Back on reddit, that was a majority of posts, and I know it was the case on other forums back in the day.
So, yeah, disagreement about the numbers in this case aside, if you're this interested in how a vote using forum works, moderating your own would be a very cool experience on top of diversifying the instance/community balance.
Wow, now that I think of it, that is indeed how I vote most of the time.
Thanks, I will seriously consider opening a community.
I didn't necessarily think you were being sarcastic, but I appreciate the clarification.
You're correct, that was a rather shallow comparison for me to make.
I don't think raw upvotes give the full story either. I'd be interested in seeing, for example, from which instances the voters are distributed.
That would be interesting indeed! I heard that if one hosts their own Lemmy instance, they can see who voted on every post. Don't have that for now though.
Votes mean as much as the shit I just took.
No. The shit that you took is more meaningful than fake Internet points.
True, it was a very healthy bm ;)
Usually I'd agree with this, but on this post, the upvote count is a direct representation of how many people care about this issue (out of the number of users who saw this post). That is meaningful.
In my view, upvotes are too easy to manipulate to take them seriously or expect authenticity. And I'm ok with that. I think Reddit and the like showed that karma and the like are not great measures of authentic engagement.
I don't have access to traffic data to make a good argument on this specific post. Without the ability to compare total interactions vs votes, as well as the ratio of up vs down, it's a matter of general principle in my opinion.
It is also my opinion, having moderated off and on since the nineties on various types of forums that pretty much any post is ignored by a majority of users that come across it. Voting really only shows which people are willing to use the effort to hit a button. If a majority of users don't engage, I think that it is indeed a direct representation of how many people care. Again, I can't see those numbers, so it's kind of a moot point to make at all, but I suspect this post is like most posts anywhere.
But I still maintain that votes are meaningless across the board because they're a horrible metric for anything at all, especially when they're the only metric available.
Edit: again, fwiw, in the time it took me to type that up, the number of positive votes went down by 3. And, iirc, at the point where this tangent about the value of votes started, or was over 400, which is still meaningless, but taken in isolation would point to a general trend where there's significant disagreement with whatever it is about the post drawing votes.
I kind of see your point. The information we have is not sufficient, and we cannot really know how much of the Lemmy userbase cares about this issue.