Out of the 37,000 people who voted for posts or comments in the last month, the 10 most prolific voters (0.02% of us) cast as many votes as the bottom 59%. Here’s how that looks, visually:
As you can see, a lot of people didn’t cast many votes. Someone cast 23k votes, with a group of 13 each casting at least 10k votes.
“But of course most people aren’t really engaged, most of those 37k people are just NPCs who don’t really matter” you say, “Rimu you’re just including them to make it seem worse than it is”, you might say. Ok, cool, let’s pretend the bottom 85% of us don’t matter and just look at the top 5000 voters. Here’s how the distribution looks among them:
Still super unbalanced. Let’s analyze this a bit.
Among those 5000, the top 147 (2.94%) cast as many votes as all the others (4853 people) combined. Among those 5000, the average number of votes cast in a month is 1142. Among the top 147, the average number of votes cast in a month is 6868.
How do you feel about a tiny group having this much influence over what news you receive?
Having most voted content at the top allow me not to see much of communities where there is a lot of automatically published content but low engagement.
Engagement is a proxy for quality. Not the best proxy but as I block communities I’m not interested in but which have engagement I discover slowly more and more niche communities with a little pool of active users but proper human-made content and engagement.
There are other ways to see this though. PieFed’s categories of communities for example are great at surfacing low-engagement content. An example is https://piefed.social/topic/arts-craft, which has subsets like Photography. News, politics, and memes are always going to drown out the more niche content, so it is also helpful to have a dedicated News & Politics Topic area, allowing you to cut back on subscribing to those communities, yet you can still see that content whenever you actively want to look at it, just a button press away.
I even see poetry floating into my Subscribed feed now, since moving to PieFed!!:-)