this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2026
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Science Memes

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[–] luciferofastora@feddit.org 1 points 4 hours ago

Source?

Last I followed that conversation, rimu stated that it wasn't about vote manipulation or spam, just about the outsized influence of people who spend more time online (for instance because they're chronically ill and the offline world therefore just doesn't hold any appeal to them).

Your comment took a few seconds to read in my inbox. If I made a post that took off and got a hundred replies, most of which are nice but don't warrant an in-depth response, I could read and swipe to upvote each in a few seconds, leaving the ones warranting more time and a reply unread and going back for them afterwards.

If the intention is that people should comment or post more rather than (just) voting, making them vote less isn't gonna achieve that. A comment is nowhere near a decent substitute for a vote. The difference in effort between "swipe" and "swipe, think of what you want to say, consider whether it's too inane to be worth a comment, fret over the wording to avoid accidentally stepping on toes you care about, knowing that people may end up judging you for your choice of words anyway, or maybe even complain about you commenting too much in general" is monumental. The venomous treatment he's been getting isn't helping.

And even if he did comment, what if the other person replies in a civil manner? You'd like to reward and encourage that. If you're out of votes for the day, the only thing you could do is reply "+" or some variant, which would probably result in people jumping down your throat for making such a pointless comment, similar to the "this" comments. "That's what upvotes are for", I've seen people argue. Which is entirely correct, but what if you're out of upvotes? Do you just stop engaging for the day, knowing you'll be frustrated anyway?

The bottom line is that a vote cap inhibits engagement. If we wanna prevent engagement bait and karma farming, we can simply not show anyone's "score" on their profiles and moderate excessive outrage bait posts.

So this achieves nothing good, just punishes those that contributed most.