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It’s a little overstated. Piefed has some indicators to show when someone is usually downvoted more than upvoted, which can help people in moderation decisions, or it can be ignored

There’s also some controversy over a configurable limit to number of votes per day, in case an admin is worried about someone being more of a voting bot than an engaged user

But most piefed admins have configured things in ways they are more comfortable with

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OpenStars@discuss.online ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
I feel like the social credit system, like most descriptions of PieFed features by people who have barely glanced at them before complaining about them exceedingly publicly, is quite misunderstood.

For one thing it does not affect 99.6% of users, as Rimu mentioned somewhere in this thread. And for another, you have to be downvoted like 10x more often than upvoted to receive that label - which is also temporary. A single comment (or handful of them) won’t do it - you need to consistently be bucking all of the trends, in a MAJOR way, to receive this label. Think: going into a Linux sux community and trying to say that Linux is superior - I mean, objectively speaking “duh” (says me who uses multiple OSs on a daily basis), but read the room, you know? They specifically made the community to crap on Linux, so let the babies whine in peace rather than incel your way into correcting them inside their safe spaces? When people have the choice of man vs. bear, don’t be the reason that people choose the bear…

But mainly: it’s just a label. It does nothing whatsoever to actually filter the content - there are no options to make use of the label in that fashion. And several times the label has proved helpful to me, like I was going to write a reply to someone but then I noticed the label. A quick glance at their post history confirms that the new account is a far-right leaning recent refugee from Reddit, who will be uninterested in all of my “facts” and “truth”, and I quickly see the futility of even attempting to try. So I don’t bother, and I am grateful to the label for alerting me to the likelihood of having ended up with that same opinion, but only after having learned the hard way.

Though labels are up to the recipient how they want to make use of them? Sometimes I decide to simply ignore them, particularly in certain contexts, while other times I follow through a bit to see if they are justified to my eyes. Irl has “reputations” as well - so why not here, particularly when they are useful and people want them? When applied gently and optionally, they can be useful tools.

The vote quota thing though - that is wholly bad, I agree there. It’s especially heinous since it shadow-censors people’s contributions without disclosure of that fact. The reputation indicator purely works for the behest of an end-user, but the vote quota applies also to users of other PieFed instances (even those that have disabled the vote quota), and also those of Lemmy, Mbin, nodeBB, Mastodon, Friendica, etc. Worse, there is zero method whereby e.g. a Lemmy user could check in advance to see if their contributions are going to be censored. Basically any community housed on a PieFed instance that uses vote quotas can be throwing out contributions with no modlog entries, zero explanation or notification of it ever happening, and especially no ability to know in advance when it will occur. And users on those PieFed instances that have their votes constrained will also have their votes discarded even when attempted to be offered onto communities housed on Lemmy instances.

A great deal of the criticism about PieFed’s features has been demonstrated to be based upon outright disinformation - e.g. supposedly “hard-coded features” are not only not hard-coded, but turned off by default hence opt-in rather than opt-out, an extreme rarity in software and very friendly actually - but the vote quota criticism is imho totally valid as it is an extremely unfriendly and insensitive thing to do to others (even though somewhat rare, if that matters to anyone). i.e. PieFed is quite opinionated in its features offered. Personally I see Lemmy as doing likewise - though more in features not offered than in ones implemented (e.g. why choose to not notify anyone of a moderation event happening to them? do they have a “right” to know or not, if they are e.g. banned from a community?) - but not to the same degree, with PieFed going much further than Lemmy in terms of injecting the politics of its dev team directly into the codebase (though each feature can individually be disabled by instance admins, or just use the PyLova fork that has tweaked these settings already, plus added a few new features on top).

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