I disagree with the first of your statements. I think that where it’s going is in three directions which are pulling against each other.
Direction one: a feeder platform for Only Fans for people that crave interaction with the models
Direction two: a low effort, low engagement platform where a small number of power posters upload a lot of links and content for people who don’t engage with the communities other than voting.
Direction three: People that want to build an active kink community but aren’t calculating on the fans of the other two directions flooding out their content. Also, from my observations, these people have relatively little to offer fans of the other directions.
The three are not exclusive to each other. All three add volume. Porn needs volume. Quality is what the user like, which like porn tastes are diverse.
I think you’re deluding yourself on that issue.
I have fairly mainstream tastes and I have a large collection of various pictures. As an experiment I picked a number of those pictures, based around various themes and posted them. I’ve been quite successful in terms of upvotes as a result. However the more interesting thing for me is what happened today when I had run out of that initial selection.
Yesterday I didn’t post any pictures and as a result a number of other users posted a wider selection of content than had been available while my posts were doing well. I want to share content with other users that share my preferences but I don’t want to be part of the problem for niche communities or for original content creators who only have a small audience and probably never will appeal to the mainstream.
The Only Fans people seem to be riding high and that’s good, we don’t need to worry about them getting flooded out.
But there may be creators who have a natural audience of maybe no more than twenty and it’d be nice for them to be able to have those twenty upvotes without there being immediately five downvotes that will knock them very quickly off the active page and some shitty comment about how they are not… I dunno, whatever ugly thing people think of to say.
I think first, there’s a decline in the general Lemmy userbase. Partly, this is because of unaddressed Federation bugs that have persisted now for weeks without being publicly addressed. That’s driven a lot of contributors away, which has feed on effects across communities. That’s structural and beyond LemmyNSFW, but affects us.
Second, here at LemmyNSFW, poor community moderation. There are dead communities admins will not address because of top mod ownership rules. But that so many subscribe to dead communities shows the decline. Reddit prunes unmoderated communities for a reason.
Mods also let creeps post horrible comments and don’t filter them out or ban abusive users, and this has driven away contributors. Especially amateurs and OF creators. I’m of the opinion they are bread and butter here and driving them away reduces overall value of the site. So while I’m into the kink side, I want c/gonewild to thrive.
Third, there are the serial downvoters. Admins thought requiring people to join communities in order to vote would solve this problem. No, because their goal is to suppress contributions overall, so they just join to downvote. This is why you see a top community like c/anal or c/blowjobs wither with no submissions. They’re killed early on. And that drives away contributors. Whether that’s contention over the top page or just a desire to see LemmyNSFW fail, I don’t know. But IMO downvotes only express aggression and don’t help curate content. They serve to drive away contributors.
We need more contributors, not less. And the decline in contributions says something is seriously wrong. It’s like a reverse Tragedy of the Commons, where instead of overgrazing by all, we have a few trampling the commons out of spite.
Finally, there is the lack of rich media. Only pics and RedGifs, both limited. And gifs get converted to webm, which don’t autoplay or loop in LemmyUI. Another Lemmy issue, beyond the site here, but is one cause of declining interest IMO.
This is JMO and is said with all due respect and deference to the community and site admins.
Third, there are the serial downvoters.
Would it make sense to just disable the downvote button on the instance? I know others have done that.
BeeHaw did that. That’s one option. Another might be to try tweaking the sorting algorithm. A third might be to institute more stringent mod rules in countering abuse directed at contributors, especially OC contributors who expose themselves - both their bodies and their emotions - to public scrutiny. Can you imagine what it must feel like to post imagery of your nude body, only to get critical comments about your appearance, or lude PMs demanding sexual favors, and see no enforcement of community guidelines?
Perhaps some mix of all three. Or something I haven’t thought of.
I think first, there’s a decline in the general Lemmy userbase. Partly, this is because of unaddressed Federation bugs that have persisted now for weeks without being publicly addressed. That’s driven a lot of contributors away, which has feed on effects across communities. That’s structural and beyond LemmyNSFW, but affects us.
Although there is definitely a component of this, I think the trends we’re seeing predates the 0.19.0 issues. If anything I think we’re in a healthier place than say two months ago, but that’s largely propped up by a handful of individuals.
Third, there are the serial downvoters.
One thing that came up during the downvote removal discussion is that the ‘mark as read’ feature requires voting to register. Combining this with the fact that users don’t liberally block as much as they should and it’s a recipe for issues.
Frankly I never thought the subscribed only downvote was a good idea and it’s just prevented community moderation. Needing to subscribe to a community to downvote a post with a broken link is frustrating and the barrier is still too low to stop bad actors as a whole.
Users who block do so out of personal interest. That is, there’s something they don’t want to see, so they remove it from their feed. This is as intended. Therefore, those who persistently downvote have different reasons than simply not wanting to see something. No, either they’re voting tactically to benefit their own submission, as OP suggests, or to suppress the existence of whatever content they’re voting on. In both cases, these are the bad actors you refer to. Because their interest in voting is not to curate but to destroy. That particular community, or perhaps the site itself.
I think there are people on Lemmy who wish to see NSFW content entirely removed from the network. We saw an immediate defederation by the .ml communities, for example. These are closely linked to Lemmy devs, who seem to have an ideological purpose behind creating Lemmy, .ml standing for Marxist-Leninist. Now, ironically, Marx and Engles both wrote in support of women’s economic and sexual freedom. I think Engles in particular would have been pleased at the idea of women doing with their bodies as they wish, even if that was exhibitionist on a platform like this. And it should be noted, the Leninist October Revolution led to a sexual liberation movement in Russia that was only suppressed by Stalin after he gained power.
I don’t think devs and the .ml community have read deeply into the original sources they espouse. But regardless, I think there are some people who want to see LemmyNSFW fail. And they’re actively working to achieve that end.
Third, there are the serial downvoters. Admins thought requiring people to join communities in order to vote would solve this problem. No, because their goal is to suppress contributions overall, so they just join to downvote.
Can you say more about this? What do you think the serial downvoters are up to? Do they just downvote or do they upvote in some situations too?
I don’t know motives. I can’t read minds. But that it drives away contributors is something I’m pretty sure of.