Several people in the community have expressed frustration in regards to the fact that any post that fits the community it’s posted to but is slightly out of the normal post type like, for example, being more hardcore rather than softcore, get’s a lot of downvotes by people who simply don’t like that particular post.
We have also had complaints that particular types of posts as a whole get more downvotes even if they are in the appropriate community and are the normal type of post for a community. This especially appears to be happening to male content.
Additionally we are seeing posts with more downvotes than a community has subscribers, meaning people are downvoting content they don’t even want to see in the first place.
We understand some may not like some content of a particular post or community, but downvoting posts discourages these posters who are actually passionate/interested in the topic of the community from posting again. Additionally, when posts are downvoted like that it can bury them in our instance and especially in other instances, preventing them from being viewed by others almost at all.
After some discussion amongst the moderators and admins,because of the reasons above, we’ve decided to disable downvotes at least for the time being.
What do I do if I dislike a post?
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We recommend those who would normally downvote a post they don’t like just, instead, block the user who created the post, or, if the community is a topic you dislike, block the community. That way, you no longer see those posts, but don’t effect those posts’ visibility to other members of the community and instance.
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Additionally, you can view your “Subscribed” feed instead of “Local” so that you only see posts from the communities you are subscribed to.
What do I do if a post doesn’t fit the community it’s posted in or is spam?
- Please report the post, either the mods of the community or an instance admin will remove the post if necessary, as soon as possible. We have admins and mods online almost around the clock, so these types of posts should be removed quickly.
Potential future post filtering on lemmy:
- In the future it appears that lemmy may implement a tagging system similar to flairs on reddit. This request has piqued the interest of the lemmy devs, so keep an eye out sometime in the (maybe not so near) future for the implementation of that feature.
As @yay@lemmynsfw.com has said in the comments:
Downvotes should be used for posts you don’t like in your area of interest, and not for niche communities you don’t like.
When the RFC mentioned in the post is developed, we will be able to have a more refined home page, this way we can enable downvotes.
But for now, please block users/communities as it supposed to be.
Please put any comments questions and concerns in the comments below, we are of course always open to community thoughts and feedback, and want to work with you to keep this instance an enjoyable and entertaining place to post and browse.
Strongly agree with this decision to disable downvotes untill the community of active oc posters and commentors grows.
Look, i post nswf oc content because i like making and sharing my pictures. Gives me a thrill, i like the social aspect too. Alot of people here are focusing on the “user experience” but what about “posting experience”?
Its just not fun to post your oc content and immediatly get 5 downvotes cause some lurkers cant be bothered to customize their feed. Its driving active and contributing users away and is harming this relatively small community atm.
Its just not fun to post your oc content and immediatly get 5 downvotes cause some lurkers cant be bothered to customize their feed. Its driving active and contributing users away and is harming this relatively small community atm.
Agreed. My wife and I enjoy posting pix of ourselves. We do it because it’s fun for us. The amount of downvotes we were getting was pretty discouraging.
I’m excited for this change!
Its just not fun to post your oc content and immediatly get 5 downvotes cause some lurkers cant be bothered to customize their feed. Its driving active and contributing users away and is harming this relatively small community atm.
I can definitely see this being a much bigger issue for the Gonewild posters than anyone else, perhaps this change need only be applied to those communities?
First, love what you are contributing/posting. The ai art, sharing prompts and even helping other user finetune the process. A+
Now onto the issue at hand, i wanna make clear that im def not supporting to get rid of the downvotes forever. I just think that atm they are harming this instance and should be disabled for a while untill we have more people who post original content or untill fediverse users have gotten into the habit of curating and browsing only in subscribed communities of interest as most redditors have learned to do, due to the sheer volume of content there.
I think the real problem is that alot of new users are used to reddit and how it works. Lemmy operates different, i had to figure it out and get used to it too.
On reddit gonewild, you post something and only users who sort through new get to see your post (new accounts of course, subscribers is something else) and vote on that post. Its a sorting process thats rather low profile, the more people like it, the more exposure it gets, you go from new to rising to frontpage. Users sorting new are different folks then users scrolling the frontpage. New page are people trying to sext or cam or are just lonely and wanna talk. You can thrive and have fun in just that section of the sub. Even if you never get the upvotes to get to rising or frontpage, its a fun experience. If you do get the upvotes for frontpage, along come the rude disrespectfull messages, its part of the internet and comes with high exposure. But at that point the poster already has 100’s of nice messages and the self esteem boost that comes with reaching the frontpage. In other words the downvotes from that group are pretty harmless emotionally.
On lemmy new posts go up almost immediatly after posting so your exposure is biggest when first posting. If you get lots of upvotes you can keep that exposure longer. But as i just explained high exposure means rude assholes and on lemmy thats right at the start before the validation. Immediate bad repsonses and only the fun experiences later on or maybe never at all.
You have to realize that posters of nude selfies are putting themselfs out there, not a prompt or a (very beautifull) artpiece. The reactions/comments are way more personal and confronting. Its not always easy to deal with it and atm the downvotes on that content is leaving those posters with nothing. No fun experiences at all. So they give up and leave, or check this place see the negative comments and just never try.
For me personaly, its about building a community here, i dont post to sell or for validation (anymore). Maybe its a bit cheesy but when i first started in this world, i met some amazing and very helpfull people, it kinda changed my outlook on life. I wanna return that favour to the internet by helping to build something positive here.
Ok enough written. Im very interested on why downvotes are so important for you and your community. Cause not only gonewild is affected, every community that has nude oc content is experiencing this problem.
im def not supporting to get rid of the downvotes forever. I just think that atm they are harming this instance and should be disabled for a while
If this is the case then that’s perfectly valid, but temporary becomes permanent without a set end date.
On reddit gonewild, you post something and only users who sort through new get to see your post.
Yes, but as you say it’s different on lemmy and both users and creators need to grasp that. Both upvotes and downvotes count as activity and raise a post. A post with 200 upvotes is just as ‘active’ as a post with 100/100 or 200 downvotes.
Content doesn’t go away just because people disagree with it, and if it receives enough engagement to be seen by the wider community of course it’s going to see wider scrutiny.
The only way to prevent that is to limit access to the content from the wider community which stifles growth and engagement, or limit the wider communities ability to negatively influence the content, as in this case by removing downvotes, which also stifles growth and engagement.
Now I agree that for the sake of gone wild posters this could be beneficial, both to the sensitivities of contributors and may help the growth of the community by making contribution more encouraging, but it won’t actually change the engagement the greater community has with the content. At the end of the day you have to be controversial before you become accepted and my advice there would be to focus on having the popular vote, not all the votes.
You have to realize that posters of nude selfies are putting themselfs out there, not a prompt or a (very beautifull) artpiece.
Yes, which is why I think that this could be beneficial for those posters, but they are also just a fraction of the total content on lemmynsfw.
For me personaly, its about building a community here, i dont post to sell or for validation (anymore).
I agree. And I’d say we face similar challenges with the general community even if our perspectives are different. Both gonewild and AI creators face backlash when presented to the gen pop for reasons outside of their control.
Im very interested on why downvotes are so important for you and your community. Cause not only gonewild is affected, every community that has nude oc content is experiencing this problem.
I think it comes down to understanding the community and the expecations you have for it.
If you want a community for the creators to have a safe place to create and enjoy the you can’t have it open to the public, they’ll ruin it as we’ve seen pointed out here, in which case I agree entirely that limiting outside influence is for the best. Turn the community into a zoo rather than an interactive exhibit.
If you want a community for the public, you have to accept their judgement. For us artists it’s less of an issue because we can change our style to suit the community, but if we want to express ourselves we still have to accept that not everyone will agree.
And this is where our perspectives begin to differ due to the nature of our content.
I’ve been a digital artist for 25 years and AI is just a new tool. It’s of no benefit to me or AIgen to shy away from the public engagement, quite the opposite, our content needs to become so normalised and abundant that misconception can be scraped off the social consciousness, and ignoring the opinions of those outide of the immediate community goes against the goal of developing acceptance.
Often the things we hold closest and most dear are those that are too delicate for sharing.
I’m not against the goal of limiting downvotes, but I do have serious concerns about the scope. On an individual community level this prevents our users from voicing displeasure with content that may still yet need to be determined as acceptable or otherwise, and removing that community regulation would easily result in the creation of content that wouldn’t be beneficial to the growth of our community or its integration with the rest of lemmy but might not be against the community guidelines.
A perfect recent example is that we had a new community pop up for “deGenerative” AI content, this came about because a contributer had something they wanted to post but no other place to post it. The community decided through downvotes that that content didn’t vive with the existing community and showed a gap for a new one.
Had that user only seen their upvotes they’d still be posting unpopular creations rather than operating a community catering to their style.
So overall, not against limiting downvotes for gone wild, but I also think it’s the only portion of lemmynsfw that is unfairly brigaded to the extent that it’s necessary, and I think the change will be detrimental to the less personal creator communities.
Thanks for giving this a shot!
I do warmly welcome that change! Are other instances able to downvote our posts anyways, tho?
I just want to say that I think the admin here is awesome. You seem to really want to accommodate both users and posters. I decided to no longer post here because many of the users are negative. The downvotes felt awful even though I have a thick skin. That’s great they are disabled, but there are also negative comments. I have a thick skin, but I get treated better on other social media. There are great users here, but the trolls are too prominent for me. It seems like many users have high expectations yet don’t want “pros”. The stock images look like sex dolls. Idk. I just want to be treated well. Thanks for the users that supported me. There are awesome people here.
Hey Annabelle, don’t leave yet.
I absolutly know what you are talking about. I also have had accounts on multiple platforms and agree with your assesment. Toxic and negative users all around. Whining about their "right’ to downvote. For starters, from this thread its pretty obvious who the downvoters are. So i blocked them all. Those are 5 or 6 six jerks less to deal with. Dont wanna support the creators, you know the one who actually get out their comfortzone and contribute, not gonna see my content. Negative comment, blocked too.
But i really wanna support this instance and help make it thrive. There are wonderfull people behind the screens, with good intentions. Dont give up yet, take a break sure but come back to check for progress on this issue.
Thanks @Violetpsychosis@lemmynsfw.com.
Question for you and admins here: Does blocking someone work here on LemmyNSFW work the same way now as on Reddit (i.e. they can’t see any your content posts). Previously on Reddit before they made the change, blocking was only one way, which didn’t work well.
Blocking is only one way here as well. If you block a user then their comments and posts will no longer appear for you. If there is a comment by the blocked user in a conversation it shows up as ‘There is no record of this comment’ the same as if it was removed by mod action or if it’s the end of the comment chain you just can’t expand it (At least on Jerboa). Blocked communities don’t show in your feed and won’t show up in a search if you try to manually go to it either.
Your own comments and posts will still show to the blocked user however.
Hi Annabelle, Wrt negative or harassing comments, you can report them for actioning by mods/admins. I am quick to ban trolls and toxic folks who don’t add value to communities, and I believe most mods would agree with me and do the same.
Its not anybody specific. Maybe just a general culture. Maybe ill change my mind after i get some space
It’s definitely not the culture but a loud (and jerk) minority. You may even meet someone obsessed with downvoting you, when you see someone like that just report them. It’s sad to see you going, but we need to stick together if we want this platform to get bigger.
As someone who also used to post OC and Mod on here, I can say looking back on things that the “general culture” I think you’re talking about is one wherein the community at large has allowed for the (mostly women) OC posters on here to feel unvalued/undervalued, or in some cases outright disrespected.
In terms of unvalued/undervalued, I mean that it comes as a real issue for any forum (or whatever) of this size to cover both the niche and general. I have since leaving here switched primarily to discord groups for the sort of OC posting I want to do, entirely because I have better interactions that way. For someone to see a pic of me they can’t just be browsing through /local. In those groups, I (and others) are sought out and enjoyed rather than tossed in with a mix of professional pornstars, hentai, and everything else. And remember, OC posters aren’t just doing this because they would like the honor to be included in your special jerkoff session. We do it because we want to enjoy the experience as well. I honestly have no advice for fixing this other than time and size, though in reflection I’d like to apologize to the Admins here for potentially having made them feel same way. Y’all deserve better than you’ve been treated.
And as for the outright disrespect @b9999998 , Annabelle’s most recent post proves exactly what sort of shit is being let slide:
Don’t let the door hit you 👋👋👋
is the top comment on a post saying goodbye to the few likeable men on here when she decided it was time to move on. ANNABELLE BROKE NOT A SINGLE RULE and STILL, she is currently being allowed to be disrespected over a policy the Admins and Community agreed on: “Self-Promotion is only okay as long as the community you are posting in allows it, and you don’t spam it.”
Fuck y’alls absolutist need to say the first thing that comes to mind for once, and start thinking about how to develop a community that’s not entirely comprised of men with last weeks shit stuck to their balls. The silent rule #1 of any mixed gender group is “don’t bother the women (and queer folk) or they won’t come back”.
So riddle me this anyone: how the hell are you supposed to keep women around when users can criticize (physically), disrespect, belittle, harass, or mock the women who would like to be part of this community? If a new woman joins and sees those sort of comments directed towards a likeable woman who’s followed all the rules, do you think she’s going to want to become an OC poster on here?
honestly wouldn’t it make sense to defederate from every non-NSFW instance? then people would not see porn unless they come here.
I imagine some people want their main instance account to include porn. Not how I would (and do) operate, but simplicity would be a reason.
For example I have my phone set up with Island to duplicate my apps for porn use separately from the direct installs. It’s a hassle. I can totally imagine wanting to just not bother if one’s life situation allows for that.