There are issues that have been on my mind for a few days, and I wanted to talk about them with you.
Downvotes
As you may notice, downvotes have been completely off for the last few days. I did this because I couldn’t resist the pressure of some friends :/ I still don’t know what to do about this. The majority of members probably want it to be completely open. As mods, posters and admins; some think it should be closed, some think it should be restricted (I guess).
I guess there is no solution that makes everyone happy. I realized I don’t have admin skills in stressful situations, I’m a fucking stupid lol :D I miss @gabe so much.
lemmyposter212 suggested “fuzzy votes” or something that can work for us too. I think I’ll just ghost this issue for a while.
Donations
As you know, all our donation accounts have been closed. Since it was my first time opening a site in the NSFW area, I had no experience. I reviewed some adult donation sites but most of them were shady. Honestly I couldn’t trust them.
There are only coins now. But I guess most people don’t want to deal with coins. It is because I didn’t get any donations about 4 months now :D Those sent from Github Sponsor or Patreon were also returned to donators as well. I received $200-ish donations so far.
We are currently the 2nd largest instance in Lemmy. After lemmy.world, we’re bigger than lemmy.ml and lemm.ee! I don’t think it will work this way anymore. On an annual basis, I need to spend a month’s salary for Lemmy NSFW.
Does anyone have an idea to solve this problem?
First off: thanks for running this site.
Second: you made the right choice with downvotes. There are too many people who downvote stuff outside their kink. I’ve seen more dudes showcasing their junk since you started. That isn’t my thing, but it’s good for the community.
Third: I’m gonna have to look up this coin thing. You got a link?
Fourth: the gallery sounds cool.
Thanks my buddy :) There is a post I’m using for it which is here: https://lemmynsfw.com/post/87160
First and foremost - thank you for everything you do running lemmynsfw. You’re doing an amazing job and I, for one, appreciate it tremendously.
Re: downvotes, I still believe that downvotes open only to community members is the way to go, but I appreciate you’re doing what you feel is best and if you think it’s genuinely improving things to turn them off entirely, you do what you need to do. I’m willing to be convinced, I truly am, but I haven’t been yet. That said, I found a workaround to my biggest problem with it - hiding read posts without voting - so I don’t have to upvote things I don’t like just to make them go away. With that in place, I can live with it. At the end of the day, I just want to be able to browse without seeing the same posts more than once.
Re: donations, it’s truly a shame that you haven’t been able to set something up. I was here right at the beginning, and I was a very early donor, because I truly believe that Lemmy needs a dedicated place for NSFW content, I want lemmynsfw (and Lemmy as a whole) to succeed, and I understand how much it costs to host such a place. So I’d be very happy to donate again if you can find a channel. That said, I don’t want to have to do so using some sort of cryptocurrency. Not only because, like Lemmy itself, it’s not quite there yet in terms of usability, but also because (unlike Lemmy), at the end of the day I find the entire crypto world to be very scammy and shady, rampant with bad actors. Not to mention that Trocador app you linked to elsewhere doesn’t seem to handle setting up monthly recurring donations, which is what I’d like to do.
My suggestion would be to investigate Epoch as a payment processor. I have joined multiple porn sites in the past, and they’ve all used Epoch for their billing, and at least I personally have never had a problem. They seem on the up-and-up to me (but again, I said investigate - please do your own due diligence). What I don’t know is if they handle one-time donations, or if they just do monthly billing.
Re: Gallery, I’ll be honest I’m not that interested in new UI’s for Lemmy. The default UI + TamperMonkey scripts (LemmyTools + Lemmy Keyboard Navigation) work great for me and pretty much reproduce old.reddit on PC, and Sync took me all of 2 or 3 days to adjust to on Android and now I’m cool with it. I think it’s wonderful you want to keep contributing to the Lemmy universe, and it’s awesome you found someone to help, but just speaking for myself, I’d view this one as pretty low priority.
Once again, thank you. You invest so much time and energy here it’s crazy. Hope you get the donation channel issue worked out very soon, so I can start contributing again.
Epoch seemed safe to me too. But they responded as below for “donations”:
“Thanks for the email and details. Unfortunately, we are unable to provide processing due to the billing being for donations. We are ok with the NSFW content; however, with our structure with our Acquirer/Bank, our services can not be used for the billing of donations.”
Well, then how about this. Make LemmyNSFW a premium service. Anyone on any instances can post, comment, vote, admin, etc on the communities housed here, but if you want to have a user@lemmynsfw.com account you have to pay a $1 a month subscription fee. Then you offer the ability to tip more if you want 😉
This might sound a little extreme at first, but LemmyNSFW really just needs to be a hub for its communities to offer the core value it gives to the greater Lemmyverse. Hosting user accounts is kind of secondary. And having pr0n available is essential for Lemmy as a whole to be a truly viable Reddit replacement. Look at PornLemmy, they’ve been trying to sell it for the past 4 months and don’t seem like they’ll be around in the long haul. Some instances allow NSFW communities, but many don’t. That’s what this instance and it’s domain name offer primarily.
I’m not joking, this could be the solution to them preferring subscriptions. In addition to crypto wallets, which you should still have even if some of us are averse to it.
Look at PornLemmy, they’ve been trying to sell it for the past 4 months
“Trying” is too big of a word. Not caring is more appropriate. If someone wants the site then very good, if not then I don’t mind. I’ve put it in minimal hardware usage mode, and it can coast along for a very long time. However, with how the Lemmy experiment unfolded up to now, PornLemmy will probably not be the only one doing so. Development so far has been like a case study on how wrong things can go when devs go by their own without any functional requirements, software design documents, planning, management, etc.
Hey! I just realized your username is from Farscape! I was like, “Delvian… Delvian… I know that from somewhere…” Great show. Ignore me and carry on…
Hahaha! I have used this username (here and on reddit) for years, and you are the first person to call that out. Excellent!
Using the Sync app (on Android anyway), you can hit the settings button while browsing posts, and under settings there’s an option right there to hide read posts.
On the web, if you click on your username in the top right and go to settings, there is an option “show read posts”. By default I think this is turned on - uncheck the box to turn it off. For a while, this wasn’t working, but it seems to have been fixed along the way.
My humble opinions are:
Downvotes are there for a reason and they should be allowed to everyone who want to downvote something they don’t like I don’t see the point of restricting it.
If you don’t get enough donations you should try to cut costs,maybe purging old inactive stuff or optimizing the server resources usage/downgrading unused resources of the server…
I use Lemmy over an Android app so I really don’t give a flying fuck about web interfaces of Lemmy.
Pray&Luck 🙏🤞.
I struggle with downvotes for my tastes vs the communal good.
If I’m scrolling through gonewild and I see a post from a gender I’m not into, do I downvote because I don’t like it?
No, because that punishes someone else (who’s putting themselves out there and contributing) for my tastes, and it doesn’t actually improve the algorithm of what gets served to me.
If it’s spam, or a photo of someone’s thumb wearing a tutu, or off topic, or violating a rule then I’ll downvote (this is pretty rare though).
I also usually block posters who aren’t to my tastes, but that feels too coarse grained because maybe they post in the asklemmy or something with great content there.
Well, regardless of how you might feel about the just you’re doing, as a frequent user I think you’re doing great. Moderation of any platform is a thankless job. It’s a lot like politics where the people that want moderation power probably aren’t the ones that should have it.
Downvotes. I think they should be on. I know brigading is def a problem. But on the other hand, not having downvotes enabled forces users to rely on reporting everything to a mod instead of letting the downvotes do their job.
The costs and donation stuff. That’s a lot of personal investment without much in return. Once I’m employed again I’d love to help out somehow.
Good luck on the UI stuff. I been on Voyager app on IOS since it launched so I have no opinions.
Keep up the good work amigo!
For a few months I was just on the technical and moderation side and things were simple. @gavi was handling the management well but left. You know, everything is fine in the beginning when it comes to hobby work. However, as you progress and other work gets in the way, it gets a little overwhelming. I believe we experienced this here.
The down vote issue is really complicated. Can’t comment for now.
For new UI; rather than replacing existing UIs, we trying to create an alternative for consuming visual content. We plan to have a structure similar to scrolller.com in the final product.
I genuinely don’t know so forgive my ignorance. What does downvoting do for moderation purposes? People still see it on their feed and don’t downvotes count for “active” posts to be presented? It does not remove the rule-breaking post and if people just downvote them a mod might completely miss the post since no one is reporting it.
It doesn’t do it directly. Downvotes promote self-moderation. Posts getting downvoted disincentivizes someone from posting another thing that might get downvoted. When you take downvotes away, people are less inclined to self-moderate and it shifts the burden to a mod.
I don’t think you’re aware of what’s getting downvoted as other users have expressed in these comments. How does one “self-moderate” being a different gender from what someone wants to see or being unattractive to the person downvoting? Your scenario highlights the abuse is effective at dissuading anything someone might not “like”, not content that doesn’t fit the communities posting guidelines.
This post got over 20 downvotes and cruel commentary about the submitter’s appearance. It was on topic for the community. I don’t know about you, but that’s exactly what I don’t want to disincentivize.
https://lemmynsfw.com/post/6909667
Also, for several months the place was empty. In large part because commenters were nasty and downvotes abused.
As a mod I’d be happy with downvotes turned back on. But I want some kind of enforcement with teeth when community members abuse real human beings. Reposting commercial porn is one thing, who cares about downvotes. But commentary and mass downvote brigades intended to disparage real people who expose their nude bodies for our entertainment should never be allowed here.
That’s JMO.
I’ve lurked for a while here and the only disagreeable thing I’ve ran across on this instance is the downvoting. We all know users are using it as a disagree or dislike button and it breaks my heart to see people putting genuine and authentic OC out there just for other people’s enjoyment and receiving that kind of treatment. In the past I’ve upvoted several posts because of this behavior I’ve seen with like males posting on gonewild being instantly downvoted. It’s definitely crushed someones day or has even stopped people from continuing to create content for this community.
The only reason for downvoting I’ve seen on here is laziness for not curtailing your own feed (subscribing, blocking) or downright petty behavior of making an anonymous statement that you don’t like someone or what they do. There’s a report button, a block button, or an unsubscribe button. Instead they’ve decided to move a few inches over to be an asshole. Whatever the outcome is, thank you for making this change and giving it a chance.
