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.
get’s [sic] a lot of downvotes by people who simply don’t like that particular post.
That’s literally the point of the downvote system. To downvote posts you don’t like, or you feel are out of place.
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.
This seems to be the real issue you’re trying to fight. It seems like only permitting downvotes on communities that the user has been a part of for greater than 1/2/7/30/pick-a-number days would be the proper solution. If people in a community are downvoting a post, then it means they don’t think that post is worth sharing. No admin, moderator, community owner, etc. should be able to change that.
I am strongly against removing downvotes.
get’s [sic] a lot of downvotes by people who simply don’t like that particular post.
That’s literally the point of the downvote system. To downvote posts you don’t like, or you feel are out of place.
Sorry, but I hard disagree with you on the “point” of the downvote system. A downvote, to me, is not the same as “liking” or “disliking” content. I only downvote content that is not correct for the sub, bad-faith, or troll content, and I would really urge others to do the same.
If you think of cause-and-effect, downvoting any time you dislike content is not a good system: Upvoting is the incentive to post that type of content, and downvoting is a disincentive to post that type of content. And Lemmy needs more content.
For example, I see Gonewild, every male poster getting downvoted to oblivion. But male nudity is not against the rules if properly labeled. As a straight male, I have no interest in seeing male nudity, so I don’t upvote it, and it’s not bad-faith or rule-breaking so I don’t downvote it. But it’s clear most people are downvoting it because they “dislike” it. But maybe there are some non-straight-male people in the sub who would appreciate it, and they don’t see it because it’s been buried. The eventual effect is that the community becomes more insular, with more unwritten rules.
I appreciate your verbalization of the issue at hand. I like to think of the vote system more along the lines of appropriateness upvote=appropriate/good, no vote=appropriate/neutral or not good, and downvote=inappropriate/broken/rule breaking.
Not interacting with a post has about as much of an effect on the non-chronological sorting as a downvote does so essentially you’re just going out of your way to make someone feel bad if it’s an appropriate fit for the community and you use it as an “Ew” button. This behavior becomes especially problematic when it comes to non-promotional OC.
It’s not perfect, but I think removing the downvotes for a brief stint will have a pretty good impact on training user behavior to help facilitate growth until this place is at a point where there is enough core functionality to allow for better solutions.
This is a Lemmy implementation problem - you need to vote to remove a post from your feed if you’re hiding seen posts. I’d much rather ignore posts that fit but aren’t for me, but there’s no other way to mark them read.
Gonewild
Gonewild is a good example, if you don’t like male nudity, a more positive way would be to not downvote it but campaign to have a gonewildmale or something. Would make sense to have that so that the people who do like it can still watch it.
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.
I ran a forum with 30k active users before saying F that. One thing I learned during that adventure is that you can’t force people to behave the way you want. It doesn’t matter what you type, the up/down votes will mean exactly what the user wants. Trying to force conformity or censoring their contributions (down votes) will only end in frustration and lower user count.
tldr: Your team is behaving like it’s their first moderating experience.
Another opinion from someone with 0 posts and 0 comments on lemmynsfw
Trying to force conformity or censoring their contributions using down votes will only end in frustration and lower user count.
That is what has been happening the past 6 months on lemmynsfw. I’m very glad a change is being now to right this ship.
I mean the account is 5 months old… who cares how many comments and posts they have? Maybe they have the account to vote and mostly just lurk until now?
Unless you try making posts here you wouldn’t experience first hand why people don’t want downvotes. It’s easy to criticize without having perspective of people who are submitting content. There’s also some entitlement of people who want certain content who are doing nothing to get that content.
Harden up buttercup. I’m on world so I don’t have to worry about changes to lemmynsfw voting, but I agree with the others that removing downvotes ignores that the viewer knows what the viewer wants to see. If a certain type of content is being outright rejected by the community who are you to force them to view it? Downvotes help tell us creators what is and isn’t working for the community and encourages us to lift our game.
Now go through my history and try that bullshit line:
Another opinion from someone with 0 posts and 0 comments on lemmynsfw
I just looked at your posts, how about creating content instead of reposting it. They have bots for what you do, go let one of them do it so you can stop being sad that no one likes Amy Schumer.
I find your use of name calling disrespectful and your tone condescending. If you want to have a conversation with me do so in a respectful way.
“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, preventing them from being viewed by others almost at all.”
Isn’t that literally the point of down voting? To discourage posting that doesn’t fit the community so that it isn’t seen by as many people… ESPECIALLY since the focus on this instance is NSFW then more discouragement of posts that don’t fit should be the goal so that users subscribed to those communities surface the appropriate things they want to see. You’ve removed users’ agency to shape their communities and caused waaaaaay more work for moderators.
This also takes away our ability to down vote posts across the entire federation it appears?!
I understand what you’re saying, and while I personally like downvotes I’ve also seen how posters who fully fit the topic of a community are discouraged from posting because they were downvoted by people outside of the community
Moderators have talked about this for a few weeks now, this decision won by a majority after we got several complaints.
If something doesn’t fit a community that can be brought up to the mods in a post and a discussion can be had. However as of right now, with the size of this instance and to promote more growth downvotes haven’t really been helpful.
“posters who fully fit the topic of the sub are discouraged from posting because they were downvoted by people outside of the community”
Ok. I hear that. I guess maybe that proves the community itself should be discouraged? I don’t like that sentiment necessarily but… The inability to down vote federated posts means I’m going to bounce to another instance probably. I liked being able to curate my NSFW subscriptions and not risk being defederated from the entire lemmynsfw instance but can just change accounts now and again I suppose.
Agree that the point of down voting is to discourage posts that don’t fit with the community, which means the the community is voting for what it does and does not want to see in a community.
Someone being passionate about something that doesn’t fit with what the community wants to see getting frustrated should not over ride what the community has voted for. They should instead find or create a community that fits their passion and not try to change a community to fit their passion.
Yes but my point is it’s usually people outside a community. We’ve seen posts get more downvotes than a community has subscribers. If we could limit downvotes to just those subscribed to a community, we would, but unfortunately that functionality doesn’t exist right now.
Additionally upvoting does also work to shape a community, posts with more upvotes will still rise to the top of a community
So if a post gets more upvotes than a community has subscribers will you disable upvotes too?
Maybe it’s just me, but this feels like a double standard.
Let’s say I create a community that allows male and female content. But a lot of users join the community who dislike male content and consistently downvote it as a way to discourage it, then those downvoters are the ones trying to change the community. To me, it is the downvoters who are trying to, in a sense, hijack the community and make it something it wasn’t intended to be.
Maybe in theory but that’s not how they get used
All my posts in the Any Schumer get down voted despite it being on topic
and caused waaaaaay more work for moderators.
Hard disagree as a moderator of a bunch communities
Terrible community to use as an example. It’s not NSFW so not sure what it’s doing on this instance. The down votes kind of prove the community itself shouldn’t exist…
Just FYI Celebs communities are allowed content here and there are NSFW/nudity posts in that community.
Again proving that downvotes are getting misused.
I fully understand why you guys did this and it is certainly a solution to the problem above.
That being said, I really do not like this change.
I would go into detail about the reasons why, but I feel like this topic has been hashed out a few times before. So everyone should know why people are for and against this change.
(I am only posting this comment because the other way to show disapproval has now been removed.)
