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lemmynsfw Lemmy NSFW @lemmynsfw.com
lemmyposter212 @lemmynsfw.com

An update on our community regarding downvotes

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?

  • 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.
  • 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.

165 comments

  • 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.

  • Permanently Deleted

    • If you have an issue with the mods please do report it we have a public matrix channel, you can report it there, or message an admin directly.

      We continually have discussions in the mod chat about the behavior of mods and what is and isn't the appropriate behavior of mods. If you have a serious issue with a mod, and it is brought up, we will discuss it.

    • I understand and appreciate that this community is important to you and that you want to see it grow and flourish. I think we ultimately want the same thing but have different views and interpretations of what the current problems are and what the best approaches are to solve them.

      I'll try to respond to your points and questions, and explain why I think the deactivation of down votes is a good step right now. I want to make clear that I don't speak for anyone else, I'm just stating my own views and opinions:

      What do we do about moderators being spammers?

      We seem to have different definitions of spam. The amount of posts doesn't make a poster a spammer imo.

      Blocking moderators isn’t my favorite thing to do, even though I currently have.

      If you need to block moderators then maybe the com is just not for you? You're free to create your own community with better moderation and less spam.

      Although it generally might be a good idea to use separate accounts for official admin announcements and for posting content, something to think about. Thank you for bringing up that point.

      We’ve already lost one community member due to how they treated her, and how her comments about his improprieties were handled, can we talk about corrective actions? Or is this just a good ol’ boys club?

      While I would have worded the message to that community member differently (and b9 and me talked about that), my perspective on the issue is that B9 didn't have ill intentions and the member misinterpreted the message because they already disliked b9 bc of !fauxbait. I might be wrong, but that's how I read the situation.

      Feels sus that this comes pretty directly after they were called out in comments with downvotes on their bullshit, now mod deleted, reply .

      I can tell you that this was talked about way before, I asked for this like 2 weeks ago because I was upset about getting down voted on my niche kink posts. OC posters that don't fit mainstream beauty standards have been complaining about down votes for quite a while. There are people sitting in front of the screen, we humans are not machines, we have feelings. Down voting someone because you don't find them attractive is just a shitty and hurtful thing to do.

      And who cares this much about fake points anyway? just tell the people who are complaining about the “excessive downvotes” to turn off vote counts in their user settings.

      (OC) Posters want to see that people interact with their content, that some people enjoy them. This is not a good solution for them. Yes, some people write comments, but only a small percentage of the people up voting a post will leave a comment.

      why should a few complainers ruin the way the entire instance is operated? absolutely ridiculous.

      The "complainers" are the people that are posting and keeping this instance alive. As you might have noticed not a single OC poster has complained about this change. The way I see it a few people misusing down votes where ruining the entire instance. As other folks in this thread explained, everyone is aware that his heavy handed approach is not ideal but under the circumstances it seemed like the best choice to try it out.

      I already had to limit my experience to SUBSCRIBED only so that I didn’t have to see said moderators awful bullshit spam taking my actual entire main new page up all the time

      Seems like a great solution. The "local, newest" feed will become basically unusable at a certain point anyways if there are enough people posting. The local feed can be useful to find new coms that you aren't aware of but since sexual tastes are very broad and particular it's to be expected that a lot of the posts will not be to your liking.

      I get why the Lemmy devs made users default to the local feed on the web UI, but I don't think it's a good fit for a NSFW instance. The mobile app I'm using defaults to the subscribed feed. I recommend changing the web UI to default to the subscribed feed in the settings.

      If you want to use the local feed as your default feed then you have to block the communities that you don't want to see. This is a blacklist approach, which is a lot of work. The subscription feed is a white list approach, way less work. Of course not useful for discovery, but I don't think "discovery mode" is a good default mode for this site.

      (guess i can go back but its probably just him with another username doing the same now)

      Do you have a reason or proof that they are using multiple accounts?

      And it’s a core aspect of the fediverse.

      I'm not sure if you're talking about the local feed or about down votes. The local timeline on any sufficiently large fediverse server is basically useless because it's just way too many random posts to take in. Down votes are not a core aspect of the fediverse. Activitypub, the fundamental protocol of the fediverse specifies a "Like Activity" but no "Dislike Activity": https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#like-activity-outbox It's just something Lemmy devs took from Reddit and similar boards. Not all boards handle down votes in the same way, a site like hackernews, will not let you down vote until your account has received a certain amount upvotes. It's fine to experiment and iterate on this formula. Given the limitations Lemmy the team came to the decision that this is the best way to go forward until changes to Lemmy are made. We need to use the options and settings that are currently available.

      You wrote in another thread on this post that you don't want even more instances of Lemmy. A lot of people would argue that the ability to create your own instance if you dislike the moderation on your previous instance is a core aspect of the fediverse. I think the best approach to not need more instances is to be the most welcoming community possible on lemmynsfw. This means to accept that people will post stuff that you don't want to see and that that's okay and even a good thing.

      Let me explain how this happens since you dont get Lemmy??

      I can assure you that they are aware of the chain of events that leads to more down votes than a community has members. As I explained above, sexual interests are diverse and if everyone would down vote anything that they personally find distasteful then we would lose all those wonderful niche communities where people can enjoy their specific tastes. I think this community is better for this diversity.

      Why are you using subscriber count as an arbitrary ceiling?

      The subscriber account was mentioned because it is proof that down votes are coming at least in part from the local feed. I think those down votes are a net negative for the community as it discourages anything that isn't mainstream.

      most people dont subscribe to communities they like… I only do it to avoid your homeboy’s spamming and similar users.

      I would recommend that they start subscribing to their favorite coms if they are unhappy with the local feed, see my above comment about black list vs white list approach.

      legit part of the federated universe that happens to specialize in porn

      What makes a site a legit part of the fediverse? To me, if a server speaks activitypub and federates it is part of the fediverse, if an instance turns of federation then it's not part of the fediverse. You seem to be talking about something else?

      And guess what the internet already has plenty of ? yep! porn Collections, you nailed it.

      I don't think people posting porn content takes away from the coms that focus on OC content. If people are looking for OC content they will find it. Anyone who's familiar with NSFW Reddit knows about gonewild. !gonewild has more than 16k subscribers. That's ~38.7% of the user base (though some subscribers might come from other instances). I think that's pretty good.

      You’re removing features for people using them within the defined rules (none).

      While it would be possible to see who down votes by looking at the database, there is no way to see the users who gave down votes via the UI. I think that a rule that is not practical to enforce is not very useful in this context.

      I'm looking forward to the return of down votes if down votes can be limited to subscribed communities or to only allow users with enough points to down vote. I'm generally wary of technical solutions to social problems, but I think in a pseudonymous board like lemmynsfw it can work quite well or at least it can be a useful part of the solution.

    • Why do you sound incoherent? Are you autistic?

      You should get off the internet you retarded aspie.

  • I just want to go on record saying I do not like this change, though I do understand the good intention behind it.

    It seems there was a simple and elegant solution discussed earlier in this thread - only allow downvotes of you are subscribed to the community where the post is. I know this would need to be implemented by the lemmy devs; is there someplace we can request or vote on such features? A whole tagging system may be nice, but it's overkill for this problem.

    Meanwhile, genuine question, how do I hide posts that I have already seen that I would have downvoted? I have already joined a bunch of communities, and I only look at my Subscribed feed. I have lemmy set to not show me posts I've already voted on. Thus, my feed is always kept fresh, and when I log in I just see what's new in those communities to which I've subscribed.

    So, now I see a post that I feel doesn't live up to the standards of a particular community. It doesn't break any rules per se, and it's not report-worthy, it's just not a good post. Normally I'd downvote and move on, and I'd never see it again. So now what do I do to ensure I don't see it every time I log in? Lemmy doesn't have a 'hide' or 'mark seen' feature (another good feature we should have), and I don't want to upvote the post because it's a bad post. I also don't want to block the poster, because their next post might be great! What do I do here?

    I hate to make this post any longer, but I'll just provide an example. Within the last couple days, I saw the same post uploaded to both gonewild and to adorableporn. I upvoted the gonewild post and downvoted the adorableporn post, because at the end of the day it was a pretty average nude picture, perfectly reasonable for gonewild. But not, IMO, anything that could be called adorable. That, to me, seems like specifically the kind of situation that calls for a 'downvote and move on' response. So now how do I hide that post without blocking that user, who is otherwise posting good content?

  • It's a sad day when something like this happens. Unfortunately with how the Lemmy's All works it's possible a huge amount of the initial downvotes are regular people not wanting to see the content, as downvotes are federated. This constituted as part of my original choices for disabling it when I started my instance. We had the gripes people are displaying here and it probably constituted to a lack in Reddthat's growth potential.

    There needs to be work done not only for flairs, which I like the idea of, but for a curated All/Frontpage (per-instance). Too many times I see people unable to find communities or new content that piques their interest. Having to "wade through" All-New to find content might attribute to the current detriment as instead of a general niche they might want to enjoy they are bombarded with things they dislike.

    Tough problem to solve in a federated space. Hell... can't even get every instance to update to 0.18.5 so federated moderation actions happen. If we can't all decide on a common Lemmy instance version, I doubt we can ask our users to be subjected to not using the tools at their disposal. (up/down/report).

    Keep on Keeping on!

    Tiff - A fellow admin.

  • Believe me, I didn't want this decision either, but the posters were being downvoted for their posts in even accordance with the community.

    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.

  • I have no problem with downvotes . I have problem with users who downvote and comment " WTF is wrong with people/ Why you degrade like this?" on a SPH community! Rules and description are on the sidebar! People see something and dont even bother to check what community they are commenting on. What I am supposed to post on SPH / Femdom comminity ? - Minnie Mouse praising them?

    • Are the people writing those comments subscribed to the community you're posting in? Might also be a problem of people from the local feed commenting on those posts?

  • Because you don't nlike something, that does not mean others want like it, the more you downvote, the more down it goes, so people who like the content won't see it.

    It's a NSFW instance, people expect to see mainly NSFW, if you don't like something, block the community that it came from, you don't have to downvote every post , day after day. I learned the hard way, that SFW posts in the community that I made, are big NO, so I stopped posting SFW.

    It's a big community and people should be free to d upvote and downvote, but there are users who only downvote ! Which is not the only use of the downvote.

  • I'm happy to hear that the overall consensus was for disabling downvotes for the time being. I don't think this is something that should be in place forever, but for now it's a step in a positive direction. I'd like to note that other instances can still downvotes posts and comments that are federated so we still might see some issues in that regard.

    People seem to want to treat Lemmy as a platform exactly like Reddit, but the reality is that things just don't work the same here. There is no algorithm filtering things out in the background to ensure you have a homogenous feed and keep you engaged. It takes a little bit of work to curate your feed to be what you'd like to see and just because something is outside your personal preferences and kinks doesn't mean that it is bad.

    I've seen people mention multiple times in this thread that they downvote all the "weird" stuff they don't like. All the same "weird" things exist on Reddit in their own communities, but there is a greater volume of other content posted to the point where you likely won't see it. This is a place that is starving for content and downvoting someone because they are curvier or don't like the same kind of hentai as you only dissuades people from posting anything else. You can't encourage growth by telling people to not post.

    Edit: Forgot to mention that I appreciate you mods and admins! I don't envy the firestorm that this change may cause.

165 comments