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.
While not directly related related to the upvote/downvote issue mentioned, I've noticed a lot of the Lemmy nsfw posts are just...weird?
Too much AI, yiff futa stuff (I mean hey, if that's your thing, then you do you), and mildly nsfw content that looks like it was taken from a 1998 Hustler magazine.🤷🏼♂️
Lemmy is a bunch of Marxist-Leninist furry Linux users. Have you not noticed?
You just said 'Linux users' three different ways /s
spoiler
That's why we need a way to organize communities into different genres like softcore, hardcore, celeb, anime, etc.
And people can pick what their default feed has
If you would look at all of the posts from reddit nsfw subreddits then a lot if them would seem very weird to you. It just doesn't make sense to drink from the firehose of all the nsfw subreddits, would be way too many posts, you just look at your subscriptions or a specific subreddit. Because lemmynsfw is way smaller, overall post count is maybe measured in posts per hour instead posts per second, most people seem to primarily look at /all aka /local. I think the web UI also defaults to /local instead of /subscriptions, which doesn't help the issue.
This leads to many people downvoting posts in coms that they aren't part of. The long term solution would be improvements to lemmys filtering system. Also the option to only allow voting in coms that you're subscribed to looks promising. But this needs dev time and capacity. I'm positive that downvotes will be activated again once lemmy improves for lemmynsfw's use case.