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.
If this is the case then that's perfectly valid, but temporary becomes permanent without a set end date.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thank you for taking the time to write this down and explain your pov so polite and articulate. Breath of fresh air.
Honestly, you make excellent points and i see no reason to not reinstate the downvotes in the AI communities except maybe technical? Its definetly worth to explore the option.
You also seem to grasp that there are real problems atm with attracting new oc posters and forming a positive envirronment for them to fool around in. The irony of the case is, despite lemmy's pretty rough handling of sellers that is just what lemmy will end up with. They are the only ones willing to put up with the mean comments, downvotes, lack of community and overal negative vibe, cause they have monetary reasons.
I can take my content anywhere online and go have fun pretending to be a pornstar in my free time. As an oc poster other sites offer me more protection from harrasment, im here cause i actually believe in the project decentralization, federation, open source... its the future. I didnt know that 200upvotes did the same as 200downvotes exposure wise btw.
There are other tools that could help the situation too, 2way blocking would be nice or the ability to make private and invite only communities, to be able to control the audience a bit while the community can develop. There is strength in numbers for this kind of thing and once the groundwork has been layed, those posters will have the support they need to move on to the wider lemmyverse. Just an observation but i think the ai community on lemmynsfw seems to already be in the next stage, which is good of course.
Well time for some coffee here. Still in pyama and all :D
You're welcome, thank you for taking the time to read my diatribe. I agree 100% with the issues that gone wild posters face, and I definitely think that any means we can to support and encourage them should be implemented, but a very practical side of me thinks there's a reason this has never been solved and that's simply because the wider market has no interest in the good natured, interpersonal erotic community because 95% of people only engage in this content for the function of self pleasure. I think the only way that those communities can function well is indeed to severely limit outside influence while also working to ensure that gone wild posts can rise high enough to reach the gen pop so as to encourage community growth.
So in all sense I agree that the gonewild communities need this, but it's a double edged sword that will just change and redistribute the harm in other ways to the other communities. I would think there is probably a technical limitation to having their votes turned off separately from the entire instance and should be something that lemmynsfw community leads should push for with the lemmy devs for the health of all our communities.