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?
IMO up & downvotes both have a purpose. Content can be disagreeable without being rule-breaking. I've certainly found downvotes a helpful indicator in the past, occasionally highlighting a poor formulation that caused one of my comments to be misunderstood.
A potential middle-ground might be disallowing downvotes on post, but permitting them on comments?
Either way, big thanks to you for hosting the site, and hope the donations situation gets resolved!
@SmuttyLad @yay
Discussion about this in the Mod coordination room is IMO the proximate cause. An older woman posted an image of herself in shibari ropes to a shibari forum and got cruel commentary over her appearance and a mass of downvotes. And that kind of behavior had happened before in gonewild, driving away many good amateur contributors.
I don't care about removing downvotes. But I do want strong enforcement when it come to the community hurting real people.
https://lemmynsfw.com/post/6909667
For sure, ideally this could be controlled on a community - by community basis, but AFAIK that isn't an option with lemmy, hence my suggestion of retaining downvotes only on comments.
This would protect contributors from essentially all unwanted negative attention (since derogatory comments are against guidelines), whilst keeping negative feedback for a part of the content where folks have to actively engage to participate. (You won't even be in the comments if you didn't find the post interesting & engaging)
@SmuttyLad
I agree with all of that. To me, the issue is really about how we treat OC contributors. Whether they are amateurs just having fun or OF creators in it for a small buck, they are human beings first. They deserve basic respect. That's all I want.