Currently downvotes are enabled on a trial basis, this was done by me to see if they can be enabled to prevent spam from rising to the top of communities, along with the fact that is another form of interaction/feedback.
However I’ve gotten some pushback for this and so I’d like to see the general consensus of this decision. Please put any comments/concerns in this thread, and please vote here: (Link gone poll is done)
the results of this poll and the comments will determine if we keep or remove downvotes again
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Yes I like having downvotes. I use downvotes to notice trends of spam so I can better identify who to report/block.
That site sabotages the back button, fyi.
ALSO the downvote disabling feature never worked as intended. It only blocks lemmynsfw accounts from downvoting anything, lemmynsfw or otherwise. THIS account could already downvote anything federated.
the downvote disabling feature never worked as intended. It only blocks lemmynsfw accounts from downvoting anything, lemmynsfw or otherwise. THIS account could already downvote anything federated
Sure but those of us on lemmynsfw can’t see them.
Ok. I generally like being able to see things.
You could downvote from another account but it wouldn’t be federated and tallied for anything but your home instance.
I was for disabling down votes the last goaround wrt this topic, and I’m of the same opinion.
LemmyNSFW hasn’t grown much more in the past year and this will just drive away more posters (of which there aren’t much left) imho
Additional - I’d prefer that others block me (so they don’t have to see what I post) or block/don’t subscribe to various communities I mod that they don’t want to see as part of their feed, rather than have them downvote individual top level posts.
Enabling downvotes wrt comments, I’m okay with…
I’m 50/50 on this, so I’ll not vote, but I want to at least share my thoughts.
On one hand I generally like downvotes, because it makes it easier to identify bad actors & trolls. However, on an instance that’s all about nudity and sex, it could become a tool for harassment towards original content creators, which could discourage them from actually participating here. And I think OC is something we’d generally like to see more of, right? Or if we go with people who may be not quite the model standard body type, or do content that may not be the most vanilla kink out there, then they may be discouraged simply by people being not a fan of it, and it being very visible to them. It’s one thing to not get many upvotes, another to receive a lot of downvotes.
If this was a regular instance I’d easily vote for the downvotes, but here I’m rather leaning towards “nay”.
Ditto
Please don’t bring your bad Reddit habits to Lemmy.
Please take your own advice.
Which bad Reddit habit am I inflicting on Lemmy? Qt3456 is making low-effort comments in place of upvotes.
You’re derailing the topic with off-topic pseudomodding.
I don’t know if it’s possible from a technical standpoint, but it’d be great if it was a toggle that you could set to not see downvotes on your own posts or comments.
I find myself posting more constructive dissent here than on Reddit because I don’t get discouraged from hive mind dog piles.
The effect would be similar for those content creators.
Downvotes have some advantages over blocking. They:
- Indicate trends of spam (as @morphballganon@mtgzone.com pointed out).
- Allows minimizing exposure to unwanted content from a given account without blocking out exposure to all that account’s content. (Accounts may post a mix of content I do and don’t like. Blocking throws out the baby with the bathwater.)
- Help disambiguate the popularity of content vs. reach of content. (Relatively few upvotes compared to other posts could be due to community obscurity, or posting at a poor time of day. It doesn’t indicate whether the community likes the post, or how you should adjust your posting habits to increase appeal. Counting downvotes helps you understand how many total people viewed a post, and the percentage of those who appreciated it.)
- Are lower friction. (They take fewer clicks.)
No downvotes. People use it as a “this isn’t my fetish” button and everything even slightly niche gets sent to oblivion. Especially bad for gonewild posts where people’s self image gets involved.
Also using a Google doc for this poll seems like a bad idea since people who aren’t from this instance can vote
You are using “some people misuse a thing” as a rationale to get rid of the thing.
If someone posts fetish x on a vanilla community, they should get downvoted. If they post that same thing in a community about fetish x, then the community can simply be blocked by those so inclined.
by that same logic a use that sees content they don’t like on a community they do can block that user.
is there a problem with content being posted that doesn’t match communities right now? i haven’t noticed one. the biggest problem on this platform right now is lack of content. downvotes, or any tool for creating explicit negative social interaction or feedback can make a community more hostile and less inviting. right now i generally see almost no posts on any nsfw communities that should get downvotes that don’t just get taken care of by a moderator. right now we need to draw people in to posting content way way more than we need better tools to organize it.
the biggest problem on this platform right now is lack of content. downvotes, or any tool for creating explicit negative social interaction or feedback can make a community more hostile and less inviting.
Exactly this. We don’t have enough content to give users the tools to discourage posting.
This is the important part:
Especially bad for gonewild posts where people’s self image gets involved.
We don’t need a “go away, you’re ugly” button. That’s what blocking is for.
Hm… what if downvoting was weighted only 1/10th as much as upvoting? So a few downvotes here and there from people doing it wrong wouldn’t amount to anything in others’ view, but if a post is heavily downvoted due to being in the wrong community or low effort, that’s visible?
Maybe? I dunno. Turning off downvotes seems like a pretty simple solution. Trying to come up with complex ways to make it hurt just the right amount doesn’t seem like it’ll work in all cases.
It’s called fine-tuning, and if everyone gave up that easily, many domains would suffer, like medicine, architecture, manufacturing design etc. Don’t be afraid of something simply because the ideal fix is more complicated than 2+2.
If they post that same thing in a community about fetish x, then the community can simply be blocked by those so inclined.
The problem is the majority of people don’t actually do that. They just downvote it to oblivion. That’s a significant part of why they were turned off in the first place.
If they post that same thing in a community about fetish x, then the community can simply be blocked by those so inclined.
Yes, they could. But that’s not what’s going to happen.
Believing that fetishes should be separated in their own corners and downvoted otherwise is an excellent reason to not have downvotes - or to just not post content in this instance anymore
Separating things into their own corner is literally the point of subs.
Unless a community explicitly has a rule excluding content, and the uploads are valid there, downvoting something just because you’re not into it just seems like entitlement to me. Its the same “reasoning” people use to get gay content outside of Rule34 or other general boards, because they find it “icky” (of course none of these people complain about lesbian content)
Having to enumerate every single rule on a sub would be horrific and more importantly preference can’t be written into rules. What a community likes and doesnt like is based on the voting system, thats the fundamental point of Lemmy and reddit.
Thinking you can post whatever you want and expect all the exposure without regards to a communities tastes just because it doesnt explicitly violate rules is entitlement.
Seems like the divide is between people who actually contribute to this instance and post content, versus those who don’t and want to decide what get seen or not. Question, when we are gone, are you going to start posting? Will you create and moderate communities? Or are you going to keep sitting and expecting poster to cater to your tastes?
Its pretty rich to sit on your ass, makes demands and still call others entitled.
I posted when this instance first started and there was nearly nothing. So yeah I would and did. I didnt complain about the down votes and wasnt demanding up votes either.
I’m entitled to nothing, posts or votes. You are entitled to nothing as well.
I think a lot of responses were correlating downvotes with censorship which is something I can agree with. I personally don’t want to see someone’s dick in gonewild but I know it’s for someone. Maybe we can have a tagging system that user can filter what they don’t want to see. But I don’t care if downvotes comes back or stays away because I’ll just block the accounts that shows things I don’t want to see.
Every downvote on pro-downvote comments should count as a vote for re-enabling. Clearly they’re okay with downvotes, at least when it suits them haha
If 10 people downvote 10 pro-downvote comments, your algorithm would count that as 100 votes against downvotes. Didn’t think that one through, did ya?
Shoot you found the flaw in my system.
Definitely enable; e.g.: lets say based on my sorting algorithm and frequency of frontpage visits, I usually see posts with ~20 upvotes (sounds like a weird oversimplification but that is kind of the case for me foe some reason)
For those 20 upvotes there might be 500 more people that believe that a post is very low quality, inappropriate for the community’s topic, etc., but I still see it, since, well its score was ~20.
Without upvotes it was very frequent that I saw a post that was not (or was very-very slightly) related to the community’s theme, and there is absolutely no other way for the community to filter it out. It forces me (everyone) to scroll across much irrelevant content, until maybe I give up and unsubscribe from some communities altogether, instead of helping to curate them into something people enjoy visiting.
The only other solution to this problem is to have moderators check every post that is uploaded, and, besides putting more strain to moderators, one moderator’s decision might even be debatable sometimes (e.g. a post might technically fit in a community, but the people who visit it might not find it enjoyable, or will just prefer to see it in a more appropriate community).
Downvotes provide a simple solution that involves many opinions in this whole process.
The only case that not having downvotes might make sense, is “Top”, in which I feel I only see posts with an insane number of upvotes (that I btw might not enjoy seeing) and nothing else. I also feel that this sorting algorithm also promotes the visibility of more generic content that a larger variety of people will enjoy, and will just upvote without considering the community it was posted in etc. But in those cases, the posts with many upvotes, can only get more upvotes (promoting the phenomenon), whereas with the ability to downvote, the final score will be more balanced, or at least leave the choice to the user (maybe indirectly via the choice sorting algorithm, or their client’s settings), for if they want to see controversial posts.
I don’t see it being a benefit in communities in that I mod (hentai, paizuri, tentaclehentai, and hentaigif), so I’m not personally keen on it but I can see why larger communities might want it. I’m no longer as hopeful that a more active hentai-oriented community will develop here, so though I voted “No”, I’m a little apathetic about the choice now, personally.
From what I recall, some users use downvotes for more than just spam, like disliking things. This creates a problem when people browse the Local feed and downvote stuff they don’t like even if they aren’t even subbed to that community. This impacts niche communities and their posters/creators who would get more downvotes from people seeking more mainstream content even if it would otherwise fit that community.
If the goal is just to ward off spam, then unless reports aren’t enough, I’d keep downvotes off.
I created this account solely for, uhm, research purposes but I’m using it as my only account now. Partly because my other instance had some persisting issues for a few weeks and partly because I realized the missing downvoting really helped me chill and stop looking at/for karma. Not that I’m here to collect points, but my primitive monkey brain found a source of cheap reward and enjoyed it. I’m not really into downvotes, but I’m fine with both if others care for it.
I worry that regular posters will get discouraged and post less. A few have already mentioned that.
That on top. I’d rather have no downvoting
Yes I can clearly see this more about girls… and Sex Doll stuff aren’t a niche here it was worth checking this place out though I wish your site luck Reddit and Internet has become to damn soft in general people are just ridiculous nowadays it’s kinda sad 🤷🤦♀️
Currently downvotes are enabled on a trial basis, this was done by me to see if they can be enabled to prevent spam
There’s a bunch of spam from a user called “BravoIsabella” that has positive upvotes, and a grumpy post from one of the AI communities saying “mystery downvoter show yourself”.
Edit: we have three regular posters (Radovic, LVL3_Eroticism, and Cleverhans) saying they don’t like the decision and they may stop posting. There’s at least one instance of upvoted spam.
There are two instances of spam accounts getting upvotes
Oh and the “mystery downvoter” post got, as of this moment, a -11. In a new community with 5 subscribers. It basically means a gang of people are just going around and downvoting everything I post. It’s no longer about artistic differences or anything, it’s a vendetta.
And frankly, I am not here for this type of shit. I’ve put a lot of time and effort into creating art and sharing it, including creating new communities. But this gang of self-appointed anonymous vigilantes is really making me reconsider whether it’s all worthwhile.
Sorry about the whining. But since the admin asked how people feel about downvotes, that’s how I feel.
It’s shitty. I appreciate your posts. Here’s hoping OP turns off downvotes and we can go back to the way we were.
Thanks!
Yeah, I posted this. Somebody or a number of somebodies are mass now downvoting nearly everything I post. Presumably, they have some beef but they should have stated it openly and we could have discussed it. Instead they are just blanket-bombing me.
Frankly, it’s the sort of thing one expects on reddit. But this is supposed to be a better sort of place?
Removed by mod
I feel downvotes are fairly useless.
They’re used as a disagree button. Ok but why do you disagree? Leave a reply and let’s discuss. Gain saying has little value and that’s all a downvote to disagree is.
They’re used to report spam. Spam should be reported so I don’t think that’s a valid argument for them. Downvoting spam leaves it up, reporting spam gets it taken down. We have a better solution to spam than downvotes.
They are used by bad actors, with the removal of downvotes bad actors have to spend more effort in making a comment and it becomes far more obvious in who they are, report and block them.
Finally downvotes are a way to yuck someone’s yum, I’m mindful of the instance we’re on. I don’t want our communities to become like Reddit where only one genital configuration and body type are allowed.
Very well articulated 👍, especially your last point, given the still fragile growing-pains state that LemmyNSFW is currently in
I really don’t think anything has fundamentally changed with the community or platform since the decision to remove downvotes in the first place. I just don’t think the population of Lemmy as a whole is large enough or mature enough to use them in a responsible manner and it will continue to be used as a “this isn’t my fetish” button rather than any indication of quality or community relevance just like before.
I agree that the spam problem has gotten worse over time, but I really don’t see downvotes doing very much to fix that. Most of it is from content sellers. They only need one post to do well to get their visibility and they almost always get at least that much so they still end up rewarded for the behavior in the end.
Agreed with this. Lemmy is too low volume to need them.
