An update on our community regarding downvotes

get’s [sic] a lot of downvotes by people who simply don’t like that particular post.

That's literally the point of the downvote system. To downvote posts you don't like, or you feel are out of place.

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.

This seems to be the real issue you're trying to fight. It seems like only permitting downvotes on communities that the user has been a part of for greater than 1/2/7/30/pick-a-number days would be the proper solution. If people in a community are downvoting a post, then it means they don't think that post is worth sharing. No admin, moderator, community owner, etc. should be able to change that.

I am strongly against removing downvotes.

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.

I ran a forum with 30k active users before saying F that. One thing I learned during that adventure is that you can't force people to behave the way you want. It doesn't matter what you type, the up/down votes will mean exactly what the user wants. Trying to force conformity or censoring their contributions (down votes) will only end in frustration and lower user count.

tldr: Your team is behaving like it's their first moderating experience.

"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, preventing them from being viewed by others almost at all."

Isn't that literally the point of down voting? To discourage posting that doesn't fit the community so that it isn't seen by as many people... ESPECIALLY since the focus on this instance is NSFW then more discouragement of posts that don't fit should be the goal so that users subscribed to those communities surface the appropriate things they want to see. You've removed users' agency to shape their communities and caused waaaaaay more work for moderators.

This also takes away our ability to down vote posts across the entire federation it appears?!

I fully understand why you guys did this and it is certainly a solution to the problem above.

That being said, I really do not like this change.

I would go into detail about the reasons why, but I feel like this topic has been hashed out a few times before. So everyone should know why people are for and against this change.

(I am only posting this comment because the other way to show disapproval has now been removed.)

Permanently Deleted

I disagree that blocking users or communities covers everything. Upvotes are for good content, neutral (no action) is for most posts that you just scroll past, but downvotes are for 5 second clips without sound that technically don't break any rules of the community. But maybe other people might disagree, and that's good, in that case they can upvote and the net value of the post is clear. If not, the OP gets a clear signal that the number of downvotes is higher than the number of upvotes and they can fuck right off with those posts.

Especially if they also post other, high quality content, you can't expect me to just block the user who has done nothing wrong, or report their post that breaks no rules.

Or do you expect me to upvote literally everythingI scroll past (except the posts I would have downvoted)? I'll gladly do that if I can autmate it, otherwise ain't nobody got time fo that shit.

I disagree with removing downvotes..

I prefer to jump on here and browse local by New posts. I don't shoehorn myself to specific communities, I like to see what all is out there. If it's not in my interest I block the community, I don't interact with it.

But the ones I don't block I'm interested in, not enough to join because to me that takes away my intent to just browse it all. After all that's why I joined this instance, to not have to hunt down communities to subscribe to but to get it all straight from the horses mouth..

I just want to say that I think the admin here is awesome. You seem to really want to accommodate both users and posters. I decided to no longer post here because many of the users are negative. The downvotes felt awful even though I have a thick skin. That’s great they are disabled, but there are also negative comments. I have a thick skin, but I get treated better on other social media. There are great users here, but the trolls are too prominent for me. It seems like many users have high expectations yet don’t want “pros”. The stock images look like sex dolls. Idk. I just want to be treated well. Thanks for the users that supported me. There are awesome people here.

Sounds like we're only allowed to upvote and anything whatsoever that gets posted is considered valid content? So... basically just a shitty Instagram for nudes?

Fck it, I'm begining to look for a new nsfw server. Normal people need both down votes and upvotes equally. That is called freedom of opinion and a free exchange of freedom of opinions. The comunity is a comunity then it is not a walled garden of enforced hapy smiles only. If someone doesn't like getting down votes, the problem is in them, they have a chance to correct, adjust their content, but all is lost if they are just blocked. You'll lose comunity faster this way. And so, your decision to remove functionality is plain wrong. Oh, and vote me down, if you do not agree ;) you fcks.

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?

Welp, guess the bot content and spam-posting will always rise to the top now :/

Thanks for keeping us in the loop! While I agree that downvoting can be problematic for smaller nicher communities, I'm not a fan of removing the downvote button. I think a better option would be to remind users (in a post like this) that they can block communities whose content they don't want to see on their client

Just a reminder that it is ok to propose different solutions and also disapproval of the change here, we know this is not a perfect solution.

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.

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.

Thank you for this. I found it really discouraging to spend hours making something only for it to be downvoted immediately. I hope this will encourage more active participation now.

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?

I agree with this.

Going through the comments some people say downvotes are important for ____ reason, which is actually correct. But that's not how I see it playing out.

And interestingly some comments, especially when you squint and read between the lines, actually show how people are misusing downvotes (I hope I'm not reading into it too much).

In any case when you look at how downvotes actually played out, perfectly fine posts (for their community) were being significantly downvoted. This is the right path, at least until things grow to be larger.

Just wanted to comment that I also agree with the decision. Lemmy has a lack of OC amateur porn so I really feel like anyone breaking the ice and posting their own content shouldn't receive any downvotes.

I agree with the decision but disagree with the reasons. And I believe a community poll should have been held before the change.

The actual reasons I think downvotes shouldn't be used are those mentioned in Is it worth having downvotes?: because it discourages people from posting content, especially if they post their own nudes and receive downvotes, and it makes the content from this instance less visible in other instances. Those two result in less content overall.

This is a great decision and I applaud the admins for listening to feedback.

Nothing worse than having your posts down voted especially by people who are submitting no posts of their own.

Good move, I can only upvote this decision. Jokes aside this is a good move.

The discussion is old and tired so I won't rehash it. But, I did want to vocalise my support as people are more likely to speak up about things to complain which can shift the perspective.

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.🤷🏼‍♂️

I think it's a good change for now, prevents people feeling demotivated! Thanks for the update.

This kinda bs is why I hate anonymous forums.

On my reddit account I had 20 followers.

At least 5 of them followed me to downvote EVERYTHING I posted. I think one of them was on some kinda macro because within minutes of me posting I'd be downvoted. EVERY TIME

up and down votes should be weighted.

You're a lurker who never up or downvotes? Finnaly see a post you upvote? That's worth 1 per day you havn't voted.

You downvote 100 posts a day? Each one of those is worth 0.01. Be a downer somewhere else.

I wonder if Lemmy could/would ever get the ability for only subscribers of a community to downvote its content?

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 absolutely fuckin hate this. It's almost the equivalent of YouTube removing the dislike button.

I am leaving this account behind because of this change, which is incredibly frustrating to have to do, since I had many saved posts and I already had been blocking the communities I don't like to see rather than downvoting their posts, so I have to redo all of this on a new instance.

Downvotes are an integral part of a voting system, and are especially critical in low population environments like this. I don't care how many "likes" a post has, what matters is the up/down ratio. Now lemmynsfw has lost that.

I do warmly welcome that change! Are other instances able to downvote our posts anyways, tho?

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.

Time to upvote shit to the top, self destruction speedrun lets goooo

Thanks for giving this a shot!

As someone who likes male content as much as female content, I support this change.

It's a tricky situation with the instancing. I just filter users/subs I don't like, but with the global down votes idk. Everyone has a right to be seen, but at the same time you wanna filter the bots/spam/promotion etc.

Good luck, and hail boobies.

I'm happy to continue posting and helping grow communities. 😊

Just highlighting a rule/advice I have on sidebar of !adorableporn@lemmynsfw.com (and applicable at any of other communities I mod)

Please don’t engage with Trolls and those being disrespectful to community/members. Report such to mods for ban action. Zero Tolerance.

honestly wouldn't it make sense to defederate from every non-NSFW instance? then people would not see porn unless they come here.

Just try not to downvote at all, except when someone posts bullshit like hate.

Is there any chance of setting all the downvote numbers to zero?

It's weird seeing a post with only an upvote arrow, but with a negative reaction score.

It's now over a week and it seems things generally have improved. A lot more different posters, but niche content and OC have not increased much yet. A lot more postings of popular redgifs links by non-OC reposters.

Just some unscientific observations - based on my own posts into small niche focused communities:

• more people seem to have switched to viewing own subscribed feed.
• not excessive amounts of upvotes, to be expected for small communities and small number of subscribers. I want my niche communities to be small and intimate of mostly interested/engaged subscribers, not just passersbys.
• some haters seem to have started abandoning LemmyNSFW (or blocked me/my comms which is totally good, as that's the way its supposed to work for stuff one has no interest in seeing)

Unfortunately I can't see your guys posts except mod posts. Not sure what kind of NSFW you're posting here