MaybeALittleBitWeird

People go in and downvote every post?

Yes. A common issue has consistently been that people will downvote all posts for a specific community or subject, whether that’s something gay, a specific hentai, or a more niche fetish/kink that they don’t personally find appealing rather than blocking it. These posts are usually relevant and quality submissions for the community that they’re posted to, but end up with negative scores because of differing preferences.

I know this is an incredibly divisive topic and I don’t envy the position this puts admin in. For what it’s worth, I appreciate that you’re trying to make it work and involving the community in the process.

Downvotes are a useful tool to shape a community and help with moderation, but with the size of the active posting population as well as the broad reach for posts across the greater Fediverse downvotes don’t lend well to fostering the human element. It’s fine to have them with a larger active community where people can form their own content bubbles, but pretty much anything that’s posted here ends up at the top of local for a few hours and is going to get a lot of eyes on it that may not enjoy the premise of the community. You’ll have no posts to downvote after the community has chased away anyone who posts though.

With Yiffit, pornlemmy, and now Lemmyf.uk all shut down this is the only dedicated nsfw instance left that I’m aware of. It honestly just seems like Lemmy in general is hostile to nsfw content.

You could downvote from another account but it wouldn’t be federated and tallied for anything but your home instance.

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.

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.

I’ve posted my own OC before and I understand completely how fucking weird and aggressive people can be. I don’t want to go into details because this isn’t the place for it but on top of being kink-friendly I have a body type that invites some of the more depraved people. Enough so that I’m really not interested in posting myself any longer.

I just don’t want to see this place turn into the same version of walled gardens that Reddit ended up as. We’ve interacted enough at this point where I think you have a sense of my personality and even I’ve been banned and blocked for some very innocuous comments in the past when the reality is that if I had been told I crossed a line I would have apologized. I know that obviously everyone isn’t as reasonable or understanding, but just like with the conversation with downvotes, you can’t force a user to use a tool appropriately and there will always be bad actors on both sides. I think the one-way communication block allows for the least exploitation while still accomplishing the goal.

I’m not sure about private communities, but maybe someone else can chime in. I know you can disable comments and posts at the very least.

I understand where you’re coming from with your opinion and I don’t think it’s incorrect in any way, but I still personally disagree. A conversation requires two people and if you block off one end it’s no longer that. Just like you mention, they will tired eventually and move on. I’m not sure if Lemmy allows blocked users to comment on posts by users they’ve been blocked by actually though. I would hope not at least because that is a situation I absolutely do not think should be allowed.

I actually prefer the one-way ban personally, but I’m not a poster generally. I would imagine that the people who are enough of a problem to require the two-way ban would just ban-evade with another account anyway.

Blocking is only one way here as well. If you block a user then their comments and posts will no longer appear for you. If there is a comment by the blocked user in a conversation it shows up as ‘There is no record of this comment’ the same as if it was removed by mod action or if it’s the end of the comment chain you just can’t expand it (At least on Jerboa). Blocked communities don’t show in your feed and won’t show up in a search if you try to manually go to it either.

Your own comments and posts will still show to the blocked user however.

I actually wasn’t aware that the mark as read implementation required voting to register as I’ve never had it enabled. That does change my perspective quite a bit of true. I can see that being okay for general news or tech content, but when you add sex, which is largely going to come down to personal preferences, to that it certainly creates problems. Honestly a lot of the problems people are talking about in this thread come down to implementation problems in the end, but we just need to do the best we can with what we have for the time being.

I appreciate your verbalization of the issue at hand. I like to think of the vote system more along the lines of appropriateness upvote=appropriate/good, no vote=appropriate/neutral or not good, and downvote=inappropriate/broken/rule breaking.

Not interacting with a post has about as much of an effect on the non-chronological sorting as a downvote does so essentially you’re just going out of your way to make someone feel bad if it’s an appropriate fit for the community and you use it as an “Ew” button. This behavior becomes especially problematic when it comes to non-promotional OC.

It’s not perfect, but I think removing the downvotes for a brief stint will have a pretty good impact on training user behavior to help facilitate growth until this place is at a point where there is enough core functionality to allow for better solutions.

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.