Do you want downvotes? (POLL)
NSFW
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
200
Comments147
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.
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'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.
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.
Downvotes have some advantages over blocking. They:
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.
Then use your same logic for upvotes, which you clearly didn't. Only having it one sided defeats the entire purpose of votes, if you can't see that then you have insanely flawed logic.
I'm obviously not going to make your argument for you.
Having it one sided clearly doesn't defeat the purpose of votes. When you went to the ballot box do you upvote your chosen candidate and also downvote your least favourite?
Not having downvotes is a simple statement: "If you do not like this thing, we don't care". Report the spam and block the creators you don't like, simples.
So you use my logic for upvotes, which you clearly didn't, and maybe you'll see why it's downvotes that are removed and not upvotes.
See, if downvotes were active you might have just gainsayed and moved on and we wouldn't have had this interaction. Neat huh?
I changed my mind. I was pro downvote but I just looked at the new community list, saw one I liked, and then saw that a lot of the posts that fit the theme just fine have been downvoted for no reason. The mod is clearly upset about it also.
So yeah, please turn downvotes back off.
How do you know that there was no reason behind the downvotes?
True. I mean no discernable reason.
I can see a lot of pros and cons, and I don't think we can know what is best without a longer-term trial. There'll be some trolling and harassment that comes with it, which is really bad, but also it allows user filtering of spam and junk posts, which is good. Hopefully there's less of the former and more of the latter.
I'm for them in theory but I feel like they get abused. Like if someone posts a dick in gonewild. Nothing wrong with that, but most people don't wanna see dicks.
I don't suppose you can leave it up to the sub-lemmy to decide? (Sub lemmy? Wtf are we calling these?)
I agree that there's nothing wrong with that, but if most people don't want to see it, then... why shouldn't it get downvoted? That's kind of the point, isn't it? Give the people what they want.
Perhaps dicks belong in a more niche sub where people actually do want to see that?
They get downvotes in the niche subs too because everyone browses Lemmy by All due to lack of content.
ok, well that just sucks.
*Edit: I feel like my wording was unclear and could be interpreted as "sucks for them, but oh well". I meant it more in a genuine "oh damn, that's really shitty" kind of way.
As a moderator of some of those subs I can confirm.
I’m going to post a solo on gone wild .. 😈 let’s experiment lol
It will definitely get abused 🤣
Already is, big time
Ohhhh I know trust me I know lol 🤣someone downvoted almost every one of my posts on nodachiwrld 😆
Lol yeah people hate you and your magic dick
Ps tell your hot ass wife to post more 🤣
She doesn’t like posting on here because people would rather see pornstars than OC’s, eclipsebunnie stopped posting here, nsfw kitty, posterxbunny, phoebe grace all left because of it , now If I told them about the downvotes they’ll never come back here .
I have to disagree with that one, gonewild/oc posts get the most upvotes on average
I seen far more pornstar pics/posts make it on the front page more than OC’s, now is currently mostly OC’s but that’s only because the current OC’s are pretty new and are posting individually on other communities
if you look at top week and month the majority of top posts are OC, there are more pornstar posts because there is just a huge stockpile of porn that people can grab from, that's always going to be true. But again if you look at the upvotes history, people do actually appreciate OC alot. The ratio of upvotes for oc vs porn is probably similar to reddit, there's just a lot less people here, which means less interaction in general.
But then why are OC’s leaving? I talked to the girls I know and they said not many interactions on here, upvotes are good but it doesn’t keep them staying on the front pages for long and then gets drowned out by non OC posts . If people interacted with OC’s like they do with porn posts, then OC’s wouldn’t get drowned out by it
I disagree but that's just me, there are plenty of tube sites to see pornstars get fucked, I come here for the OC
Exactly! More ppl should bring light to the OC’s on here rather than the pornstar posts lol
Hahaha, they’re mad/jealous because I sleep with beautiful women all the time 😅 they don’t like pretty guys with pretty women 🤣💜
People are dumb, I'm over here living vicariously through you haha
🤣🤣🤣 welll, I’m glad annnnd a new video with the wife makes it’s way here tomorrow!
You’re beautiful not pretty 🤭
We tend to call them what the UI for most Lemmy clients (or the web version) call them, i.e. "communities".
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.
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.
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.
Exactly this. We don't have enough content to give users the tools to discourage posting.
This is the important part:
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.
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 feel that downvotes serve an important purpose both in keeping out spam, but also in preserving the many-niches architecture common in porn. Without downvotes even more work will be put onto mods in order to make sure the content posted is relevant to the communities its being posted too. Take c/Hotwife which has recently had a few postings that have 0 to do with hotwifing. Allowing downvotes is an imperfect solution, but I think an important one.
What about people getting pissed over something (presumably, it's hard to tell) and then going after people's posts in other communities and rampage-downvoting everything?
This should be handled by (auto)mod tools, allowing good faith users to help filter non-fitting or low quality posts, and preventing bad actors from downvote fireworks.
There are possibilities to limit available downvotes either by throttling amount per time/community/instance/user, by demanding to have a certain “reputation” in the community/instance or by making downvote cost your own “reputation”.
None of the above is perfect, but IMO outright removing a right to disagree is against community interests.
Currently I can either leave a “harassment” comment: “wtf this is doing in this community”, make complain to a mod (if there is any active), or ignore the post. Neither help community grow stronger, I think.
It seems to me that most valid criticisms are better stated as a polite comment than a numb downvote.
To be fair, comparing to Reddit, Lemmy is still niche, let alone LemmyNSFW even nicher. However, without downvotes some communities lose track. Without growing bigger, I do not expect to see some niche NSFW communities here which are already niche on Reddit. With more posters Lemmy shall grow, does not matter if it's slowly, but it should be steadily.
I think it's better to have a button to report spam, harassment, etc , rather than using downvote. Downvote is too ambiguous.
do reports downrank posts?
It might even remove the offending post entirely.
automatically/instantly? or do you mean after review?
Reports just trigger a mod or admin to review the post when they see it. Reports do not affect the ranking of a post in any way unless moderator action is taken and it's removed.
After review ofc. Good moderators is the core of lemmy communities, not only for removing spam but for keeping things on-topic.
Reports should not downrank posts. It should notify moderators. Moderators can decide to add a mod comment, hide the comment, delete the comment, message the commenter etc. There can be tools under moderators control to automate this.
Such buttons aren't really supported in mobile apps though.
I suppose it makes sense if the change is lemmy-wide
I mean, that's how the report button works site-wide. If we are talking about a button that works automatically, then you are basically copying the downvote, but worse, since it cannot be offset by many people upvoting.
You need to remember that it is hard to distinguish between a downvote / button use because of spam / harassment and because of people not liking something. You need a human to do that. Fetish content will get downvoted / buttonned by people "not into it" when obscure enough. Regular OCs will also get that treatment - since users will get bored and seeing new content from them may make them downvote / button.
From a user interface perspective, I think it's far less likely people will report spam than downvote when they do not like something. I suppose we both are only hypothesising here though.
I don't see offsetting as a good feature. It just seems to drive people into tribalistic up/down wars. What's the point of users seeing the net votes?
Only if it isn't a single button.
The point is the same as with hiding the yt dislike button. It helps people determine if something is of higher quality or not.
I do agree if it were not a single button the likelihood would be much further less. I would imagine ideally one tap to open a modal window and then one tap between 'This is spam', 'This is harassment' or type in Other : []. So maybe just moving the Create Report to where downvote button now is worth trying.
There is a fundamental difference between YouTube and Lemmy though - community members and community moderators. I think having a signal from dislike is much less needed because of it. However, I do think it would be nice (not impactful at the current size of community) to have a viewcount of some sort.
Nope. I'm seeing male posters getting downvoted, which sucks. Everyone should be welcome in all communities unless the community states otherwise or a post is off-topic.
Yeah, just filter stuff you don't wanna see. There's a person behind the post you're downvoting
Enabled downvotes and place immediately got more argumentative and a bit more toxic. No, not want.
I too, as a person who has no feelings for men, have clicked posts for gay porn by accident. I too have come across posts which I did not prefer, even if they were concerning women. I, too, have seen some things which in general I do not like. In these cases—
I simply became more careful and started taking a look at the community name first. Secondly I started looking for communities whivh fit what I like better. Niche ones without exposure. A good sign. For the last, there are a number of ways for me to deal with it, like simply moving on. Blocking where maliciousness exists. Finding other communities. Et cetera.
Ability to downvote is an important part of these communities, it's a self control mechanism. I surely don't want to block some users just because I don't like some of their posts, downvote should suffice.
Maybe it's just me, but after enabled I seem to get much higher quality content on the local page.
Liked having them gone. Not sure I'll keep posting if they stick around.
I think vote up is to "like" a post and down vote to "dislike" a post. If the intent is to use down votes to prevent spam that is what a report button would be for.
Thank you for involving the community in the decision :D I generally like downvotes because it allows scrolling top posts to see the most generally liked content. It's still easy to view New posts to see things without being affected by downvotes, like looking at a niche topic.
When is a decision expected?
Probably about a week, just to make sure everyone is able to see the poll
A poll isn't a good way to decide this. Regular posters suffer from downvotes more than others, and they drive our community. Their opinion should count for more.
Currently three regular posters have complained about it:
Yes I definitely understand that, that's why the comments here and the poll are being taken into consideration
To be quite frank, I don't know why you're even doing this. We had a discussion about it last year and all the same points were raised after which you turned them off, only to turn them on and have another debate a few weeks later and you then had to turn them off again. I think you know that you will probably have to turn them off again at some point. So how about you level with us, what is it about downvotes that you find so compelling?
Downvotes can be a useful tool to shape a community, the issue comes in when several people start downvoting communities they don't even participate in. Which is one of the main issues brought up here.
It may seem very clear to you that "no one" wants downvotes, but as an admin I get complaints for basically every decision made on this site, so what is the "right" choice is sometimes hard to determine. I've been getting complaints about downvotes being disabled for awhile now, so it wasn't clear to me. Even now, the opinion is still very split. Which is why I enabled them quietly to see if it would cause any issues. It did, so I made this post to see if people think the issues created by downvotes outweigh the benefits, and what peoples' other opinions about them are.
This is my opinion based on what I've read and the results of the poll: I think at a later time when lemmynsfw is larger, downvotes may be viable, especially if lemmy implements a custom home feed so that not everyone sees the same posts. This would help mitigate the issue of people not in communities downvoting posts. But as it stands, I'm leaning towards disabling them again. Frequent posters, which are kind of needed for this site to survive, don't seem to like them, and the poll is split almost 50/50. I have to try to balance enjoyability of posting and enjoyability of consuming content on the site, and it just seems like downvotes really hurts posters and only marginally helps consumers.
I'm leaving the poll up for a few more days and am going to continue to read the comments, but, if nothing changes, that's probably what's going to happen.
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.
All this seems very fair. I'm under no illusion as to the popularity of downvotes, I would say that damn near all of them want to be able to downvote.
The question I have asked you and have asked @CombedSpaghetti is what motivates me or any of your other regular posters to post when they know that all their efforts can be nullified, for any reason you can think of, by someone pushing a button at the wrong moment.
And you can't. Not unless you cut us in on that sweet crypto action 😜
Like I said I understand what you're saying, my answer is it's not always as simple as doing something that makes one group of people happy, I have to weigh the options, which is why I made this post.
Also, I don't get paid to do this, they crypto money goes 100% to paying for hosting the site to my knowledge. All the admins have day jobs.
The stated reason is spam. We've been getting a lot of that recently, so I get admins are looking for a way to deal with it. But the spam is being upvoted, so I don't think it's working.
Yeah this time spam. This is admin Yay talking about it last year:
https://lemmynsfw.com/post/4962186
Then he said this a few months later:
https://lemmynsfw.com/post/7152586
"Annoyed by the lack" and ":/" sounds like the admins just want downvotes. Well, it is their instance and they will have what they want.
Id say enable it. There is no complex algorithm that promotes content based on up and down votes like with sites like YouTube. If people want niche stuff that performs poorly on All > Top, they can see it on the niche sub for that content in their subscriptions or directly on the sub page. Having a low score doesnt delete posts.
I hope those who are downvoting comments because they don't want downvotes re-enabled realize the irony.
Ehehehehe it is better this way no, everyone downvotes where they want to downvote? This is proper. Unless you're saying you want people to downvote where you want them to downvote and don't want them to downvote where you don't want them to downvote… can you be so insecure? That is not possible. You are a generous person and I suggest we all contribute to make small figurine statues of your great likeness in honour of this forum (I'm a poor chap after all). Butt plug size…
I personally believe downvotes can be of use, but that would require a much, much larger userbase than what Lemmy - as a whole, and also LemmyNSFW - has. Maybe the biggest stances could afford to have downvotes (though from what I'm aware, plenty of them don't) but in NSFW I could easily see a few people with bad intentions deciding what gets or doesn't get seen in smaller communities.
The average activity in non-niche communities of NSFW is also much smaller than their Reddit counterparts, plus the fact that - from my experience - there's quite a few mods missing, inactive for several months to +1 year, and I'm not sure what one would do in case of brigading.
Unfortunately you can't really stimulate people to comment, which really would've been a boon to uploaders
when it comes to harassment or brigaiding please report it to me and I'll take care of it, if mods for a community are inactive
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.
Nice /s Downvotes are disabled again, I checked my comment but I don't have any way of knowing how many people disagree with me or don't believe I contributed meaningfully to the discussion.
Downvotes are not personal guys, this is not Facebook.
Not upvoting something will result in a post not gaining much traction, but there is no way to send a post down the feed if it's not appropriate for a community.
I guess I now need to start reporting posts that are out of topic
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.
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 don't like downvotes. I post stuff here, if it gets downvoted it can fail and go below the level of visibility that garners it more votes. People will downvote for any reason that comes into their heads. It's almost like random noise but it messes with my post's path to its intended audience.
I don't see what possible motivation I would have to keep posting when that is happening.
You aren't entitled to exposure. Voting the good up and the less good down is the fundamental basis of sites like Lemmy and Reddit. As a content creator/poster it of course hurts when your stuff isnt enjoyed by the community, but its the decision of the users what gets big and what doesnt.
We can't afford to shit on the few posters we have.
Radovic is prolific - they post a tonne of content. If they are saying they don't like the change, listen.
I am also being shat upon in the past few days by anonymous blanket-downvoter(s) and it's not a pleasant feeling. Rather discouraging, too.
Posters need viewers and vise versa. One cannot function without the other. So no I reject your appeal to authority fallacy.
I don't need viewers. I choose to share content with users that like it but if you think I won't walk away from this instance over this and carry on with my life without looking back then you're mistaken.
You don't need viewers yet you're up in arms about the -1 vote button coming back?
What you have to do to actually win this argument is to tell me why I should bother to post anything when people are downvoting it.
What would motivate me to service the needs of people that hate the majority of content?
I don't care about winning against you or getting you to do anything, your opinions and actions after today are your own.
Suppressing down votes is something I disagree with, and I'm voicing those concerns.
No, it's you who aren't entitled to content.
If I have to make an effort to do something it has to be rewarded. Else why do it?
You don't wake up in the morning and whack yourself in the face with a teaspoon, do you? It wouldn't happen because there would be no reward in it. Except for that one person in 100,000.
So without me, and people like me*, you ain't up or downvoting anything because no on is posting.
*Unless you want to leave the posting to the bots...
Lol I'm sorry but you're are entitled to nothing when posting. If people like it, great you get upvotes. No one is entitled to those votes though. If you were, then they'd be meaningless (or at least more meaningless haha)
Well I'm not going to post anything, so you're not going to decide whether it gets exposure or not. So that's that sorted.
Up to you.
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
I've just counted 100 communities I had to block to get a semi interesting "local" feed, in addition to 7 posters who were really not my taste. How many hentai/anime communities are really needed for example? So yes, downvoting makes sense as long as there is a local feed, that's how lemmy works.
And yes, I have witnessed a clear improvement since downvotes are back.
Downvotes are good, just as good as upvotes, having it one sided defeats the entire purpose of voting.
Everything just being upvoted is a terrible idea and you can see the negative impacts it already has in other places of the internet.
I don’t want downvotes because I imagine it’s a tool for the bots to bury certain topics.
Here’s an idea I haven’t heard before: How about the option to give a single or double upvote, but no downvote.
Yes
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?
Disable down votes. Its nothing more than a Tool for Trolls.
Good job, a few saved posts from my saved list have been replaced by blanks. And who can blame the ones who did it? (Many will, considering these did get a bit of abusive words despite doing some good things). This place has become a place to debate and argue rather than have a good jerk. Ha! Just what was needed.
Being a bit of a dick is normal, so it is tolerated, and opinions are given importance, these dickheads are given respect for abusing the very ones who made this place work. What's next now? Enforcing moderation on those who answer back to them? It is the norm in the more corporate forums so I—would—not—be—surprised—at—all. Good job all.
Hehe… who could've seen this coming. The majority of good willing people here couldn't, how surprising🫢 If the world had more silent thinking (which is my style) and less debating (which was how things were before this slight seemingly insignificant change, a change which incited the question of whether each posting itself was right or wrong), these things wouldn't happen… but it is not the place of idiots like me to interrupt the legitimate high-placed people of the world from shooting their own feet so… carry on. It is amusing in itself. I'll start a casual bet (smiles on wager, so the world benefits from it) on just how much everyone among these well intentioned ones choose to ignore the results out of embarrassment. I say the majority will be too embarrassed to even talk about it again, as if it never happened, and try to shut down anyone who references it for being 'incorrect' or 'wrong'😁 Better yet, some will blame and insult the few posters who deleted everything. That will definitely happen.
How ironic is it that for the sake of arguing for good quality posts, you would drive away the posters of some of the best quality posts💀
I'd want it enabled only for people who are subbed to the community in question. That solves practically all issues.
Was tried before. Didn't work.
I don't see much reason to have them. Others have spoken of helping with spam. I haven't noticed any spam on this instance.
You haven't seen the new posters that suddenly show up, drop the same 2 pics in about 40 different places, then never post again?
I see a handful that have upvotes.
Oh sure but I wouldn't have considered that spam I guess.
No downvotes. This is a porn instance. Users will downvote OC that isn't classically attractive, gay content, etc. I'll do that because I'm a jerk. But it discourages what few posts we get.
Spammers should be banned and or users should block.
I voted for : "I don't care"