Several people in the community have expressed frustration in regards to the fact that any post that fits the community it’s posted to but is slightly out of the normal post type like, for example, being more hardcore rather than softcore, get’s a lot of downvotes by people who simply don’t like that particular post.
We have also had complaints that particular types of posts as a whole get more downvotes even if they are in the appropriate community and are the normal type of post for a community. This especially appears to be happening to male content.
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.
We understand some may not like some content of a particular post or community, but 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 in our instance and especially in other instances, preventing them from being viewed by others almost at all.
After some discussion amongst the moderators and admins,because of the reasons above, we’ve decided to disable downvotes at least for the time being.
What do I do if I dislike a post?
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We recommend those who would normally downvote a post they don’t like just, instead, block the user who created the post, or, if the community is a topic you dislike, block the community. That way, you no longer see those posts, but don’t effect those posts’ visibility to other members of the community and instance.
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Additionally, you can view your “Subscribed” feed instead of “Local” so that you only see posts from the communities you are subscribed to.
What do I do if a post doesn’t fit the community it’s posted in or is spam?
- Please report the post, either the mods of the community or an instance admin will remove the post if necessary, as soon as possible. We have admins and mods online almost around the clock, so these types of posts should be removed quickly.
Potential future post filtering on lemmy:
- In the future it appears that lemmy may implement a tagging system similar to flairs on reddit. This request has piqued the interest of the lemmy devs, so keep an eye out sometime in the (maybe not so near) future for the implementation of that feature.
As @yay@lemmynsfw.com has said in the comments:
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.
Please put any comments questions and concerns in the comments below, we are of course always open to community thoughts and feedback, and want to work with you to keep this instance an enjoyable and entertaining place to post and browse.
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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.
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.
“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?!
Agree that the point of down voting is to discourage posts that don’t fit with the community, which means the the community is voting for what it does and does not want to see in a community.
Someone being passionate about something that doesn’t fit with what the community wants to see getting frustrated should not over ride what the community has voted for. They should instead find or create a community that fits their passion and not try to change a community to fit their passion.
Yes but my point is it’s usually people outside a community. We’ve seen posts get more downvotes than a community has subscribers. If we could limit downvotes to just those subscribed to a community, we would, but unfortunately that functionality doesn’t exist right now.
Additionally upvoting does also work to shape a community, posts with more upvotes will still rise to the top of a community
So if a post gets more upvotes than a community has subscribers will you disable upvotes too?
That’s a strawman and you know it, those two things are not comparable for multiple reasons.
What are the reasons upvotes and downvotes are not comparable?
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.
Yeah that’s honestly been my biggest issue here is the fact that I can’t properly filter out certain content/users because it technically fits the community or the user posts in many communities.
Like the hentai community is one of my most viewed yet people will post niche hentai stuff that I have no interest in whatsoever and even though there’s already a specific community for that niche it’s still not breaking the rules by being in the main community.
It’s the same with users who post exactly the type of content I like while also posting content I abhor. I can’t block them without also losing out on a lot of the content I actually want to see
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.)
