Community Feedback Thread
Community Feedback Thread
Any critiques, desire for clarity, outright hatred, whatever have you. I will respond the best I can.
I know there's been some blowback on some of the policy updates but it's been difficult to really explain fully that the restrictive content policy is temporary, this community was very unmanaged for a time and it had to be reigned in somehow and with the limited tools at disposal the temporary policy changes were made.
Here's a comment that also explains a little bit behind the decisions made recently as well.
For community mods, we have a community mod coord matrix group chat now. Feel free to DM about it.
Also, there's another ongoing discussion regarding SFW communities on lemmyNSFW here.
Would love to see the photon UI deployed.
100%, we will implement it when we can :)
Yay!
One of my biggest gripes with Reddit as a platform is the overabundance of amateur models spamming every single subreddit with the exact same posts to shill their OnlyFans and Fansly profiles, even to the point of posting their content in irrelevant subreddits without consequence. It's at the point where the admins have all but abandoned the 10% rule for self-promotion.
Will you be implementing a policy to ban self-promotion for profit (and keep communities like Gonewild purely for exhibitionists), or at least encourage professional content creators to actually interact with the community and not astroturf LemmyNSFW with adverts for their OF like they've done with Reddit?
I think it's mostly up to the community moderators to determine whether or not they want that content and how they will police it. As long as it doesn't break site rules (new rules and clarification coming soon) then it's not really something we want to micromanage.
With that said, link spamming is def not ok. I'm open to suggestions on how we can build out the toolchain that can ensure a good quality of posts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptual_hashing
Hash all the images in a separate table and make it searchable. It's a lot of work but it also makes dealing with DMCA much easier as you can automate removal of obvious infringements and illegal content that's spreading.
This is what killed nsfw on reddit. All these beautiful, niche subs. Destroyed by of spam. I wrote a bot that scanned a posters history, and if it found an of link, it flagged them. Of course it was banned on reddit.
I am quite time poor to learn a new bot language here at the moment but in time I could give it a crack.
OF spam kills communities.
Based on what evidence?
As a mod of many subs on Reddit, what I saw killed a lot of the subs over thepast year is the proliferation of spam accounts that repost popular posts indiscriminately within a sub (OC, seller, doesn't matter) in order to advertise products/websites, etc via pinned posts on their profiles. Plus the Reddit admins allowing "viral" subreddits to spring up on a daily basis by these spam rings.
Most competent mods on legit subreddits knew how to use automod and verification tools to handle sellers, etc. What drove a lot of us mods to throw up our hands and close off subreddits is the fact that we got no support from admins to combat spam/spammers (not the same as sellers).
And of course, at the same time, Reddit banned a lot of long time experienced moderator accounts which then resulted in many niche subreddits to be banned due to lack of moderation. From my viewpoint, the culprit is not due to sellers.
[Addition] - Just old history for reference
I wrote a bot that scanned a posters history, and if it found an of link, it flagged them. Of course it was banned on reddit.
Haha - what a coincidence! I was part of the ones that reported to Reddit admins such bots like the one you wrote so that those bots would be banned 😉 (and they were)
[Addition] rip onlyfansdetectbot, https://imgur.com/LrQhZv6, Full album for related screenshots wrt bot - https://imgur.com/a/tfqTKLg
Yeah but at this point they're probably helping growth since they post so much actual content, so I think having a light hand towards them is beneficial. Still should be in the proper subs though.
I am all for making sure for rules to be enforced, however...
I have been collecting images I like from the R site for however many years, and now, with a new site and community, I am ready to share the love.
I've started posting, but !tinytitties@lemmynsfw.com have been kind of unwelcoming. First, they asked for model consent on a post, which was promptly deleted anyway. No big deal, let's choose something that doesn't look like I want to share some revenge porn. Another one deleted, now I am banned for even subscribing.
The rules are not clearly specified. I've posted to some other communities with no problem, but there is no rule about having to provide source, consent, or OC name. This is something that has to be worked on a little.
Can you remove the blurring? Feel like I’m failing an eye exam.
While I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done about it, I really don't like that I'm able to see who reported my content. By not having the reporters be anonymous, it leaves a gateway for people to be harassed by others for making completely legitimate reports.
I'm not sure how likely it is that a case like this has happened already, but as the community grows, we're bound to see people who are here in bad faith.
Please don’t allow communities to ban sellers. I think not allowing advertising in the community itself makes sense. I shouldn’t get excluded for having a fan site though! It’s incredibly entitled to expect girls to post nudity with no way to profit off of it. Give the good talent a reason to post on this platform 💘💘💘
Give the good talent a reason to post on this platform
I totally agree with you. OC/seller talent is always welcomed at communities I moderate (with the exception of ones that are strictly studios/sites focused).
IMO, Reddit (and the subreddits I mod) benefited so much from the creative sellers.
I get the reasoning, but I do feel that the rules are Way too strict on artwork (as opposed to pics/video of real people) to an unprecedented level. I'd like to see that reevaluated to be more in line with what other sites that allow NSFW permit - if they were facing legal trouble over that content, then they would ban it too, so I think it's pretty evident that they don't.
In particular this whole concept of establishing a "canon age" for every character and disallowing aged-up art strikes me as much worse than simply disallowing any art that looks underage.
I'd also like some clarity on how broad this goes.
Is captioned-in non-consent dialogue also prohibited? What about live action scenes with actors who are verified 18+ but have no curves and look young? Original art with unspecified age? Monster girls from species that don't even live to 18?
There's a lot there and it's above and beyond virtually anywhere else. If this is part of the idea of broad, temporary restrictions as an attempt to reduce the admin workload, really what it's going to do is create a lot of little fires to stamp out when the focus needs to be on the things that will get the site shut down the fastest (obviously illegal content and DMCA violations). Best to keep it simple, and simple is following established standards. Even if it means allowing content admins personally don't like.
I agree. These rules only increase moderator workload, which really only contributes to burnout when the moderation tools aren't good.
I'm having two issues with this instance while using a 3rd party app: Sync for Lemmy. Both issues are about blocking communities, and I don't think either are the app's fault.
Failing to record new community blocks
The Sync app fails to record a block when I use its "block community" button. This request either doesn't reach the server, or the server is mishandling it. I get no error in the app, but when I check my block list on the website, the block is not there. This feature works fine on other instances.
Failing to apply community blocks
When viewing the instance in Sync, none of my community blocks work at all! I have 68 blocks, and as far as I can tell, none of them are working. I verified 5 that definitely are not, but its hard to know if I'm not seeing a community because a block is working, or I just haven't scrolled far enough to see any posts in it.
On the other hand, when viewing the website, the blocks do prevent those communities from appearing in my feed. They just don't block them in the feed the Sync app receives from the API. Blocks on other instances work fine when that instance is viewed in Sync.
So it seems like there are two bugs regarding blocks at the API level.
Did you know that, at least from my experience, the password reset link is not functioning. I was logged out for some reason, and couldn't remember my password. Tried the "forgot password" with email address several times over a couple of days, never received an email. Fortunately, an extra neuron fired this morning and I remembered the password and was able to log in. :)
I wanted to express that I'm extremely concerned about the banning of @paddedperson and the deletion of their thread saying that they were migrating away from lemmynsfw.
As far as I can tell, @paddedperson was banned for leaking preliminary information about upcoming content policy changes from the admin discussion group. In my view, they were legitimate concerns, and retaliatory action taken against him are very concerning with respect to treatment of whistleblowers.
Can admins comment on this incident?
Truly transparent non-profit organizations (e.g. Wikipedia) typically release meeting minutes (a summary or transcript), or allow the public to attend voting meetings as part of the audience. Can the admins provide a summary or transcript of the votes taken on various decisions?
So I'm not really an "admin" - I'm a sysadmin/developer who was given the role of admin so I can make sure all systems (including modlog, reportings, and other tools) work as we adjust them for this instance's very specific needs.
Padded got banned because he was trying to sabotage the efforts of an entirely volunteer group including revealing our hosting provider. We are not a "non profit organization" - lemmynsfw is a volunteer instance being run on donations. People need to understand that this is no one's "job" and yet it's literally taking a ton of our time. I've spent so many hours pouring over lemmy code, system configurations, working with the mod tool group, brainstorming, writing code, and trying to help the real admins where I can...
And seriously, no one is being paid for this, donations barely cover server costs, and any excess donations are being saved because it's anticipated that server costs will continue to rise while donations don't. Besides, I don't think any of us WANT to be paid for fear of reprisal from our respective governments for "making money" off serving pornography.
When the creator put out his call for help, a bunch of us stepped up to try to keep the server alive, but this is not an easy instance to run. Please understand that.
To be clear, the volunteers/admins at Wikipedia are not paid either. From my personal experience in Wikimedia communities, my sincere advice is to consider and take transparency seriously.
The most important resource in volunteer spaces like this is 'trust'.
I hope you and the admin team recognize that in order to run a website like this, you also require the trust and buy-in from moderators (who are also unpaid) to invest the many hours into their communities just as you have done for the server. Hiding things from moderators, sending mixed messages, and making secret deliberations (with rumors that some admins are eager to remove large quantities of content) is really damaging for that relationship of trust.
The recent content policy changes (even before padded's leak) have been dictatorial top-down decrees. However, these unilateral rule changes are impractical/meaningless when moderators have not agreed to enforce those rules -- and I've personally experienced this (at best, only 30% of the content that I've reported for content policy violations have been addressed by moderators). Realistically, no moderator wants to enforce rules they don't believe in, and if they leave, the departure of skilled talent cripples this website and leaves communities effectively unmoderated in practice.
Please consider improving the transparency of these content policy deliberations, and at the very minimum, incorporate community moderators into the discussion and ascertain that they are in agreement with the rules before rolling out changes on the drop of a dime.
I would also like the option to disable downvotes in my community. Thank you.
Edit: I meant disable downvoting for posts only, not sure about comments. It's currently too easily to manipulate voting like it is on reddit.
Unfortunately it is only instance wide at the moment.
Ok got it, thanks.
I asked @yay@lemmynsfw.com a couple weeks ago about possibly having RedGifs links fully working with proper embedding (like on reddit). Not sure if the recent changes about the instance admins will have any impact on this kind of things, so I'm posting this just to check if it's something that it's still being worked on. Again, no rush :)
I'd definitely post more from there if the embed was as nice as e.g. using RES.
Very true. Currently Red gifs links are very cumbersome to view.
Not sure if this belongs here but...
Does every celebrity or porn star really need their own community?
Was browsing by new and almost every celebs post had a duplicate in the ultra specific community just for that one celeb.
Yeah... Noticed that. I don't like it, but that said won't it be up to the users to see what survives and takes root?
I'd rather they didn't exist, but at the same time the freedom of this kind of platform might be compromised if mods just start shutting down communities as they see fit.
I'm split 50/50 on this.
Yeah, I see your point too, which is why I phrased it as a question. Reddit was big enough that these would just be buried. Also, things are so new and in flux I can't just stick to subscribed right now. ONce the dust settles it will be easier to just ignore.
won’t it be up to the users to see what survives and takes root?
I would agree, but all these celeb communities is making lemmynsfw nigh-unusable for me. Right now, they make up well north of 90% of all communities on this instance, meaning the front page is devoid of any other content unless one uses subscribed-only view or blocks them all.
Being able to one-click block communities from the communities list would help a lot.
Edit: Nevermind, I'm dumb - Hadn't enabled 'Show NSFW' in settings. Still, I don't see why the celebs can't just all go in /c/celebs.
Why is everybody trying to police this instance like it was a single little subreddit? Would Reddit have gotten far if it had been so anal about what communities people can and cannot create?
There's always gonna be communities that other people don't want to see, and with a growing community there's gonna be more and more of them. So instead of policing them all, just subscribe to communities you'd like to see, then look at the "Subscribed" view, that what it's literally there for.
I'm not policing anything. Was just posing the question. I'm not saying what we should do. This post is asking for feedback. That was my feedback.
I don't speak for the entire admin team, but I don't think we have any interest in policing the community creation provided they have enough moderators to prevent abuse compared to their level of activity (re: huge communities need more mods than small)
We are looking into users who create communities en-masse and are not active.
Maybe this is just a problem I’m having, but I can’t access LemmyNSFW with my VPN (Proton VPN) on. I typically have it running all the time, but it seems even more important that it work considering the subject matter.
I'm not sure why this would be happening. I'll send a DM and maybe we can track it down.
Myself and @hellagooned are also having this problem as mentioned in our comments further down.
One other issue I’m having is following users. Is that possible? Or am I just missing it?
Following as on creating a list of people to remember, sure, that would be cool, and if it's exportable, even better!
But turning the forum Lemmy into another social media wannabe clone, no thanks!
There are RSS links in user pages but they don't seem to be working (the magazine feeds do work).
User follow is my most desired feature at the moment for sure. My friends list on reddit's nsfw users is what I miss the most about reddit. 😣
This is a core lemmy enhancement. I don't believe this is currently on their radar. I will add it to ours and see what that would take. It might not be feasible to implement on our instance alone but if we can work it out I'll try to get it merged into lemmy.
Right now it's not really possible. I assume it will be a feature in the future, but for it's not a thing on lemmy. There is RSS links I believe on user pages but they seem to be finnicky.