Lemmy NSFW @lemmynsfw.com lemmyposter212 @lemmynsfw.com 12 mo. ago

An update on our community regarding downvotes

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?

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.
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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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.
- I very much agree with your comment, we did this as not a permanent solution, we did this as a bandaid for an issue with how lemmy works as a whole, and we plan to adjust accordingly when there are more options to fix the issue.
  
  A very good option here it would be a functionality to show two stats – a comunity members up/down votes and everybody's up/down counters. And add an aditional sort options, e.g. hot in community. This way votes could be localized usefully and used as a tool to rise best content in comunity without manual moderation, and a global functionality also wouldn't be lost.
  
  P.S. Someone add a ticket for lemmy developers to work on it. I'm not on their repo.
  
  The much simpler solution would be to only allow downvotes in communities where you are a member
  
  It wouldn't. Why the hell can't I (or someone) randomly stumble on some post by choosing show me local (server) content feed or by choosing show me all, or simply by search and then vote up/down the post or comment even if I'm not right now in that particular comunity. E.g. if someone posts perfect or simply wrong misguiding bulshit reply, or then I find the post very usefull, or then comment is funny or on a contrary it's not. People are not living in a boxes of closely guarded comunities without exploring whats outside or new, without migrating, joining, leaving, fighting, agreeing, cheering, checking what ather users are into, etc..
  
  And to add the second counter(s), technicaly is just as a simple as adding one aditional db field on posts table (or two if we keep ups and downs totals as separate fields now). And after, adding a simple if clause near the existing ones caunting global likes/dislikes, to increase a comunity counter too if this particular vote request comes from comunity member. Thats it. Then you can start expanding sorting options to enable more sorting options, but thats even not nesesary at first. Quite enough it would be simply to output vote count as a text at the top of post, near the global total - to be able to see what comunity members think and to be able to compare to what outsiders think.
  
  Your solution has also been proposed in various other threads, and is being considered seriously.

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