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I've noticed a pretty glaring trend of OC posters creating an account, posting for a few days, and then disappearing never to be seen again. Posting studio and model content found on the corners of the internet is fine, but in the end it doesn't actually drive much engagement, which is essentially the primary purpose of a link aggregator site. The primary content people engage on are going to be things that a person has taken the time to create themselves or something with a clear gimmick, like the ifyouhadtopickone or kink communities.
Personally, I'd say that the reason we're seeing people drop off the site shortly after joining is because of the overall community at large. When anyone from the Fediverse can just drop in on a whim and comment something disparaging to someone who went out of their way to post themselves it really doesn't feel great. Combine that with the fact that if you're not a professional model or Onlyfans producer, you'll be downvoted pretty heavily even with the rules changes in place.
I try my best to go out of my way to comment on anything I reasonably can and I don't know if I can place exactly why, but the instance feels both simultaneously hostile to post and to comment/engage in at the same time.
The majority of OC posters on reddit also only post a few posts. I think our proportions are similar to theirs. I don't see this instance or the fediverse as less empathetic than reddit or any other large social network users.
I think the doom and gloom is overstated.
Of course we should always strive for improving mod tools and banning bad actors.
I think that if you aren't beating reddit on the empathy metric then you're not doing at all well. I was struck forcefully by the opinion of the OC poster on the downvotes debate who said:
When I started posting here our content was heavily downvoted, even in communities appropriate for it. This was very discouraging. It made us feel bad about doing something we should be doing for fun.
And then you've got various other people talking about things like the lack of downvotes devaluing upvotes, which to my mind is just childish nonsense in the same vein as the existence of trans people devaluing masculinity and femininity.
The sheer glaring entitlement of people that are not sharing anything wanting the right to make people feel a bit shit about themselves...
Reddit has hundreds of millions of users and the platform is highly active, making it suitable for pros to submit work for profit. Or as a means for amateurs to break in and see if they can build an audience.
Reddit is a business plan for many creators. The large audience there gives submitters incentive to put up with the horrible abuse they face from poor moderation and terrible users. And still, as you note, OC creators flee. Comparing our relative numbers of fleeing contributors per capita as being similar to Reddit isn't the win you seem to be arguing for.
Look, when some of the largest communities don't see posts for weeks, that's a sign something is wrong. We have disincentivized contribution to the point where stagnation has set in. That's a clear sign some change is in order. What that change should be, I don't know. But simply refusing to accept these clear signs as doom and gloom leads to refusing to recognize a problem. And if you don't see a problem, you can't act to fix it.
We saw a decrease in users when there were mass downvotes, we changed how downvotes worked and since then we've seen and increase in activity.
We're talking about implementing automod features, not sure how soon that'll happen, but it will definitely happen.
Another thing that disincentives some people is the lack of filtering of rude comments, if a comment is rude or downvoted on reddit it is automatically hidden, so maybe that is something we can look into for when we implement automod
Just know that we're not just sitting on our laurels doing nothing, the mods and admins are constantly talking about how to improve this community
That all sounds like progress.Thank you and the team for your hard work!
I'd agree that the overall trend for posters is probably similar and you have a fair point there. I wouldn't say empathy is any different, but it's important to keep in mind that different styles of social networks will absolutely attract certain types of peoples. I'm not making an assertion that this is good or bad, or who may be present in this community because of this, but it's something to keep in mind as your average Instagram user and Fediverse user will likely have vastly different opinions, priorities, goals, and use-case for the platform.
I don't think it's fair to say that the doom and gloom is overstated. When you have a smaller platform and community, small issues are far more recognizable and have a greater overall impact if left unchecked.
The downvoting on pure amateur content seems quite aggressive. But perhaps that's a matter of building the right community or communities for that particular aspect. Wife and I love sharing content but it's not always going to be hyper-produced. Can't think of a real solution but it might end up driving us away. I'm sure we are not alone on that sentiment.
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With a whole full week here, I am starting to feel it depends on the community and it's composition. It's not LemmyNSFW specific if that makes sense. Some folks will go out of their way to upvote every post, some will do the same with downvotes on anything that triggers them, others will simply skip on to the next post and do nothing. All 3 are perfectly fine IMO.
But it's a contrast with Reddit where I've spent a few years. Reddit NSFW communities tend to drown amateur/ sub-wow content by ignoring that content (gut feeling, I've no hard analytics to back that up) and upvote produced stuff. The exception is on very specific kink /r's
I know you're relatively new around here and there's been a lot of discussion and changes regarding downvotes in recent months. They were completely disabled for a while, but currently you need to be a subscribed member of a community for it to register. You are not alone I'm your feelings regarding user behavior. I appreciate that you're sharing yourselves at least!
Don't judge me, I am a tech geek --and hopefully this doesn't break any rules but, I've been working around Lemmy itself trying to figure out how to get some basic analytics for myself. Got some interesting --and perhaps obvious data points that I am looking forward to continue see develop as we share more OC material.
Positive Sentiment by Community is just a weighted average between up / down votes. It essentially shows me which communities are more/less welcoming to OC content produce by my wife and I. That's all.
Perception by Community just distills the above purely on
upvotes / (upvotes + downvotes)represented as a %Engagement by Community on the other hand is the total of votes
up + down--I am working to include comments by anyone except the OP as well. This one, IMO, is the metric we should be watching to gauge true engagement.Cheers!
Very interesting!
The problem is unattractive amateurs, not people being overly critical.
So we have ants then
Grrrrrrrr.... 😠
Hey, fair point; interesting perspective, though, given this is where we share and enjoy all sorts of kinks.
There is always going to be the majority of people who are all attracted to the same or similar traits.
Which is where the phrase 'the tyranny of the majority' comes in. Just because you're in the majority doesn't mean you have any kind of moral or aesthetic superiority.
Don't get me wrong you have a right to like what you like and to dislike what you don't like.
What you don't have is the right to tell people that what they like is wrong.
I don't know about anyone else but that attitude is why I left reddit.
What I value about how Lemmy is now is that in general people are a little bit more willing to say, 'I don't like it but that just means I don't engage with it' rather than 'Kill it with fire and downvotes.'
There does seem to be a problem with a lack of empathy with people wanting to share something that's deeply personal. And I think you're right that federation kind of works against those posters. Not all instances seem to have good manners when it comes to other people's sexuality.
In the end that comes down to moderation. I don't mean to imply that mods and admins are doing a bad job in any way, but they'll always be fighting a losing battle. The manpower and tools just aren't advanced enough to deal with it all before the damage is done.
I know you mentioned it in another comment and I've mentioned it before in the past, but the instance overall always feels like it's having an identity crisis and doesn't know what it wants to be. Sexuality is a very broad spectrum and the nature of that means that most people are going to find the sheer existence of certain parts of that spectrum that don't include them unsavory or offensive.
Before anyone grabs a pitchfork, I'm not saying it should be a free for all and predatory things like pedo and beastiality absolutely need to be banned, but if you're someone who isn't into kink or gay or whatever else then there's always going to be friction with those that are. Personally I'd say the instance as a whole needs to take a more specific stance on what it wants to host for this specific stage of growth.
The problem is with a certain immature section of the audience. Perhaps there needs to be the equivalent of private subreddits for the OC and people have to prove they aren't going to be troublesome before they get access.
Restricting access would probably not be successful. It would just fragment and wall off significant sections of the already small communities.
That is absolutely what would happen. I'm a mod for a sex positive community on reddit and we tried this. Once a user managed to get into the private / closed sub they no longer wanted to post in the main / public one and that caused all kinds of problems.
Good point.
AutoMod tools are the answer, if a comment has certain keywords, or even a negative sentiment a good automod can remove the comments pretty much immediately. We've talked about automod for awhile, and I definitely want it, I'm going to start experimenting with existing solutions soon.
We've talked about wanting to implement an automod solution for awhile, and finally there are some tools for that, I personally am going to start experimenting with some of the tools, and will begin to provoke more chats with the other admins to start creating a plan of action in regards to that.
Also, as far as separate instances like that, that can get muddy, I think, unless you have a really clear definitions of what's "too hardcore."
What we don't allow on the site are
- things that are illegal (like CSAM and beastiality)
- things that would be illegal to host on the sites servers because of where they're located (like animated beastiality, shota and loli)
- things that are generally considered very extreme (like scat and barf)
The last one is because lemmy doesn't have a good automod system and most people don't want to see that kind of thing. I would argue that, outside of those things, what people are into varies greatly and that's why we allow pretty much everything else.
I think the problem lies in the fact that, unlike reddit and most other social media platforms, lemmy has no personalized algorithms. This means that everyone on an instance gets the same "hot" and "active" page. So I think the main reason the content seems all over the place is because the algorithms aren't personally catered. Reddit has just as many, if not more, niche communities, but their "best" and "hot" pages have personalized algorithms so that you see more of what you like.
Personalized algorithms like that aren't insanely difficult to create, but it's the nuances of it that are difficult. It's something I would like to look into and partner with some of the other admins that have dev experience to maybe create for use on any lemmy server, but as of now there is nothing developes on that front.
That being said, I don't think the answer is to split the content even more by making more instances and then having potentially even more uncertainty about what is and isn't allowed.
I think the answer is for us admins and mods to continue to do our best to reduce toxicity, to continue to improve our mod tools, and continue to have active discussions about what would be good for the growth of the instance.
But if you have other reasoning that you feel that the instance is having an identity crisis, I'm all ears, we're always open to constructive criticism and suggestions to improve the overall user experience on the instance
We're working on the hostility aspect, it's slowly improving, and we're slowly getting more OC posters, it just takes time.
As an admin I see more and more posts in general and more OC posts every day. Our growth is slow and organic, and until there's larger roadblocks on reddit it'll probably stay that way, but given reddit is going public this year, we will most likely see some of those road bumps start to happen.
Until then, the admin team and mods are working to get her to reduct toxicity and make it a good place to post, we've even implemented some bespoke code to prevent mass downvotes, and we're talking about implementing some sort of automod. We will continue to improve the experience as best we can and we will continue to slowly but surely grow.
