Lemmy NSFW

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.

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.

Maybe it's just me, but after enabled I seem to get much higher quality content on the local page.

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.

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.

Yes

Good job, a few saved posts from my saved list have been replaced by blanks.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.

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.

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".

I was for disabling down votes the last goaround wrt this topic, and I'm of the same opinion.

LemmyNSFW hasn't grown much more in the past year and this will just drive away more posters (of which there aren't much left) imho

Additional - I'd prefer that others block me (so they don't have to see what I post) or block/don't subscribe to various communities I mod that they don't want to see as part of their feed, rather than have them downvote individual top level posts.

Enabling downvotes wrt comments, I'm okay with...

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.

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.

Downvotes have some advantages over blocking. They:

• Indicate trends of spam (as @[email protected] pointed out).
• Allows minimizing exposure to unwanted content from a given account without blocking out exposure to all that account's content. (Accounts may post a mix of content I do and don't like. Blocking throws out the baby with the bathwater.)
• Help disambiguate the popularity of content vs. reach of content. (Relatively few upvotes compared to other posts could be due to community obscurity, or posting at a poor time of day. It doesn't indicate whether the community likes the post, or how you should adjust your posting habits to increase appeal. Counting downvotes helps you understand how many total people viewed a post, and the percentage of those who appreciated it.)
• Are lower friction. (They take fewer clicks.)

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?)

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

I think it's better to have a button to report spam, harassment, etc , rather than using downvote. Downvote is too ambiguous.

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.