I think first, there’s a decline in the general Lemmy userbase. Partly, this is because of unaddressed Federation bugs that have persisted now for weeks without being publicly addressed. That’s driven a lot of contributors away, which has feed on effects across communities. That’s structural and beyond LemmyNSFW, but affects us.
Second, here at LemmyNSFW, poor community moderation. There are dead communities admins will not address because of top mod ownership rules. But that so many subscribe to dead communities shows the decline. Reddit prunes unmoderated communities for a reason.
Mods also let creeps post horrible comments and don’t filter them out or ban abusive users, and this has driven away contributors. Especially amateurs and OF creators. I’m of the opinion they are bread and butter here and driving them away reduces overall value of the site. So while I’m into the kink side, I want c/gonewild to thrive.
Third, there are the serial downvoters. Admins thought requiring people to join communities in order to vote would solve this problem. No, because their goal is to suppress contributions overall, so they just join to downvote. This is why you see a top community like c/anal or c/blowjobs wither with no submissions. They’re killed early on. And that drives away contributors. Whether that’s contention over the top page or just a desire to see LemmyNSFW fail, I don’t know. But IMO downvotes only express aggression and don’t help curate content. They serve to drive away contributors.
We need more contributors, not less. And the decline in contributions says something is seriously wrong. It’s like a reverse Tragedy of the Commons, where instead of overgrazing by all, we have a few trampling the commons out of spite.
Finally, there is the lack of rich media. Only pics and RedGifs, both limited. And gifs get converted to webm, which don’t autoplay or loop in LemmyUI. Another Lemmy issue, beyond the site here, but is one cause of declining interest IMO.
This is JMO and is said with all due respect and deference to the community and site admins.
I think first, there’s a decline in the general Lemmy userbase. Partly, this is because of unaddressed Federation bugs that have persisted now for weeks without being publicly addressed. That’s driven a lot of contributors away, which has feed on effects across communities. That’s structural and beyond LemmyNSFW, but affects us.
Although there is definitely a component of this, I think the trends we’re seeing predates the 0.19.0 issues. If anything I think we’re in a healthier place than say two months ago, but that’s largely propped up by a handful of individuals.
Third, there are the serial downvoters.
One thing that came up during the downvote removal discussion is that the ‘mark as read’ feature requires voting to register. Combining this with the fact that users don’t liberally block as much as they should and it’s a recipe for issues.
Frankly I never thought the subscribed only downvote was a good idea and it’s just prevented community moderation. Needing to subscribe to a community to downvote a post with a broken link is frustrating and the barrier is still too low to stop bad actors as a whole.
Users who block do so out of personal interest. That is, there’s something they don’t want to see, so they remove it from their feed. This is as intended. Therefore, those who persistently downvote have different reasons than simply not wanting to see something. No, either they’re voting tactically to benefit their own submission, as OP suggests, or to suppress the existence of whatever content they’re voting on. In both cases, these are the bad actors you refer to. Because their interest in voting is not to curate but to destroy. That particular community, or perhaps the site itself.
I think there are people on Lemmy who wish to see NSFW content entirely removed from the network. We saw an immediate defederation by the .ml communities, for example. These are closely linked to Lemmy devs, who seem to have an ideological purpose behind creating Lemmy, .ml standing for Marxist-Leninist. Now, ironically, Marx and Engles both wrote in support of women’s economic and sexual freedom. I think Engles in particular would have been pleased at the idea of women doing with their bodies as they wish, even if that was exhibitionist on a platform like this. And it should be noted, the Leninist October Revolution led to a sexual liberation movement in Russia that was only suppressed by Stalin after he gained power.
I don’t think devs and the .ml community have read deeply into the original sources they espouse. But regardless, I think there are some people who want to see LemmyNSFW fail. And they’re actively working to achieve that end.
Many users are trained in voting behaviors from other platforms well before they find this corner of the internet. For a lot of younger users who may never have lived without algorithmically decided content the downvote could very well be a misguided attempt at curation. This is just to give a devils advocate argument the benefit of the doubt. Regarding bad actors, if these slightest and petty people they will get bored eventually. If it’s a form of vote manipulation, then it’s really not very effective in the first place since most posts are slow burns around here. It would likely be trivially simple to set up a bot to autosubscribe and downvote all posts as a matter to undermine the community. This would be pretty easy to root out though for anyone with database access.
The ability to decide what you want on your own instance is part of the Fediverse and Lemmy by design. .ml isn’t the only instance to defederate from instances that allow NSFW content and they reserve the right to control what is hosted on their own instance.
Assuming malice based on ideological differences isn’t productive for anyone though. If the devs wanted to undermine the ability for NSFW to be used on the platform they would do it at the code level and not resort to covert tactics to remove it. Not to comment on the devs views on Marxism, but I was also under the impression that .ml was just because they used a mali domain while they were still freely available. I think you’re right that there are certain people that want to see the instance fail for whatever reason and are doing the only thing they know how. The world is filled with small, petty people with as much time as they have hate.
I think you’re very right about a misunderstanding of what upvotes and downvotes do on lemmy, the system that serves posts to users is very simple in lemmy, and some semblance of an algorithm would help a lot.
I also think the downvote issue wasn’t as big of an issue on Reddit because they’ve always fudged their numbers post scores, even moreso when the platform was smaller. They would intentionally make the number of votes fluctuate to prevent downvotes brigading and they would even limit how many votes could be applied to a post at one time. That’s why the top posts of subreddits used to stay the same for literal years, if that many peoples votes made it through, that meant the post got REALLY popular. Maybe that’s something else we could look into.
Here’s a lemmy dev’s essay selection. Now, to be clear, I’m fine with the reading list. I’m all for reading. And I support his right to espouse whatever political beliefs he wishes. But I understand the central Lemmy devs do espouse these beliefs, and the .ml sites are hardline political sites with little allowance for divergent opinion. It’s easy to get banned there. And they defederated for a reason.
BeeHaw did that. That’s one option. Another might be to try tweaking the sorting algorithm. A third might be to institute more stringent mod rules in countering abuse directed at contributors, especially OC contributors who expose themselves - both their bodies and their emotions - to public scrutiny. Can you imagine what it must feel like to post imagery of your nude body, only to get critical comments about your appearance, or lude PMs demanding sexual favors, and see no enforcement of community guidelines?
Perhaps some mix of all three. Or something I haven’t thought of.
Third, there are the serial downvoters. Admins thought requiring people to join communities in order to vote would solve this problem. No, because their goal is to suppress contributions overall, so they just join to downvote.
Can you say more about this? What do you think the serial downvoters are up to? Do they just downvote or do they upvote in some situations too?
OK, so I have looked at this in the past week and I think you hit the nail on the head with your page contention suggestion. Seems like most casual browsers will be looking at one of three feeds: active, top hour and top six hours. I think the most viewed is active as it is the default and people coming here, wistful with a fist full, are less interested to change that. The difference between page one of active and page two is good for between 3-20 upvotes in an hour, depending on the overall popularity of the post. When a post gets to the bottom of the page it’s possible to bump it off with as few as two downvotes.
I think first, there’s a decline in the general Lemmy userbase. Partly, this is because of unaddressed Federation bugs that have persisted now for weeks without being publicly addressed. That’s driven a lot of contributors away, which has feed on effects across communities. That’s structural and beyond LemmyNSFW, but affects us.
Second, here at LemmyNSFW, poor community moderation. There are dead communities admins will not address because of top mod ownership rules. But that so many subscribe to dead communities shows the decline. Reddit prunes unmoderated communities for a reason.
Mods also let creeps post horrible comments and don’t filter them out or ban abusive users, and this has driven away contributors. Especially amateurs and OF creators. I’m of the opinion they are bread and butter here and driving them away reduces overall value of the site. So while I’m into the kink side, I want c/gonewild to thrive.
Third, there are the serial downvoters. Admins thought requiring people to join communities in order to vote would solve this problem. No, because their goal is to suppress contributions overall, so they just join to downvote. This is why you see a top community like c/anal or c/blowjobs wither with no submissions. They’re killed early on. And that drives away contributors. Whether that’s contention over the top page or just a desire to see LemmyNSFW fail, I don’t know. But IMO downvotes only express aggression and don’t help curate content. They serve to drive away contributors.
We need more contributors, not less. And the decline in contributions says something is seriously wrong. It’s like a reverse Tragedy of the Commons, where instead of overgrazing by all, we have a few trampling the commons out of spite.
Finally, there is the lack of rich media. Only pics and RedGifs, both limited. And gifs get converted to webm, which don’t autoplay or loop in LemmyUI. Another Lemmy issue, beyond the site here, but is one cause of declining interest IMO.
This is JMO and is said with all due respect and deference to the community and site admins.
Although there is definitely a component of this, I think the trends we’re seeing predates the 0.19.0 issues. If anything I think we’re in a healthier place than say two months ago, but that’s largely propped up by a handful of individuals.
One thing that came up during the downvote removal discussion is that the ‘mark as read’ feature requires voting to register. Combining this with the fact that users don’t liberally block as much as they should and it’s a recipe for issues.
Frankly I never thought the subscribed only downvote was a good idea and it’s just prevented community moderation. Needing to subscribe to a community to downvote a post with a broken link is frustrating and the barrier is still too low to stop bad actors as a whole.
Users who block do so out of personal interest. That is, there’s something they don’t want to see, so they remove it from their feed. This is as intended. Therefore, those who persistently downvote have different reasons than simply not wanting to see something. No, either they’re voting tactically to benefit their own submission, as OP suggests, or to suppress the existence of whatever content they’re voting on. In both cases, these are the bad actors you refer to. Because their interest in voting is not to curate but to destroy. That particular community, or perhaps the site itself.
I think there are people on Lemmy who wish to see NSFW content entirely removed from the network. We saw an immediate defederation by the .ml communities, for example. These are closely linked to Lemmy devs, who seem to have an ideological purpose behind creating Lemmy, .ml standing for Marxist-Leninist. Now, ironically, Marx and Engles both wrote in support of women’s economic and sexual freedom. I think Engles in particular would have been pleased at the idea of women doing with their bodies as they wish, even if that was exhibitionist on a platform like this. And it should be noted, the Leninist October Revolution led to a sexual liberation movement in Russia that was only suppressed by Stalin after he gained power.
I don’t think devs and the .ml community have read deeply into the original sources they espouse. But regardless, I think there are some people who want to see LemmyNSFW fail. And they’re actively working to achieve that end.
Many users are trained in voting behaviors from other platforms well before they find this corner of the internet. For a lot of younger users who may never have lived without algorithmically decided content the downvote could very well be a misguided attempt at curation. This is just to give a devils advocate argument the benefit of the doubt. Regarding bad actors, if these slightest and petty people they will get bored eventually. If it’s a form of vote manipulation, then it’s really not very effective in the first place since most posts are slow burns around here. It would likely be trivially simple to set up a bot to autosubscribe and downvote all posts as a matter to undermine the community. This would be pretty easy to root out though for anyone with database access.
The ability to decide what you want on your own instance is part of the Fediverse and Lemmy by design. .ml isn’t the only instance to defederate from instances that allow NSFW content and they reserve the right to control what is hosted on their own instance.
Assuming malice based on ideological differences isn’t productive for anyone though. If the devs wanted to undermine the ability for NSFW to be used on the platform they would do it at the code level and not resort to covert tactics to remove it. Not to comment on the devs views on Marxism, but I was also under the impression that .ml was just because they used a mali domain while they were still freely available. I think you’re right that there are certain people that want to see the instance fail for whatever reason and are doing the only thing they know how. The world is filled with small, petty people with as much time as they have hate.
I think you’re very right about a misunderstanding of what upvotes and downvotes do on lemmy, the system that serves posts to users is very simple in lemmy, and some semblance of an algorithm would help a lot.
I also think the downvote issue wasn’t as big of an issue on Reddit because they’ve always fudged their numbers post scores, even moreso when the platform was smaller. They would intentionally make the number of votes fluctuate to prevent downvotes brigading and they would even limit how many votes could be applied to a post at one time. That’s why the top posts of subreddits used to stay the same for literal years, if that many peoples votes made it through, that meant the post got REALLY popular. Maybe that’s something else we could look into.
Here’s a lemmy dev’s essay selection. Now, to be clear, I’m fine with the reading list. I’m all for reading. And I support his right to espouse whatever political beliefs he wishes. But I understand the central Lemmy devs do espouse these beliefs, and the .ml sites are hardline political sites with little allowance for divergent opinion. It’s easy to get banned there. And they defederated for a reason.
https://github.com/dessalines/essays
Would it make sense to just disable the downvote button on the instance? I know others have done that.
BeeHaw did that. That’s one option. Another might be to try tweaking the sorting algorithm. A third might be to institute more stringent mod rules in countering abuse directed at contributors, especially OC contributors who expose themselves - both their bodies and their emotions - to public scrutiny. Can you imagine what it must feel like to post imagery of your nude body, only to get critical comments about your appearance, or lude PMs demanding sexual favors, and see no enforcement of community guidelines?
Perhaps some mix of all three. Or something I haven’t thought of.
Can you say more about this? What do you think the serial downvoters are up to? Do they just downvote or do they upvote in some situations too?
I don’t know motives. I can’t read minds. But that it drives away contributors is something I’m pretty sure of.
OK, so I have looked at this in the past week and I think you hit the nail on the head with your page contention suggestion. Seems like most casual browsers will be looking at one of three feeds: active, top hour and top six hours. I think the most viewed is active as it is the default and people coming here, wistful with a fist full, are less interested to change that. The difference between page one of active and page two is good for between 3-20 upvotes in an hour, depending on the overall popularity of the post. When a post gets to the bottom of the page it’s possible to bump it off with as few as two downvotes.