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 @[email protected] 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.

  • MaybeALittleBitWeirdEnglish
    10•1 year ago

    I’m happy to hear that the overall consensus was for disabling downvotes for the time being. I don’t think this is something that should be in place forever, but for now it’s a step in a positive direction. I’d like to note that other instances can still downvotes posts and comments that are federated so we still might see some issues in that regard.

    People seem to want to treat Lemmy as a platform exactly like Reddit, but the reality is that things just don’t work the same here. There is no algorithm filtering things out in the background to ensure you have a homogenous feed and keep you engaged. It takes a little bit of work to curate your feed to be what you’d like to see and just because something is outside your personal preferences and kinks doesn’t mean that it is bad.

    I’ve seen people mention multiple times in this thread that they downvote all the “weird” stuff they don’t like. All the same “weird” things exist on Reddit in their own communities, but there is a greater volume of other content posted to the point where you likely won’t see it. This is a place that is starving for content and downvoting someone because they are curvier or don’t like the same kind of hentai as you only dissuades people from posting anything else. You can’t encourage growth by telling people to not post.

    Edit: Forgot to mention that I appreciate you mods and admins! I don’t envy the firestorm that this change may cause.