Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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The problem with downvotes in LemmyNSFW was very specific to that instance and its sexual nature. It boils down to the typical user doing the following:
As a result, content geared towards gay+bi men, hetero+bi women, and plenty non-binary people was consistently downvoted - and it was discouraging genuine OC for those demographics.
It was totally a band-aid measure, mind you. But it kind of worked?
An actual solution for that issue would be to require people to tag their content, and allow posters to pick what they want to see based on those tags. But for that you'd need further improvement of the software.
Sounds like they should have more LGBT ~~subreddits~~ (communities? Is that the term?)
They do, but once you hop into the "local" view you see all of those posts. And the users, instead of blocking those communities as "content that is not relevant for me, but might be for someone else", simply downvote the posts as a knee-jerk reaction.
(Yup, communities. I typically shorten it to comms.)
Same happens to the Christianity community, unfortunately.
Christians trying to make themselves into victims at every chance they can get?
Yup, it's Flax
Sellers being also part of the problem is a fair point. But it isn't just about Lemmy being Lemmy; it's that unless a community disallows sellers, amateurs eventually leave.
This would probably need a different approach, like different comms for sellers vs. amateurs. Or, if the tag system were to be implemented, forcing people to tag their content accordingly.
About sexuality: the reason why I think that tags would've worked is that, once legitimate-but-shortsighted users stop downvoting things based on their sexuality, the trolls stick out like a sore thumb. And then you can simply kick the trolls out.
Porn should definitely be separated into categories, because there is a lot of content that a lot of people don’t want to see.
I would argue the actual solution is to curate your feed by subscribing to communities you enjoy and "unsubscribing" from the ones. You can even create your home (or whatever the subscribed feed is called) feed for your "finer" taste and then block communities you don't want to see in the "All" feed.
That's how I've set up my Lemmy. I have my home feed for niche communities that generally don't end up in the all feed, and for general news I have the All feed where I've selectively blocked out communities I really don't care about. Ideally I would like to set up multiple feed because there are some communities that are so small they don't end up in my home feed either. I would need a separate feed for the extra niche communities so I could participate in them and help them grow larger.
While a tag system could achieve something similar I feel like tags would probably be more annoying to use because you'll be at the mercy of whomever sets the tag. If you look at how people use tags on Steam the tags can easily overreach. I had blocked sexual content tag on Steam to get rid of sex games, and it blocked Baldur's Gate 3. Technically Baldur's gate 3 contains sexual content but there's a world of difference between an RPG with sexual content and an actual porn game. I think Valve added some other way to filter out adult games so now I use that and I don't even bother with tags.
Frankly I also browse by "Subscribed". However that is not an actual solution for the problem, unless you have a sensible way to encourage/force other people to do it.
Multiple feeds (a la multireddits) is a great idea that pops up often. I hope that the devs are at least considering it.
The solution doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. So even if posts within a grey area get tagged in a way that reaches a wider audience than they're supposed to,, it's fine.
What do you mean? People already post things in the correct community and moderators make sure wrong posts get removed. My suggestion is that people should make use of that by curating what communities are they see or don't want to see. There's no need to encourage/force other people to do anything, they're already doing it.
First of all, wouldn't the tag system need other people to be encouraged/forced to do it? Secondly, if the tagged grey area posts reach a wider audience then it doesn't solve the problem because the problem is that people don't want to see specific posts in their feed. Posts in the grey area can contain posts people don't want to see. If the unwanted posts still end up in their feeds then the problem isn't solved. The tags should be used to exclude posts not be used to include posts.
I mean that what you call "the solution" (to curate one's feed) already exists and did not solve the problem for the platform as a whole, as attested by the OP. Because regardless of what you or me think that people "should" do, they're still browsing by "All" (that's fine) and then downvoting content geared towards other audiences (that is not fine).
And it is not just porn; you see the exact same issue with content in other languages. Same deal: the resource exists (you can set up the language of your content, as well as the ones that you want to see) and people still don't use it.
You're suggesting that people should make use of that resource, but our suggestions mean nothing if people won't follow them. We do need a way to at least encourage the usage of those resources, and discourage this idiotic "this content is not made for ME! ME! ME!, how do they dare? Downvoting time!" tendency.
It might not solve the problem but it does alleviate it. There's a big difference between seeing 10% or 50% of irrelevant content.
But tags have the exact same issue as the current solution, which is that someone has to set up what tags the user wants to see and the only one who can set them up is the user itself. The current solution already does a better job at solving the problem than tags would and people don't use it. If the people don't use the current solution why would they use tags? Why not just improve the current solution so people would use it?
Supply demand is king either ignore the downvotes or find a new target market. I dont recon its worked at all its just means people will block the accounts meaning they are memory holed perminantly.
No, it is not. Smithsonian economics don't even work here, due to the network effect causing a vicious cycle: less visibility due to downvotes → lower perceived supply → users look for that content outside Lemmy → less demand for that content → lower actual supply.
And in this case it's really bad, because Lemmy is supposed to be welcoming to gay people too, not just heterosexual men like me.
They block the communities instead, as it's easier than blocking individual posters. And, frankly, it's a better approach than downvoting the content as it discourages it from being shared.
Lemmy is the ultimate embodiment of a free market. U dont think thats even a valid argument if that content is downvoted communities dedicated to it will be equally downvoted. Welcoming should not mean making the experience for the majority significantly worse simply to avoid a minority having to search a little harder.
Blocking communities doesnt work entirely since u end up with fat chicks and dicks in communities that arent specificly dedicated to either.
Yet another dumb claim piled up over another. At this point I'm not wasting my time with this, I'll facepalm at this crap and move on to the main point.
Nirvana fallacy. People who expect perfect and all-encompassing solutions for problems should take a reality check.
The fediverse is a perfect metaphor for a free market please explain how it isnt.
I dont expect perfect solutions thats why downvotes to solve the problems that blocking cant exists. Thx for proving my point
Easy: Votes are an unlimited resource because a user can vote on as many posts as they want and a person can create basically unlimited user accounts, thus the fediverse would be like a market where everyone can create money out of thin air, defeating the purpose of having a market at all.
The fediverse would be more like a market if users had to "earn" votes by posting stuff other people vote on then "spend" those votes on other people's posts. Then votes would be a limited resource that would make sense to apply market principles to.
Bitcoins are an unlimited resource you can mine infinitely many of them. Both votes and bitcoins are raw resources that can be "mined" (earned) infinitely at a given rate by utilising the base resources time, compute, and internet.
U spend ur time compute internet and attention to earn votes that u spend on posts to affect the marketplace of ideas.