Any critiques, desire for clarity, outright hatred, whatever have you. I will respond the best I can.
I know there’s been some blowback on some of the policy updates but it’s been difficult to really explain fully that the restrictive content policy is temporary, this community was very unmanaged for a time and it had to be reigned in somehow and with the limited tools at disposal the temporary policy changes were made.
Here’s a comment that also explains a little bit behind the decisions made recently as well.
For community mods, we have a community mod coord matrix group chat now. Feel free to DM about it.
Also, there’s another ongoing discussion regarding SFW communities on lemmyNSFW here.
I am all for making sure for rules to be enforced, however…
I have been collecting images I like from the R site for however many years, and now, with a new site and community, I am ready to share the love.
I’ve started posting, but !tinytitties@lemmynsfw.com have been kind of unwelcoming. First, they asked for model consent on a post, which was promptly deleted anyway. No big deal, let’s choose something that doesn’t look like I want to share some revenge porn. Another one deleted, now I am banned for even subscribing.
The rules are not clearly specified. I’ve posted to some other communities with no problem, but there is no rule about having to provide source, consent, or OC name. This is something that has to be worked on a little.
I wanted to express that I’m extremely concerned about the banning of @paddedperson and the deletion of their thread saying that they were migrating away from lemmynsfw.
As far as I can tell, @paddedperson was banned for leaking preliminary information about upcoming content policy changes from the admin discussion group. In my view, they were legitimate concerns, and retaliatory action taken against him are very concerning with respect to treatment of whistleblowers.
Can admins comment on this incident?
Truly transparent non-profit organizations (e.g. Wikipedia) typically release meeting minutes (a summary or transcript), or allow the public to attend voting meetings as part of the audience. Can the admins provide a summary or transcript of the votes taken on various decisions?
So I’m not really an “admin” - I’m a sysadmin/developer who was given the role of admin so I can make sure all systems (including modlog, reportings, and other tools) work as we adjust them for this instance’s very specific needs.
Padded got banned because he was trying to sabotage the efforts of an entirely volunteer group including revealing our hosting provider. We are not a “non profit organization” - lemmynsfw is a volunteer instance being run on donations. People need to understand that this is no one’s “job” and yet it’s literally taking a ton of our time. I’ve spent so many hours pouring over lemmy code, system configurations, working with the mod tool group, brainstorming, writing code, and trying to help the real admins where I can…
And seriously, no one is being paid for this, donations barely cover server costs, and any excess donations are being saved because it’s anticipated that server costs will continue to rise while donations don’t. Besides, I don’t think any of us WANT to be paid for fear of reprisal from our respective governments for “making money” off serving pornography.
When the creator put out his call for help, a bunch of us stepped up to try to keep the server alive, but this is not an easy instance to run. Please understand that.
To be clear, the volunteers/admins at Wikipedia are not paid either. From my personal experience in Wikimedia communities, my sincere advice is to consider and take transparency seriously.
The most important resource in volunteer spaces like this is ‘trust’.
I hope you and the admin team recognize that in order to run a website like this, you also require the trust and buy-in from moderators (who are also unpaid) to invest the many hours into their communities just as you have done for the server. Hiding things from moderators, sending mixed messages, and making secret deliberations (with rumors that some admins are eager to remove large quantities of content) is really damaging for that relationship of trust.
The recent content policy changes (even before padded’s leak) have been dictatorial top-down decrees. However, these unilateral rule changes are impractical/meaningless when moderators have not agreed to enforce those rules – and I’ve personally experienced this (at best, only 30% of the content that I’ve reported for content policy violations have been addressed by moderators). Realistically, no moderator wants to enforce rules they don’t believe in, and if they leave, the departure of skilled talent cripples this website and leaves communities effectively unmoderated in practice.
Please consider improving the transparency of these content policy deliberations, and at the very minimum, incorporate community moderators into the discussion and ascertain that they are in agreement with the rules before rolling out changes on the drop of a dime.
It’s impossible to please everyone, tend to our jobs, and tend to our families and lives. Concessions will always be made. I don’t know how wikipedia handles all that, but I don’t see how we can do that.
There is a matrix channel for public lemmynsfw discourse, https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org - there’s not a lot of activity there but if you have questions or want a more direct line with us, that’s where we are. We can make a mod specific room and invite folks to have a mod-centric discussion if you think that’s helpful.
But please, please, PLEASE remember that everyone is volunteering their time, and respect for one another is the most important part of this entire process.
I’m very understanding and sympathetic to the fact that running large communities is difficult.
My impression of the current situation is that trust is especially low between community mods/contributors and the admin team. The only way to repair that trust is through transparency, and I would suggest that your team implement as many measures as possible.
For example, mastodon.world discloses all of their finances.
Content banning and user banning processes need publicly posted procedures. How many warnings does each user get? What is the appeal process like? Banning of communities or users should never occur unless it is in violation of an existing policy. It is not okay to change the rules and ban simultaneously (e.g. as was done with c/scat or c/rapehentai). Instead, provide some advance notice. Ideally, suspend before banning. Provide the banned community or user with information about why they were banned.
In a situation like this, where there is so much wild speculation about the content policy, my honest opinion would just be to make the entire process transparent. For example, I used to write minutes for the mediawiki community I was in and sometimes I would publish saved IRC logs. Example minutes:
- Date
- User A submitted this proposal (linked)
- User B, C said X about the proposal
- User D said Y about the proposal
- The vote on this proposal was #-# (# did not vote)
- The proposal passed and will be implemented on future date Z
Although I suppose it was more important for our community to track all the minutes because we were a volunteer community with elected admins. However, for the situation that you are in, I really think it would be beneficial to pursue transparency to that degree.
One of my biggest gripes with Reddit as a platform is the overabundance of amateur models spamming every single subreddit with the exact same posts to shill their OnlyFans and Fansly profiles, even to the point of posting their content in irrelevant subreddits without consequence. It’s at the point where the admins have all but abandoned the 10% rule for self-promotion.
Will you be implementing a policy to ban self-promotion for profit (and keep communities like Gonewild purely for exhibitionists), or at least encourage professional content creators to actually interact with the community and not astroturf LemmyNSFW with adverts for their OF like they’ve done with Reddit?
I think it’s mostly up to the community moderators to determine whether or not they want that content and how they will police it. As long as it doesn’t break site rules (new rules and clarification coming soon) then it’s not really something we want to micromanage.
With that said, link spamming is def not ok. I’m open to suggestions on how we can build out the toolchain that can ensure a good quality of posts.
This is what killed nsfw on reddit. All these beautiful, niche subs. Destroyed by of spam. I wrote a bot that scanned a posters history, and if it found an of link, it flagged them. Of course it was banned on reddit.
I am quite time poor to learn a new bot language here at the moment but in time I could give it a crack.
OF spam kills communities.
Yeah but at this point they’re probably helping growth since they post so much actual content, so I think having a light hand towards them is beneficial. Still should be in the proper subs though.
Based on what evidence?
As a mod of many subs on Reddit, what I saw killed a lot of the subs over thepast year is the proliferation of spam accounts that repost popular posts indiscriminately within a sub (OC, seller, doesn’t matter) in order to advertise products/websites, etc via pinned posts on their profiles. Plus the Reddit admins allowing “viral” subreddits to spring up on a daily basis by these spam rings.
Most competent mods on legit subreddits knew how to use automod and verification tools to handle sellers, etc. What drove a lot of us mods to throw up our hands and close off subreddits is the fact that we got no support from admins to combat spam/spammers (not the same as sellers).
And of course, at the same time, Reddit banned a lot of long time experienced moderator accounts which then resulted in many niche subreddits to be banned due to lack of moderation. From my viewpoint, the culprit is not due to sellers.
[Addition] - Just old history for reference
I wrote a bot that scanned a posters history, and if it found an of link, it flagged them. Of course it was banned on reddit.
Haha - what a coincidence! I was part of the ones that reported to Reddit admins such bots like the one you wrote so that those bots would be banned 😉 (and they were)
[Addition] rip onlyfansdetectbot, https://imgur.com/LrQhZv6, Full album for related screenshots wrt bot - https://imgur.com/a/tfqTKLg
I wholeheartedly and respectfully disagree. I used to visit the communities, let’s say /r/assholebehindthong or something like /r/assontheglass. It was a true community full of people who were into that particular fetish. It was smaller, traffic was not as fast, but the posts were quality. Pure quality.
Now it’s a non stop stream of:
- do you like my (insert appendage)
- my husband won’t fuck me, will you?
- upvote for nudes in your inbox
- etc etc etc
Total clickbait spammy shit. You’ll visit a subreddit like /r/doublevaginal and you’ll get an OF spammer posting an image that has nothing to do with DV and a title like “would you like to double vag me?!”.
The subreddits have been laid waste to the scourge of OF spamming. I yearn for the days when the subreddits were actual, real people posting real, focused content. It’s done, it’s gone and it’s nearly 100% OF material that’s killed it.
I totally understand the frustration you and many others have. It’s easy to simply point at sellers and say they are the cause - its so convenient to scapegoat.
in my reply earlier, ive laid out some of my observations (over 5 years) about the decline. A sub/community’s health and success is almost totally based on the moderator teams and whether they actually care about what they are moderating vs if they just want to build/expand little fiefdoms for ego reasons. And believe it or not, the community members play a huge part in reporting and weeding out spam and keeping the playground clean if mods motivate them and take action on reports.
As mentioned, most of the usual clickbait can and is easily handled by automod as well as by moderators who can lay out a vision and set reasonable rules for the community, as well as judicious banning. Talented sellers know how to properly focus on what the community want and deliver (without the clickbait). As an example, I took over r/LabiaGW for a couple of years from the founder of sub and grew it from 100K to 500k in that time (with the help of a healthy mix of true amateurs AND verified responsible sellers). The clickbait sellers don’t last long beyond a few days and are easily banned/weeded out by the community.
Unfortunately, Reddit allowed (explicitly encouraged?) spamrings to flourish and exist because it needed the traffic from such to keep showing subscribers and traffic “growth” metrics (likely for advertising and planned IPO purposes). Mods had to spend majority of the time fighting THAT spam so couldn’t focus on actually “moderating” and cultivating the communities. Reddit also banned/removed a lot of such responsible mods (or some mods just threw up their hands at lack of inaction about spam from Reddit admins and left the mod teams), and then these subs got taken over by shady folks who purpose is simply to promote and actively provide forums for the spam stuff you mentioned. Try looking at various mods/rings that currently “operate” the subs full of the spam you abhor, vs the successful subs that remain relatively clean and are growing. Ask yourself why Reddit admins allow hese shady folks to flourish even when repeatedly reported, but actively seek out to remove ban responsible mods who do such reporting…
I hope Lemmy admins are reasonable and smart enough to recognize the true causes and don’t knee-jerk ban sellers.
I think this instance shouldn’t try to be federate with the other and accept the role of being the porn hub of Lemmy in wich people makes and account to enter (I did to have porn separated of memes and news).
This should aliviate the need to be so restrictive, specially the broad and ambiguous restrictions like the ones on “nom consent” for drawings in wich consent is… In the eye of the beholder so to speak.
I think all the people that want questionable content legally hosted to do it their damn selves and learn the consequences of that choice or shut the hell up.
This is the way. It doesn’t matter how restrictive LemmyNSFW gets. You don’t have to play by their rules. You can always set up your own instance and play by your own rules.
I would also like the option to disable downvotes in my community. Thank you.
Edit: I meant disable downvoting for posts only, not sure about comments. It’s currently too easily to manipulate voting like it is on reddit.
I’m pretty sure that’s only possible instance-wide (like on beehaw)
And I vote strongly against disabling downvotes on this instance.
No offense but you don’t even post anything. And I’m not asking for it to be instance-wide, just only for posts posted in my community.
I’m voting to not have it active on any community I visit. Sorry.
You don’t have any posts either. So why do you want to downvote other peoples posts so bad? If it breaks any rules, just let the mods remove it.
I think it’s too easy to manipulate the voting system, same problem as reddit. I’m ready to move on to a better system.
Yeah, I’m out. I was enjoying this instance at first, but it clearly has shown itself to not be hentai friendly. The rules are way too strict, and are about to get even stricter?? I was going to attempt to work within the rules anyway with my communities, but banning @paddedperson has shown me that I don’t infact want to stay here at all. They were running most of the hentai communities here and we were starting to work together to make our communities even better. They had legitimate concerns about the rules that were not being addressed. I’ve also stated my concerns in this post and have not had any response.
I feel like the admins are disproportionately biased against drawn/hentai artwork.
A lot of the gonewild communities here are allowing unverified reposted images, and I’d venture a random guess that maybe 30% of the content is posted without the model’s knowledge or permission, which poses issues with privacy/consent law (etc).
So why ban hentai scat/bestiality communities yet leave the actually illegal communities untouched? If the admins were as strict with IRL content as they were with hentai, all of these legally questionable communities should be “temporarily” banned until better moderation tools exist.
There’s clearly a double standard here that exists.
