Uploader and Approver Complaints on Low Quality Images

For the record, I'm aware that I got very cynical in my previous post in this thread, but those weren't things I would say without reason or observation of this and past discussions, and I'm sure the same applies to Hillside Moose. I've certainly been more subtle before, but I'm not going to take back any of what I said. There were past incidents involving singular users where I was more quiet or didn't respond until the last second, leaving me to feel partly responsible for what transpired. Now, I'd rather be more straight and open with my thoughts.

Type-kun said:

More than that, knowing how he tends to approve things at the last second before the posts fall to abyss forever, I can't help but wonder if each and every post under approver:Not_One_Of_Us was deemed bad enough by other approvers?

Sometimes, it's not "bad", the reason could be "average" instead. Personally, my reasons for hiding a post can range from "this is okay, but I don't think it fits the site" to "this is just mediocre" to "this is bad, no". It's not a constant. In a way, I may not approve a post for the same reasons. And while this may not matter to other approvers, I feel approving a post is a way of signing off on it and saying "I think this belongs on the site", more so since the name of the approver is displayed to the left of the post.

It sounds self-conscious, but that's how I've operated. There was a point where I initially thought I would be judged on my approvals after becoming a Janitor and was careful about what I approved, but that wasn't the case and became slightly more relaxed about the role.

Toks said:

I think the mod queue has some kind of 'disapprovals' system where each individual janitor can disapprove a post in order to hide it from their own view on the mod queue. Maybe we can just make these disapprovals visible in the pending notification or something? That would let uploaders know how many janitors saw their upload and thought "not good enough". (It seems fellow janitors can already see this when they're on the mod queue, it shows the number of disapprovals each post has. Not visible on the post's show page though.)

However, the disapprovals system doesn't currently have comments where the janitor can say why they rejected it. Perhaps we can add a comment field to the table for this.

It is true that from the outside (or inside, really) the moderation queue doesn't explicitly communicate what an approver thinks when hiding or approving a post. In a past thread, there was concern over Janitor coverage and Touhou's popularity was mentioned. So I came in and mentioned that I won't judge based on Touhou alone, just art quality. I don't know if it had any effect on the discussion, but it felt good to explain my position.

As transparency goes, a system along these lines doesn't sound like a bad idea going forward. But even if communications get opened among approvers in that fashion without any changes, then it sort of just feels like a new feature being added.

NWSiaCB said:

Isn't that largely the same as saying that Danbooru should just be Gelbooru, but with a score filter?

If that's the argument, what's the point in having janitors or deletions at all? This seems more like a capitulation than anything.

Right, there's more than enough overlapping approval coverage right now, which makes me ask, "What's the point?" That's how I feel about hiding posts in the queue right now: no impact, no effect, because of the knowledge that they'll probably going to get approved anyway (flagging aside, but I've said why I dislike using it for that purpose). That extends into not wanting to bother with the Mod Queue at all at times.

I get that my main role as a Janitor is to shape what gets approved, but that factor makes it seem that there's less responsibility to the role than there could be, or was at one point.

Random word dump here as thoughts come along:

I find that images that get high scores are usually from popular artists and/or are usually of explicit or questionable rating. Seems the average user is just here for ero to begin with. Approval based on score would be pretty terrible. Like post #2003813 and post #1968557 would never have made it if pictures were score based, and they're definitely not "bad" art by any stretch.

Also, I'd second a rejection comment system. I can acknowledge many of my posts are merely average, but some of my posts approved by approver:Not_One_Of_Us user:Ai-to-Yukai feel quite fine for the website, so I'd be curious why other moderators had passed on them only for it to fall to the "lower end" of the approval quality spectrum with Not_One_Of_Us. Namely, for a while I'd upload from Pixiv's daily rankings, picking at stuff that others haven't uploaded yet. Though, perhaps my tastes are just skewed toward accepting more average art, lol.

In other news... A lot of the really terrible art appears to fall off the queue never to see light again, but it does seem some really low quality stuff gets through. When I see some posts I think are "bad", I do start to wonder if it's a matter of preference or it's merely bad, but I'll give them a downvote. Are these moments where I as a user should instead be flagging?

Ai-to-Yukai said:

In other news... A lot of the really terrible art appears to fall off the queue never to see light again, but it does seem some really low quality stuff gets through. When I see some posts I think are "bad", I do start to wonder if it's a matter of preference or it's merely bad, but I'll give them a downvote. Are these moments where I as a user should instead be flagging?

That's up to you. As long as you explain your reasons for flagging (but I doubt you'd actually have some flaky or outright frivolous reasons), go ahead.

Ai-to-Yukai said:

Also, I'd second a rejection comment system. I can acknowledge many of my posts are merely average, but some of my posts approved by approver:Not_One_Of_Us user:Ai-to-Yukai feel quite fine for the website, so I'd be curious why other moderators had passed on them only for it to fall to the "lower end" of the approval quality spectrum with Not_One_Of_Us. Namely, for a while I'd upload from Pixiv's daily rankings, picking at stuff that others haven't uploaded yet. Though, perhaps my tastes are just skewed toward accepting more average art, lol.

Your logic has one flaw: he doesn't only approve from the back end of the queue. I may be wrong and he might have approved all of these after they were deleted and you may have observed that but he also approves things shortly after their uploaded when he feels like it so just linking his approvals doesn't actually give any information.

The problem with score-based approval or deletion is that I suspect only a tiny minority of users actually are rating anything based upon quality.

I see plenty of things getting deleted with positive scores, and plenty of things being approved with negative scores... and totally agree with those things being approved or deleted.

People give negative scores to alternate interpretations of popular characters. (Show a "good girl Sanae" image? All the "Sanae is a slut" people downvote. Show a "slutty Sanae" image? All the "Sanae is a good girl" people downvote.) Quality doesn't matter in the fanwars, all that matters is upvoting "your side".

Further, it's basically a fetish-off. Again, fetishes involving disproportionate bodies like impossibly thin hips and fat thighs or giant breasts get lots of score by a hardcore minority of fetishists even when the image has terrible quality and is never approved. If someone with a glasses fetish upvotes every single image of a girl with glasses, regardless of any other content, how is that really making for a solid judgment of what should or shouldn't be in the site? While not quite a "fetish", some pools, like, say, Disgustingly Adorable, tend to be dumping grounds of simplistic art of popular copyrights that are a magnet for flamewars over flags. (I.E. "Simple art is fine if it's cute" versus "this is only in here because it's Touhou!")

Similarly, as already stated, you are basically pitting the most popular artists and copyrights against all others in a self-perpetuating cycle. Touhou is popular here, so Touhou gets upvoted, and more people who want Touhou join regularly and frequently vote, resulting in higher scores. Not-Touhou works are not popular here, and so they don't get voted up, so they don't get approved, so people give up on trying to upload them, so less people looking for anything else even bother looking around, which means less people are even there to upvote non-Touhou works.

Score also differs drastically between one-post-at-a-time webcomics and batch pixiv 4koma updates or full doujin uploads. One-post-at-a-time webcomics get plenty of positive score because people will upvote for every joke they like, and come back day-after-day. Batch pixiv uploads get less score because they're judging the whole pool, not each panel.

If you set up "anyone and everyone is basically a janitor" system, you're basically amplifying the problem we have right now: You empower more people to not care about what they approve or disapprove based upon any community cohesion or social agreement upon what is acceptable or not, because there's no negative feedback for upvoting bad images, and you basically set up a system that actively encourages factionalism among the userbase, since "your side wins" if you can downvote and drive off the people who disagree with you/like different copyrights/prefer different fetishes, Lord of the Flies style if the feedback loop encourages your side to grow in numbers.

Apollyon said:

That's up to you. As long as you explain your reasons for flagging (but I doubt you'd actually have some flaky or outright frivolous reasons), go ahead.

Seconded. I may not be of much importance beyond being a mere user, but I feel that if you think a picture is "bad" enough that you'd downvote it and actually think "This picture is bad [for X or Y reason]" (rather than "I don't like it"/"It doesn't appeal to me"), you might as well flag it - ready yourself for the potential backlash that might come if you try to defend your position, though.

NWSiaCB said:

-snip-

I second this as well. I don't want to get into a slippery slope argument but I don't see many other outcomes to a rating-based approval system than what essentially boils down to a rating/popularity wars with fandoms/fetishists massively upvoting their "side" no matter the quality, and massively downvoting the other "side".
Can you imagine the war between, I dunno, diehard Touhou fans and diehard Kancolle fans? I certainly don't want to see that happen.

I don't think completely replacing the current system with a mass-voting system is what was suggested. I understood it to be a quick and dirty way of approving popular posts, but something that could easily be overturned with a flag.

Gollgagh said:

I don't think completely replacing the current system with a mass-voting system is what was suggested. I understood it to be a quick and dirty way of approving popular posts, but something that could easily be overturned with a flag.

As already discussed, however, it's much harder to get something deleted with a flag (where every janitor who's active has to agree with the flag) than to get something approved (where only one janitor has to agree with the approval, or in the case of the proposed system, none at all!)

Granted, but I still don't think that it would become a run-away problem with the voting system as-is since not everyone has voting power. At least, not as much of a problem as any one janitor can ostensibly be. I doubt we would see a decrease in the number of obscure copyrights, since the janitors would still have to look at them.

I do agree that the flagging process could probably do with a bit of an overhaul, but I'm not an Idea Man.

I'm a little lost now. This voting approval system doesn't seem that much of an improvement after discussion. Anything that gets a lot of upvotes will surely be approved almost immediately, rather it's more like a janitor sees that image and immediately knows it's a good image and approves it, which then gains a lot of upvotes over the day; anything that doesn't get a lot of upvotes are overlooked by the system, which then the janitors will still have to go through all of them to find the ones that are good enough, but because of the nature of picture, received little recognition. This means that the threshold to let this system be useful and beneficial for the approvers will need to be low, which defeats the purpose of this discussion, which is to prevent bad image uploads and low quality image approvals; then again this doesn't really help any of that if the system were to be implemented. Besides, many of the images that are uploaded and receive substantial amount of votes are most often done by contributors and above, which in this case doesn't even matter to the approval system.

Lastly, I know this is a thread to talk for people that have much issue with the current Danbooru, but I just want to say that I am one who is fine with the way things are. Long ago I said this place was biased all the way through, after reading much of the thread it strengthened my belief. However, I never meant it in a negative way. I enjoy this place very much and nothing has been a problem for me.

I guess nothing on top really contributes anything, so here's something I think that relates to this topic. I believe Deletion appeal thread (restarted) should be used more for the feedback thing. At the beginning people were having constructive discussions about many of the images that were brought up, but now it feels deserted. It was meant for a place to talk to each other and teach people what is good and what is bad. While people are asking if albert cares or not (which he did respond to), I think many of the janitors and up lost interest a long time ago. It does say feedback is voluntary; this just meant that people chose to not care to give feedback. I know they may not have much time on their hands to comment about all the images there, but no time for even one?

These are just some thoughts.

The deletion appeal thread is just for dumping. If you want feedback on the posts you use the upload feedback thread. I still respond to posts when in that thread when I can quantify what's wrong if it's not explicit unless it's really blatantly bad. (I don't approve explicit content so there's no point in me responding with that repeatedly.

albert said:

The gist of my reaction to all this is that I'm fine if the overall quality of the site goes down. Instead of trying to control what comes in it's easier to control what to find.

Requiring more mods to approve a post just makes it that much less likely that a post will get approved. Don't get fixated on deletion being the lone arbiter of whether or not you see a post. You could rely on score instead.

What. Did you already forget about Oldbooru? We didn't create the mod queue. We didn't form user ranks in order of increasing trust. YOU DID. You tried the hands-off, laissez-faire approach a decade ago, and Oldbooru was so buried in shit that it had to be shut down and restructured. To hear you say, "quality don't matter lol," is not only hypocritical but anathema to Danbooru's very foundation.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.

I'd appreciate it if this topic stops being about specific users and focuses instead on solutions.

...Fine. If you don't want to do the simple, efficient solution, I can think of another. It may be better for Danbooru's long-term health anyway.

ALL PENDING POSTS REQUIRE TWO JANITORS TO APPROVE.

This change will bring about several benefits:

• Checks and balances: Trust is easy with a small, close-knit group, but as the group grows trust diminishes. A second approver serves as a buffer to prevent a single rogue Janitor approving shitposts left and right.
• Democratization: As Apollyon mentioned, it's easy to feel redundant when subjected to the tyranny of a single approver. This change would bring more responsibility to Janitors as a group to approve posts that resonate with the site's values. It can speed up approvals for borderline-quality posts as you learn their habits and trust certain Janitors: "Oh, it's [NAME] who approves mostly quality, I can vouch for this post," or "Oh, it's [NAME] who approves mostly shit, I'll just skip this post."
• Sealing cracks: "Good posts falling through the cracks" is a oft-quoted meme spouted by those advocating lower standards. This change will finally quantify it. Coupled with the rejection button idea, you can now see if a post really got overlooked, or if it got 20 rejections and no initial approver because it's trash.
• Future-proofing: People will inevitably cry salty squirrel tears when they find out their "ironically" bad 2hu posts are no longer getting rubber-stamped, so they will come here to write "Y U NO APPROVE MY POSTS???" and ask if we need EVEN MORE janitors. However, even with extra Janitors the buffer will keep the quality at a tolerable level, instead of face-meltingly awful.

Naturally this extends to reapprovals as well, with the caveat that the initial two approvers are barred from voting on the image again. "Two" is a placeholder, but it's a good number considering the current Janitor count, and it can be increased as more Janitors get added on due to reasons.

I know you said you didn't want more mods just to approve a post, but until you abolish the mod queue entirely and just "rely on score," I'm focusing on improving the "inefficient and outdated" system.

Apollyon said:

For the record, I'm aware that I got very cynical in my previous post in this thread, but those weren't things I would say without reason or observation of this and past discussions, and I'm sure the same applies to Hillside Moose. I've certainly been more subtle before, but I'm not going to take back any of what I said. There were past incidents involving singular users where I was more quiet or didn't respond until the last second, leaving me to feel partly responsible for what transpired. Now, I'd rather be more straight and open with my thoughts.

I know I was blunt, but I grow increasingly weary the longer I stay here and see where most discussion end up. Inaction is the bane of this community, and being a hugbox doesn't help. Don't be a dickhead, but don't pussyfoot around the issue and hope it goes away.

Tying approvals to score can be gamed so that's not something I would ever do.

Approvals are basically a binary scoring system independent of the actual score. Requiring double approvals would just make this even more apparent.

When a janitor approves a post, they're signaling that they like it. Up voting is another signal that indicates the user likes it.

The problem is finding out who to trust. Janitors are selected haphazardly. I'm fairly satisfied with the current pool but obviously many users are not.

The ideal approver could differentiate between good art and mediocre or bad art. They are tireless and diligent. They don't have any bias for a specific property like Touhou.

I think it's very hard to find people like that. By those metrics even I wouldn't qualify. This is why I think trying to fix the approval process is just bandaging the symptom. It fails to address the core issue: trust.

To be honest, I don't think there is a good solution. People are just going to have to accept the fact that finding good art of nonpopular properties is going to be time consuming. Maybe following a user's favorited posts or saved searches, or having recommendation threads for artists could help. I would love to see examples of curated sites that get Danbooru's level of traffic that have maintained their quality. I don't think they exist. When you get hundreds of submissions a day, you have to rely on collaborative filtering.

This site does need better ways of discovering good things, and not necessarily through janitor approvals. Similar artists is probably the most important one. It's always been on the backburner but implementing it would take a lot of effort. We do have plenty of resources available now however.

albert said:

The problem is finding out who to trust. Janitors are selected haphazardly. I'm fairly satisfied with the current pool but obviously many users are not.
...
It fails to address the core issue: trust.

You speak of trust, but don't want to act against the one who's been 'awarded' the distrust baton from (at least) 3 other janitors and yourself (though I don't know the background of that). How is keeping him on the position any lucrative to health of this site?
Finding out who fails the trust checks isn't that hard. And people who are trusted already go unnoticed, because they do their job (mostly) right.

I'll put aside that you mentioning that 'quality drop is fine' felt like a kick in the teeth, I have nothing other to say that hasn't been said.

I'd very much like to see disapproval comments preloaded and mapped to number keys. A janitor has only so much time to look at the moderation queue each day, and having to type each comment (or even select it from a menu) would either make janitors disinclined to comment on their disapprovals or seriously reduce the number of pictures they evaluate. It could be:

~: Off topic
1: Compression artifacts
2: Pointless manga page
3: Third party watermark
4: Bad anatomy
5: Bad perspective
6: Bad linework
7: Bad shading
8: Guro
9: Furry
0: I just don't care for it, personally

And a pending image might have in its blue box:

This post is pending approval and has received the following rejection comments:
Bad shading ×2
I just don't care for it, personally ×6
(learn more)

If an image gets rejected with I just don't care for it, personally ×12, and it's by an artist or part of a series with a lot of approved images, the uploader will know they have a case for appeal and just uploaded it at the wrong time. If it gets rejected with Off topic ×4, then they'll know they don't have a leg to stand on.

So Not One Of Us has to be demoted along with some other offenders?

How about splitting off possible technical mod queue enhancements to another topic? it becomes slightly difficult to follow.

albert said:

words

You are told who the problem individual is, yet you don't want to do anything about it, asking us to stop targeting "specific users" and "focus instead on solutions."
I present a solution that would contain the problem and prevent future occurrences, but you don't want to do that either.
Now you're changing the subject to about adding new features like "Similar Artists" while avoiding the problem entirely.

What are you afraid of?

Are you really that worried that some good posts will fall through? Then go to status:deleted once in a while and approve some posts yourself. We certainly won't begrudge you for approving pics you like to your site, not as much as we begrudge your chronic indecisiveness and giving one Janitor carte blanche with the mod queue.

Hillside_Moose said:

...Fine. If you don't want to do the simple, efficient solution, I can think of another. It may be better for Danbooru's long-term health anyway.

ALL PENDING POSTS REQUIRE TWO JANITORS TO APPROVE.

Fantastic idea - while in the meantime, all of contributors+ will naturally enjoy their close to absolute immunity, because - as we all already know - they'd still need a whole, round, ZERO JANITORS TO APPROVE.

Perhaps instead of introducing such half-hearted measures as mentioned above, we should cease possibility of registering any new users instead(except the paid Gold/Platinum ones) As this would give us similar results: dimnishing input from new users. The fun of being elitist will last... until current generation of contribs find some more urgent things to do in RL with noone in sight ready nor willing to replace them. But who are we to care about it now!

What are you afraid of?

Yes, yes, let the stake start burning!
In the meantime, however, nobody addressed the one small question: who's going to approve such posts like mentioned earlier approver:Not_One_Of_Us user:Ai-to-Yukai? The kind of posts, let me remind you, are usually waiting in queue for whole 3 days, until he comes and finally approves them?

richie said:
In the meantime, however, nobody addressed the one small question: who's going to approve such posts like mentioned earlier approver:Not_One_Of_Us user:Ai-to-Yukai? The kind of posts, let me remind you, are usually waiting in queue for whole 3 days, until he comes and finally approves them?

Someone else or nobody. It's not the end of the world if posts get deleted, though I understand where does the different mentality come from. Use the appeals (not the thread, the option on the post, the thread usage is half-arsed) when posts gets thrown out (a few of them would be fished up by me if I missed them, happens, I'm only human.)
I could find myself approving about a quarter of them and half of the excluded ones are mediocre-ish which may or may not have chances with others.

If there is anything I'd like to suggest is the daily appeal counter to be upped from 1/day to at least 4 (minimum upload limit) or even 10 (standard upload limit), to give users less restrictions in that aspect. The latter amount carries the risk of cluttering the thing a bit too intensively though, since appeals aren't exactly limited to uploader of the post and are not limited to 1/post.