The Problem with Prolific Uploaders

As an older contributor account, I admit I stopped uploading for years due to this kind of issue, and barely do to this day, as it is quite discouraging to look for recent images to upload, only to find that pretty much nothing is available. However, this is a good thing, as this means our image database is pretty current.

I am a bit skeptical in making any changes, as I feel any changes wouldn't affect the competitive aspect of uploading significantly. Placing more emphasis on tagging may fill out tags better, but may cause some to go overboard with tagging even the most insignificant things. And the competition will begin again.

People will complain about anything, but at our current state, I don't think this negatively affects the site significantly, besides the uploaders not considering the quality of the content and going straight to upload to make sure they get it under their name. But that can re-enter the moderation queue, so that's not too bad.

Well, just my two cents.

Randeel said:

Starting with your various scan fixes, detexted uploads and paid rewards, of course?

Yes, and I'll thank you not to butt in with snide attacks when you tagged -fuck_off in your tags before mintagging the rest of an image set because someone else started uploading them.

Get a room together, please.

Anyway, what about making everything nameless?
Be it tagging or uploading: The idea is always that something is degenerating into competition. More and more tags are getting added where we go into really insignificant details or tagging wars because user keep disagreeing about something (tags have blurry borders at borderline cases, meaning their definitions aren't fix despite a wiki and people will be argumenting in their favor of course).
And uploading competition leads to sniping.

So...make everything nameless?

CodeKyuubi said:

Yes, and I'll thank you not to butt in with snide attacks when you tagged -fuck_off in your tags before mintagging the rest of an image set because someone else started uploading them.

Yes, of course I am "butting in" in an open forum discussion. Get real.

If we put a hard upload cap on all users, that puts a tiny asterisk next to unrestricted uploader permissions.
If we hide who the uploader is, then that promotes anonymous trolling in the form of uploading stuff that’s against the rules.
If people want to recognize the translator or taggers, then they can easily do that by checking the post history.
In my opinion, I think that this problem is highly overstated, and that the best solution is to do nothing. If people can’t find anything to post, then I think that it’s their problem. There are thousands of artists waiting to be discovered or cleaned. If people can’t take a few minutes to find them, then it’s shouldn’t be everyone else’s problem.

wuv_u said:

If people can’t find anything to post, then I think that it’s their problem. There are thousands of artists waiting to be discovered or cleaned. If people can’t take a few minutes to find them, then it’s shouldn’t be everyone else’s problem.

^I can't agree with that enough. There are plenty of golden uploads out there. It's all about investing a little more time and effort other than just mashing the F5 key on the Pixiv latest uploads.

BrokenEagle98 said:

^I can't agree with that enough. There are plenty of golden uploads out there. It's all about investing a little more time and effort other than just mashing the F5 key on the Pixiv latest uploads.

To be honest, I think we should still make the user scripts about:userscripts better visible for that.
Like, if someone plans to uploads then the IQDB scripts are helping a lot since you know, at least on Pixiv, what has been uploaded and what not.
Maybe updating the help:upload notice for that matter. Although, it's already pretty bloated, especially with topic #14854 in mind.

Provence said:

To be honest, I think we should still make the user scripts about:userscripts better visible for that.
Like, if someone plans to uploads then the IQDB scripts are helping a lot since you know, at least on Pixiv, what has been uploaded and what not.

Well I can agree that having tools makes the aspect of uploading much more tenable rather than just being a daily grind. However I'm not sure about official or even sanctioned support on what amounts to a user supplied tool, and therefore could potentially break and/or become unsupported.

wuv_u said:

If we put a hard upload cap on all users, that puts a tiny asterisk next to unrestricted uploader permissions.
If we hide who the uploader is, then that promotes anonymous trolling in the form of uploading stuff that’s against the rules.
If people want to recognize the translator or taggers, then they can easily do that by checking the post history.
In my opinion, I think that this problem is highly overstated, and that the best solution is to do nothing. If people can’t find anything to post, then I think that it’s their problem. There are thousands of artists waiting to be discovered or cleaned. If people can’t take a few minutes to find them, then it’s shouldn’t be everyone else’s problem.

This mostly sums my general feeling about it. I managed to get to ~2.5k uploads as a member with restricted uploads and not uploading a single post at rush in the process - there's really no excuse for those who lament abut the lack of uploads. There are thousands of new posts every day, and hundreds of unupped posts in the daily/weekly/monthly pixiv rankings - some even able to get pretty high scores in my experience.

BrokenEagle98 said:

Well I can agree that having tools makes the aspect of uploading much more tenable rather than just being a daily grind. However I'm not sure about official or even sanctioned support on what amounts to a user supplied tool, and therefore could potentially break and/or become unsupported.

For the record, Distill has already partially broken - it's not as good as it was a couple weeks ago, due to Pixiv changing their layout and how they generate the feed page, which has severly hindered the speed of anyone who doesn't use tools from the competition or their own scripts.

I'll agree that it can be a bit frustrating seeing the same name(s) all the time on artists you like, removing the uploader name would probably "solve" this but I'm not sure if it's the best solution in the end since it invites the risk of people uploading bad shit just to troll, as others have already mentioned. I am strongly against a hard cap on all users since that won't solve the problem, just make it more annoying to upload, 3 sounds good and I would be for it being implemented.

Am I the only one who doesn't want to see their name prominently displayed on an image that they actively dislike (or worse) just because noone else could be bothered to tag it up properly?

kuuderes_shadow said:

Am I the only one who doesn't want to see their name prominently displayed on an image that they actively dislike (or worse) just because noone else could be bothered to tag it up properly?

Well it doesn't really bother me since no one is forcing you tag the post in question, but I can understand what you mean.

A few disorganized thoughts:

1) A long time ago, creator names were displayed next to pools. This gave people the impression that pools were owned by individual users, which led to people creating personal pools for their favorites. Putting a person's name on something does give them a sense of ownership of that thing.

2) Most things on the site don't show the creator anywhere prominent. Notes, commentaries, tags, wikis, artists, and pools don't show their creators. Uploads are the exception. For everything else the creator isn't hidden, but it's not advertised either; you have to check edit histories to find it.

I don't think uploaders need to be secret, but I don't think they should be emphasized either. Look at Reddit or Imgur: usernames are there, but rarely do you notice or care who posted what.

3) Uploaders find validation in all sorts of things: having high scores/favcounts on their uploads, making the popular page or the Curated pool, getting comments on their uploads, having a high upload count on their profile, being the top uploader for a particular character or copyright, or being the first one to "discover" a given artist.

It's natural that people will compete over these things. Wherever there's a number or a rank, people will compete over it. The fact that posts have scores means some people will focus on uploading the highest scoring posts. The fact that profiles show upload counts means some will focus on maximizing their upload count.

These things are inevitable, whether we want them or not. I don't think competition is necessarily even a bad thing. It just needs to be channeled towards productive behaviors, not useless things like competing to see who can crosspost the top Pixiv posts every day.

4) I think new uploaders being discouraged is a bigger issue than power users being discouraged, and I think there are deeper frustrations for new users than just not being able compete for the top posts on Pixiv. The upload process for Members is frustrating in a lot of ways: no uploads for the first week, then 10 uploads per day after that (no matter how good your uploads are), then 5 months (!) of waiting to fully uncap your upload limit. The modqueue is capricious (as always) and the upload formula is inscrutable. It can take someone months of grinding to reach the 1,000-2,000+ uploads or 10,000-20,000+ edits that's become the standard for promotion these days. It's a wonder anyone makes it through without burning out.

albert said:

My own motivation for uploading is to share good art I find and to contribute to a database where I can easily search for it in one place. This means I don't care who gets credit for the upload. But I'm not going to force my opinion on others.

This is pretty much exactly as it is for me.

I think the first two proposed solutions here are much more problematic than the status quo. The second one is especially bad in my opinion if, 1) the information is hidden even from approvers, and/or 2) the "user" metatags can no longer be used.

It hits too close to home with evazion's last point. Thanks.

evazion said:

4) I think new uploaders being discouraged is a bigger issue than power users being discouraged, and I think there are deeper frustrations for new users than just not being able compete for the top posts on Pixiv. The upload process for Members is frustrating in a lot of ways: no uploads for the first week, then 10 uploads per day after that (no matter how good your uploads are), then 5 months (!) of waiting to fully uncap your upload limit. The modqueue is capricious (as always) and the upload formula is inscrutable. It can take someone months of grinding to reach the 1,000-2,000+ uploads or 10,000-20,000+ edits that's become the standard for promotion these days. It's a wonder anyone makes it through without burning out.

Nah this is, this is my problem too when i still no gain unrestricted uploads

post #2857258

kudus said:

Nah this is, this is my problem too when i still no gain unrestricted uploads

post #2857258

The post posted last gets the parent sign (see help:post_relationships).
" Most recent active revision."

But what does this have to do with uploading as Member?

Provence said:

The post posted last gets the parent sign (see help:post_relationships).
" Most recent active revision."

But what does this have to do with uploading as Member?

Yes i know that rule but the problem is time, when i first upload then suddenly member with unrestricted uploads upload another one from pixiv, in my case me from seiga. and if that happen automatically post user with no unrestricted uploads will get deleted

I often see this when i'm still a beginner here

kudus said:

Yes i know that rule but the problem is time, when i first upload then suddenly member with unrestricted uploads upload another one from pixiv, in my case me from seiga. and if that happen automatically post user with no unrestricted uploads will get deleted

I often see this when i'm still a beginner here

I'm pretty sure this happens extremely rarely (like it didn't happen here).
But we're getting sidetracked. This is more a problem with the approving process which is horrible on its own :/.

Provence said:

I'm pretty sure this happens extremely rarely (like it didn't happen here).
But we're getting sidetracked. This is more a problem with the approving process which is horrible on its own :/.

Concur we're getting sidetracked but i just want share my opinion about Prolific Uploaders