Deleted due to "did not like the post enough" impacting upload slots

Just wanted to throw this out there for thought. What if your ratio of deletions vs accepted uploads weren't impacted by ones that got deleted due to nobody "liking it enough?" I think it's a bit unfair to judge how many uploads a person should have based on the fact they didn't cater directly to the tastes of people they don't know. Penalizing a person if an approver thinks it breaks a rule or is poor art is fine, but because whatever number of approvers saw it and it wasn't their personal taste seems a tad much. Not saying change the approval system or don't delete those images, just don't have them count against the uploader.

I think this would still accomplish the idea of having people only post high-quality art without having to wonder if the subject or contents will be well-liked by approvers or lose you slots.

"did not like it enough" is the default disapproval reason. It just means nobody who saw the post thought it was good enough to approve it.

nonamethanks said:

"did not like it enough" is the default disapproval reason. It just means nobody who saw the post thought it was good enough to approve it.

I understand, but if the uploader isn't posting bad art then why penalize them?

Unfortunately art quality is subjective, which means the only way to discern whether a post is "good" is to show it to a lot of people and see if they agree. In the case of danbooru, we go even further by only requiring a single approver among the dozens we have to approve a post before allowing it in the main gallery.

However, this goes the other way as well: if not even a single approver likes a post, then it's hard to justify its presence. Sometimes posts get missed, but it's rare and that's what the appeal function is for.

To get to your question, think about it this way: we want to incentivize good uploads, which we define as uploads liked by at least one user among the many ones granted approval privileges. The dynamic upload limit exists for this reason: the more an user uploads posts that are similar in quality to the existing gallery, the more they're encouraged to upload, through the unlocking of more upload slots (and eventually unrestricted privileges).
If there was no penalty for uploading substandard posts, or if there wasn't an immediate reward in uploading well-liked posts, then someone could just flood the site daily with a lot of mediocre uploads without any motivation to improve. This is exactly what used to happen with the old upload system. In fact, even now there's several users I can think of that just won't improve in terms of upload quality and keep uploading a relatively high volume of posts that skirt the line of acceptable quality. I think it would be much worse without the current restrictions. Look at status:deleted and you'll see what I mean.

As for the disapproval options, those are used rarely and only for the worst posts, because most approvers can't be arsed to think too much about a quality of a post, and truth be told it would be unreasonable to ask of them to pass a detailed judgement on thousands of posts a month. If there was no penalty for posts that were just disapproved for nobody liking them, then I'd bet a good 95% (or close to that) of submitted posts would cause no penalty on deletion.

The only advice I can give you is to try and be more selective on what you upload, and try to aim for unrestricted privileges so that you'll then be able to skip the queue without worrying about something being too niche or an art style being too weird for approvers' taste.

nonamethanks said:

To get to your question, think about it this way: we want to incentivize good uploads, which we define as uploads liked by at least one user among the many ones granted approval privileges.

First, just gotta say I'm not doing this in reference to myself as this really hasn't affected me much or at all.
The thing is, there's a bunch of approvers, but most posts I see deleted because nobody liked them only have about 6-11 approvers that viewed them. I don't think 6 is nearly enough when it comes to penalizing somebody due to subjective tastes. I have looked at status:deleted and it does have quite a bit of bad quality, but there's still plenty that get missed where uploaders don't want to use 3 of their slots to appeal it and get nothing back.
The problem is the bar for quality drops SIGNIFICANTLY when someone no longer requires approval, and not necessarily to a sub-standard level. Those with no upload limit can post good art all day (and they do,) but those requiring approval need to find great or better art to make sure at least 1 of--potentially as few as--6 approvers likes it enough to approve. Worst case scenario, you just keep upload slots open and try to snipe established, popular works to improve your ratio despite not posting poor quality in the first place.

I'm not saying the approval system needs replacing, but I do think it's too flawed to penalize people without approvers specifying that they should be penalized for an egregiously poor upload.

Hell, you could just have approvers select yes/no on affecting ratio when deciding to not approve something

"egregiously poor uploads" tend to get penalized by being immediately deleted rather than deleted after 3 days, which takes up 5 slots of upload limit. Unrestricted uploaders also get unlimited appeal slots so that's more incentive to be a good uploader.

ルーミア said:

"egregiously poor uploads" tend to get penalized by being immediately deleted rather than deleted after 3 days, which takes up 5 slots of upload limit. Unrestricted uploaders also get unlimited appeal slots so that's more incentive to be a good uploader.

Maybe egregious was too strong of a word. Bad enough so that some approvers mark it poor quality but it still goes the 3 days. On a side note, apparently egregious has an archaic meaning of "remarkably good" despite currently meaning remarkably bad.

Lobuttomize said:

The thing is, there's a bunch of approvers, but most posts I see deleted because nobody liked them only have about 6-11 approvers that viewed them. I don't think 6 is nearly enough when it comes to penalizing somebody due to subjective tastes. I have looked at status:deleted and it does have quite a bit of bad quality, but there's still plenty that get missed where uploaders don't want to use 3 of their slots to appeal it and get nothing back.

That number only shows the approvers who clicked on "disapprove" for a post. Most approvers don't even click anything if they don't like a post, they just move on to the next.

nonamethanks said:

That number only shows the approvers who clicked on "disapprove" for a post. Most approvers don't even click anything if they don't like a post, they just move on to the next.

That's only more of a disconnect between the people trying to please the approvers and the approvers themselves, tbh.

What about this idea: a group like approvers that maybe you don't see as ready to be approvers yet (or maybe a pre-requisite before becoming approver) that have infinite appeals and are encouraged to go through status:deleted? Would at least give more chances to good stuff that fell through the approvers.

Sounds like unrestricted uploaders to me

ルーミア said:

Sounds like unrestricted uploaders to me

Went through status:appealed and only 4 of the appeals were from unrestricted uploaders.

But they do have unlimited appeal slots, and to some degree can be considered a "pre-requisite before becoming approver". Whether or not they choose to make use of the unlimited slots is up to them. If people who already have unlimited appeal slots aren't appealing, what makes you think making it a completely separate permission would help?

Lobuttomize said:

Went through status:appealed and only 4 of the appeals were from unrestricted uploaders.

There's several unrestricted uploaders who sometimes appeal batches of old posts.

In any case, the point is that unrestricted uploaders have unlimited appeals as well. We wouldn't trust someone with unlimited appeals if we didn't trust them with unlimited uploads, so such a privilege would be redundant.

ルーミア said:

But they do have unlimited appeal slots, and to some degree can be considered a "pre-requisite before becoming approver". Whether or not they choose to make use of the unlimited slots is up to them. If people who already have unlimited appeal slots aren't appealing, what makes you think making it a completely separate permission would help?

I mean, like, get some people that will specifically do that voluntarily

Idk I just think it's wonky for there to be such a gap between quality necessary for a picture to be approved and an auto-approved picture to be flagged. But I give up

Lobuttomize said:

Idk I just think it's wonky for there to be such a gap between quality necessary for a picture to be approved and an auto-approved picture to be flagged. But I give up

For sure, but what can you really do about that? Give more people approver? It'd probably just remain as subjective and split as it is now.

ルーミア said:

For sure, but what can you really do about that? Give more people approver?

It's been done in the past. I feel like there's a cycle here where I'll notice that several of my uploads I was sure were good enough will fail, and sure enough some will have only been seen by 6 or 7 approvers instead of the usual 10, which makes me think the existing approvers may just be getting spread a bit thin.

On a related note, has auto-approving posts that pass a certain popularity threshold (either upvotes, favorites, or both) been floated before? (Obviously it would need some sort of anti-sockpuppeting measure like excluding brand-new accounts from the ranking, but still.)

DownWithTheThickness said:

It's been done in the past. I feel like there's a cycle here where I'll notice that several of my uploads I was sure were good enough will fail, and sure enough some will have only been seen by 6 or 7 approvers instead of the usual 10, which makes me think the existing approvers may just be getting spread a bit thin.

This has been covered before in multiple topics. 70% of uploads bypass the modqueue, out of 2000ish daily uploads, only about 600 of them actually go through the queue, which for 40 something approvers is only 15 posts per approver if every single one is active. Half that number of approvers would be just 30 posts. Most posts that get approved do so within a few hours, so it's not like there's ever a massive backlog of unnapproved posts.