Unusual surge of mass post-downvoting

Provence said:

The atmosphere is pretty toxic.
It's stirring up dissatisfaction
It's disencouraging to go out your way to find stuff only to see it's getting downvoted immediately.

It's just an awful practice.
Even worse than sniping as it also hits people not involved with the sniping drama.
Technically allowed, but said persons should start asking themselves what they want to actually achieve with downvotes.

Oh, come on. You are being way too dramatic about over such an insignificant statistic. Post score is, as already stated, completely meaningless, and unless you're uploading crap-quality art or niche fetish porn, a single downvote will ultimately get drowned out by upvotes.

Unless you have reason to believe someone is unfairly targeting you in particular, there is no reason to be getting so worked up over this. One user downvoting posts they don't like is not the end of the world.

If you actually look at half the posts on this site you'd know that isn't the case. A large number of posts only get a couple upvotes. A single downvote is meaningless on whatever hot E pics are upped and get 300 score, but they're much more impactful on scenery or unpopular copyrights which might only get a couple of upvotes, if even.

I can't claim to know the perfect solution for this, but let's stop pretending that it's a non-issue. This gets brought up constantly on Discord, and this thread's mere existence is a testament to the effect it's having. I know it's all cool to pretend you don't care at all about the numbers, but score and favourites are the primary feedback you get for uploads on a site which glorifies making your Profile's numbers go up. How it affects users emotionally is important. I've had conversations with multiple users about downvotes discouraging them from uploading, one once even admitting that they stopped early for the day because the downvotes on their posts were that disheartening.

The amount of people doing this has also increased. How many will it take for this to be acknowledged as an issue? How about when the majority of posts have a baseline score of -3 or -4? This disproportionately effects non-sexual themes such as scenery, or male_focus posts, because they get a lot less interaction. Danbooru isn't YouTube, we don't get so many votes on every post that outliers are quickly lost amongst the flood of other users. Even after months, a post might not get any interactions outside of those initial downvotes. Not because they're bad, but because, for example, they aren't sexual enough. This is also why I don't think hiding score for X period of time will help.

In theory, all active posts should have at least some artistic value by nature of the curation the site undergoes. In that enviroment, active posts with a negative score shouldn't become the norm.

I agree with hiding the rating and rating for the first three days, tk. it is an effective method. I know from another site where posts and comments have a display timeout. It should be borne in mind that this will disrupt the image search by evaluation for this time. An alternative option can be considered approval of the picture, as the deadline for not issuing a grade. In addition, the very approval already means that the picture was appreciated and setting the base rating above zero can motivate the uploaders. Thus, for approved posts from the queue, you can put +1 automatically. Unlimited downloaders are worth considering. with a large number of downloads, you will hardly look at the rating of pictures, but a lower rating will be illogical for the site as a whole.

I agree that some posts deserve every upvote they get and that upvoting is fun. If Danbooru isn't fun to use, then what's the point? Post votes becoming hidden, even temporarily, would be annoying and might discourage upvoting. It's also unlikely to make people stop using downvotes as a blacklist for individual posts. How about eliminating downvotes completely and/or providing a separate individual post hiding feature for the people who want that? Downvotes are just about spreading the hate anyway. Sometimes the hate is justified, but isn't that what our discerning approvers are for?

Shifting the score by some fixed offset seems meaningless to me. -2 is -2, even if you call it "3".

Edit: Clarified that I wasn't referring to the Explicit rating.

Flopsy said:

How about eliminating downvotes completely

No, that's never gonna happen.

iridescent_slime said:

Oh, come on. You are being way too dramatic about over such an insignificant statistic. Post score is, as already stated, completely meaningless, and unless you're uploading crap-quality art or niche fetish porn, a single downvote will ultimately get drowned out by upvotes.

Unless you have reason to believe someone is unfairly targeting you in particular, there is no reason to be getting so worked up over this. One user downvoting posts they don't like is not the end of the world.

These downvotes are being done when an image has zero scores.
Looking at this via a pure numerical view makes downvotes of course meaningless. But only in the end, as going down from 0 to -1 is a 100% score change while going down from 20 to 19 is not. Downvotes only lose meaning when a post already has some upvotes.
Uploaders aren't just numbers and seeing multiple uploads of you at -1 or sometimes even -2 can be very disencouraging, even if they might end up at +8 or so at the end.

Not knowing if this thread will go anywhere or not (it probably won't), I've decided to do what I can at least to counter the mass downvoter by going through all of the recent posts with negative scores and upvoting the ones I think aren't crap (instead of ones I like).

Voting

I've opened up a tab and am using the following search, and will just refresh the page regularly throughout the day.

• score:<0 age:..1d -upvote:BrokenEagle98

Feel free to join in on this... or not.

Unvoting

If one wants to mass unvote posts once they achieved a sufficient score, I have created the following gist which adds an unvote option to the post mode menu.

https://gist.github.com/BrokenEagle/1ae66a047ee2734400b25b6bb879740a/raw/PostModeMenuPlus.user.js

You can then just using something akin to the following search to go through these.

• score:>2 upvote:BrokenEagle98

Thanks for sharing the script. This user had stopped doing this for a while but came back in force. Given they seem to be hitting people at all hours no matter when they upload, it's possible they're using a script or bot to do this. There's nothing inherently against the ToS from the looks of things, but is it annoying, especially when they're down-voting scenery posts for no apparent reason.

nonamethanks said:

As long as someone is not targeting a specific user or making sockpuppets to vote more than once on the same posts, they can downvote any content they want.

In what world is downvoting 13,000 uploads from a single user not considered targeting them?

Last month when I checked (and posted on the discord), there were 700 male focus posts, from any user, that were at score 0 after I upvoted them.
I just checked again, and now there are over 13,500 posts at score 0, again, after I upvoted them but this time, from my own uploads alone.
Remember, this is just the ones at score 0, not counting the ones going below or above that score.

Even if they're downvoting other posts, don't you think it could be a way of hiding their true intentions? The intentions could be rationalized by understanding that downvoting started out with users like -Shiki- and other male focus uploaders back in July. I mentioned it multiple times on the discord before their downvoting "suddenly" got more random and others noticed as well.
I don't think connecting between these dots is that unreasonable. Especially when you consider that most posts with female characters will get at least a couple of votes eventually to offset the downvote, whereas male focus posts can sit there for over 2 years with nothing. When you consider all that, it's easy to see the point of downvoting random posts for the sake of making it "random".

TLDR: Regardless of all the above, why is this negativity being allowed in the first place?
Users spend hours of their day uploading to this site, and this is the treatment they get in return?

Don't you think this could deter potential new users away? We here know that downvotes don't literally affect the site, but they affect the uploader instead. Especially if they were new.
We've already had cases of multiple new users asking if they've done anything wrong to get a -1 after a couple of mins.

Like Provence mentioned, this is a toxic environment for new and older users alike, and I can't believe nothing is being done about it.

This discussion is turning in a bad direction imo. If there's a problem, it's with the system, not the user using said system without openly violating any rules. One user is known to be downvoting a very large number of posts, but that does not mean they are the only user downvoting anything. It doesn't seem very fair to start making conclusions about their intentions and assuming bad faith, attributing any and all downvotes to them and claiming veiled hostility when the admins/mods already know who's downvoting what and would have done something about it if bad intentions could be proven.

If we're going to discuss this, it should be a discussion about fixing a flawed system, nothing else. Treating a user like a villain for using a feature provided to them, within the bounds of the rules, is just as toxic as mass downvoting.

The plan is to get rid of the Gold limit and allow all Members to vote. I've been planning to do this for quite a while, but I guess this forces the issue. See issue #4923 for more details.

If you think something deserves a higher score, then upvote it. If you get outvoted by other users, then tough luck. Simple as that.

Score is a measure of popularity, not quality. Thinking you can boil down "quality" to a single number that everyone will agree on is woefully misguided. If that were possible, then I would fire every approver right now and replace them with a score-based system. The whole point of the approval system is that score and quality are two different things.

Once you accept that score is not quality, then you can stop worrying about score.

Most of the downvotes people are complaining about come from a single user who basically votes on everything he sees, and if he doesn't upvote it then he downvotes it. This is allowed. You're allowed to vote a lot. You're allowed to have high standards. You're allowed to downvote things you personally don't like. You're allowed to downvote things other people like. You're allowed to use the voting system in idiosyncratic ways to suit your own personal needs. I'm not punishing people for voting the "wrong" way. As a user, I want the freedom to vote however I want.

Obstetrics said:

I can't claim to know the perfect solution for this, but let's stop pretending that it's a non-issue. This gets brought up constantly on Discord, and this thread's mere existence is a testament to the effect it's having. I know it's all cool to pretend you don't care at all about the numbers, but score and favourites are the primary feedback you get for uploads on a site which glorifies making your Profile's numbers go up. How it affects users emotionally is important. I've had conversations with multiple users about downvotes discouraging them from uploading, one once even admitting that they stopped early for the day because the downvotes on their posts were that disheartening.

From my point of view, this kind of score-whoring mentality is the root of all evil on the site. It's the reason for all the infighting over sniping and flagging. It's the reason for uploaders trying to get each other banned over trumped-up charges (yes, this has happened). It's the reason why we got rid of uploader names for a time (and the only reason they were brought back was so artists wouldn't think Danbooru itself was responsible for their works being reposted here, not regular users). It's the reason why the site is absolutely flooded with worthless duplicates - because they're easy numbers (and don't tell me it's for quality reasons - I know you're bullshitting me).

Want to know why Members can't vote? It's because like twelve years ago, some guy wrote a bot to mass downvote a particular uploader they had a grudge against. Some uploader got mad at another uploader and ruined it for everyone. That's literally it.

If the only reason you upload to Danbooru is for internet clout, then you're uploading for all the wrong reasons and I'll be glad if you're discouraged from it. Frankly, as an uploader all you're doing is reposting shit from one site to another. You don't deserve any special praise for that. It's ridiculous to take score personally for something you didn't even create.

Use the space below to tell me allowing everyone to vote is a terrible idea. I don't care. My stance is that making people pay $20 to vote on anime pictures is ridiculous and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise. If you want to talk about the logistics of how allowing everyone to vote is supposed to work, you're free to do that.

I have no plans of removing downvotes or hiding scores. It's pretty crazy that, while the rest of the internet is having a meltdown over Youtube getting rid of dislike counts, people here are seriously suggesting we get rid of downvotes altogether. All because some power uploaders had their posts get downvoted a single time.

Regular users have to deal with their uploads getting outright deleted everyday, for the nitpickiest of reasons. Our response is basically to tell them to shut up and deal with it. But when power uploaders have to deal with a single downvote, they run begging to the mods to ban the downvoter or get rid of all downvotes. Get over yourselves.

It's just anime pictures. Don't take it too seriously.

I think this is a good change. I hope you eventually reconsider the hidden tag system as well.

evazion said:

The plan is to get rid of the Gold limit and allow all Members to vote. I've been planning to do this for quite a while, but I guess this forces the issue. See issue #4923 for more details.

If you think something deserves a higher score, then upvote it. If you get outvoted by other users, then tough luck. Simple as that.

Score is a measure of popularity, not quality. Thinking you can boil down "quality" to a single number that everyone will agree on is woefully misguided. If that were possible, then I would fire every approver right now and replace them with a score-based system. The whole point of the approval system is that score and quality are two different things.

Once you accept that score is not quality, then you can stop worrying about score.

Most of the downvotes people are complaining about come from a single user who basically votes on everything he sees, and if he doesn't upvote it then he downvotes it. This is allowed. You're allowed to vote a lot. You're allowed to have high standards. You're allowed to downvote things you personally don't like. You're allowed to downvote things other people like. You're allowed to use the voting system in idiosyncratic ways to suit your own personal needs. I'm not punishing people for voting the "wrong" way. As a user, I want the freedom to vote however I want.

From my point of view, this kind of score-whoring mentality is the root of all evil on the site. It's the reason for all the infighting over sniping and flagging. It's the reason for uploaders trying to get each other banned over trumped-up charges (yes, this has happened). It's the reason why we got rid of uploader names for a time (and the only reason they were brought back was so artists wouldn't think Danbooru itself was responsible for their works being reposted here, not regular users). It's the reason why the site is absolutely flooded with worthless duplicates - because they're easy numbers (and don't tell me it's for quality reasons - I know you're bullshitting me).

Want to know why Members can't vote? It's because like twelve years ago, some guy wrote a bot to mass downvote a particular uploader they had a grudge against. Some uploader got mad at another uploader and ruined it for everyone. That's literally it.

If the only reason you upload to Danbooru is for internet clout, then you're uploading for all the wrong reasons and I'll be glad if you're discouraged from it. Frankly, as an uploader all you're doing is reposting shit from one site to another. You don't deserve any special praise for that. It's ridiculous to take score personally for something you didn't even create.

Use the space below to tell me allowing everyone to vote is a terrible idea. I don't care. My stance is that making people pay $20 to vote on anime pictures is ridiculous and nothing you can say will convince me otherwise. If you want to talk about the logistics of how allowing everyone to vote is supposed to work, you're free to do that.

I have no plans of removing downvotes or hiding scores. It's pretty crazy that, while the rest of the internet is having a meltdown over Youtube getting rid of dislike counts, people here are seriously suggesting we get rid of downvotes altogether. All because some power uploaders had their posts get downvoted a single time.

Regular users have to deal with their uploads getting outright deleted everyday, for the nitpickiest of reasons. Our response is basically to tell them to shut up and deal with it. But when power uploaders have to deal with a single downvote, they run begging to the mods to ban the downvoter or get rid of all downvotes. Get over yourselves.

It's just anime pictures. Don't take it too seriously.

Ok, evazion. You clearly are rather "loud" in this reply and I don't really why.
The issue isn't that a user is downvoting my stuff but pretty much everything (if you can use overexaggeration, so can I).
That may or may not result in annoyance in the userbase . If you are a fresh uploader, you might feel disencouraged if your uploads get downvoted immediately.
This is of course a projection, so it may or may not come true, but it already diesn't affect the mindset of established users but more new uploaders and users uploading niche stuff. It already went so far that users felt targeted. Even if that's actually not the case, it's dangerous to just ignore this sentiment.

Also by making members elligible for voting, you have to consider that it doesn't work backwards. This will favor uploads after the change and get higher scores than uploads before that change, making order:score searches pretty much irrelevant. Even if you account for favs by members, users won't go back and upvote on older images.
Also, we already had this feature under albert and it was abolished very quickly.

If you can account for this, by all neans, do it. But if you can't, it is prolly better to let it be and continue with the status quo.
What are you trying to accomplish here? Higher user activity and integration or make it so that every uploads get treated equally? Because images before the change will lose out on that change.

The site's traffic has increased massively since 5 years ago, does that mean posts uploaded 5 years ago are being treated unfairly?

nonamethanks said:

The site's traffic has increased massively since 5 years ago, does that mean posts uploaded 5 years ago are being treated unfairly?

It is a system overhaul, and not growth dependant on time.
Even images from one week ago are in a sudden disadvantage.

I've avoided participating in this thread up until now because it too quickly turned personal. It just boiled down to "I don't like the way some users are using a perfectly valid feature, they should only use it the way I want them to."

I can understand new uploaders not understanding that score does absolutely nothing, and taking it personally that their uploads don't get good ratings, but if you're uploading niche content, then I don't feel you're in any position to complain about it. Scat, gore, and watersports, just to name a few more extreme examples, are not widely popular and are guaranteed to have low scores. Bara art is not widely appealing. Scenery art is not as broadly popular as explicit art. A lot of people absolutely despise furry art. The majority of the userbase, if we're looking at score, doesn't come here for those things, they're not going to perform as well, and nothing short of removing the voting system entirely is going to change that. That doesn't mean those things don't have a place here, but you can't force people to only downvote the things you say are okay to be downvoted.

Provence said:

Also by making members elligible for voting, you have to consider that it doesn't work backwards. This will favor uploads after the change and get higher scores than uploads before that change, making order:score searches pretty much irrelevant. Even if you account for favs by members, users won't go back and upvote on older images.
Also, we already had this feature under albert and it was abolished very quickly.

Why do we care about old posts? To begin with, it's not like people can't discover and upvote older posts. Sure, most people probably aren't going to intentionally go back and upvote them just because they can now; sure, new posts are going to benefit from this a lot more, but so what? That already happens naturally with time and an ever growing user base. If the primary argument is "downvotes hurt new uploaders", then why are we even talking about stuff that's already uploaded?

Order:score is a popularity search anyway, and it's 99% porn, it's already an irrelevant search. post #3410029 probably isn't going to stop being the highest rated image on the site despite being three years old. If anything, nothing at all will change because the highest rated posts, by virtue of being on the first page of order:score, will just continue to reign due to their high visibility.

Also, unrelated nitpick, the word is discourage, disencourage isn't a word.

I'm fairly neutral on users being able to upvote, so i'm not gonna discuss that.
I'm mainly miffed by the "it's not against the rules" mentality. Rules change, they have changed many times in the past, and usually when they're changed is because some hole got abused. This is how pretty much happens everywhere.
An user may have the choice to upvote and downvote every single post, upvoting what they like and downvoting what they don't. I'm not against that.
But, unless i'm getting it wrong, there are some 3/5 bots going around at the moment downvoting every post. Is that not exploiting the system?
You could say that this feature is not hurting the site, so it should be allowed, but apparently people care about it.
I personally like to use score as a way to understand whether some artworks i've posted are too low-quality. Ignoring this problem and letting users come up with a solution would just completely devalue it, and at that point, why keep it?

tl;dr rules aren't set in stone, yeah i agree with you evazion but having a bot downvoting (or even upvoting) every post without distinction is a bit of a stretch

blindVigil said:

I've avoided participating in this thread up until now because it too quickly turned personal. It just boiled down to "I don't like the way some users are using a perfectly valid feature, they should only use it the way I want them to."

I can understand new uploaders not understanding that score does absolutely nothing, and taking it personally that their uploads don't get good ratings, but if you're uploading niche content, then I don't feel you're in any position to complain about it. Scat, gore, and watersports, just to name a few more extreme examples, are not widely popular and are guaranteed to have low scores. Bara art is not widely appealing. Scenery art is not as broadly popular as explicit art. A lot of people absolutely despise furry art. The majority of the userbase, if we're looking at score, doesn't come here for those things, they're not going to perform as well, and nothing short of removing the voting system entirely is going to change that. That doesn't mean those things don't have a place here, but you can't force people to only downvote the things you say are okay to be downvoted.

Why do we care about old posts? To begin with, it's not like people can't discover and upvote older posts. Sure, most people probably aren't going to intentionally go back and upvote them just because they can now; sure, new posts are going to benefit from this a lot more, but so what? That already happens naturally with time and an ever growing user base. If the primary argument is "downvotes hurt new uploaders", then why are we even talking about stuff that's already uploaded?

Order:score is a popularity search anyway, and it's 99% porn, it's already an irrelevant search. post #3410029 probably isn't going to stop being the highest rated image on the site despite being three years old. If anything, nothing at all will change because the highest rated posts, by virtue of being on the first page of order:score, will just continue to reign due to their high visibility.

Also, unrelated nitpick, the word is discourage, disencourage isn't a word.

You are mixing two issues together. This isn't about downvoting but more about being consistent with all uploads.
You would basically screw 4m uploads in favor of the uploads going forward.
You can search images in seperate searches. But if you want to have every image in a search, the way these images received their score should stay the same.

Username_Hidden said:

I'm fairly neutral on users being able to upvote, so i'm not gonna discuss that.
I'm mainly miffed by the "it's not against the rules" mentality. Rules change, they have changed many times in the past, and usually when they're changed is because some hole got abused. This is how pretty much happens everywhere.
An user may have the choice to upvote and downvote every single post, upvoting what they like and downvoting what they don't. I'm not against that.
But, unless i'm getting it wrong, there are some 3/5 bots going around at the moment downvoting every post. Is that not exploiting the system?
You could say that this feature is not hurting the site, so it should be allowed, but apparently people care about it.
I personally like to use score as a way to understand whether some artworks i've posted are too low-quality. Ignoring this problem and letting users come up with a solution would just completely devalue it, and at that point, why keep it?

tl;dr rules aren't set in stone, yeah i agree with you evazion but having a bot downvoting (or even upvoting) every post without distinction is a bit of a stretch

Where did you even get that it's a bot? It's not. It's mostly a user voting on everything they see.