Grahf said:
Not going to lie, I'm a little worried about this. I'm not what you'd call a prolific uploader, and 3 out of my last 4 posts have been flagged.
What's concerning to me isn't so much the flagging, but rather whether I should take it as an indication to just stop? I mean I saw nothing wrong with the images that I uploaded in terms of egregious errors. Are they the greatest pieces of art to ever be contributed to Danbooru? Of course not, but I didn't see anything wrong with them, or anything that I felt was wrong enough to prevent them from being uploaded. Now, admittedly post #2624069 is one of those artstyles that's really hit or miss, but that I've liked enough and felt good enough about to upload.
I have an inherent worry because even take a few moments to really look over an image can result in it being sniped by another user, and sometimes it's hard to tell if something has been left because other people willingly passed over it, or if it's just a lucky break that no one got to it first.
I'd like to think that my own standards of quality haven't suffered or become outdated over the years, but getting three flags in like two days has just freaked me out. I'm not taking it as a personal attack or anything, but I'll admit that it's just been disheartening to me.
This is honestly the bigger concern here, I think. The current perception is that it's bad to have anything flagged since deletions are perceived as bad in the first place, and are oftentimes the judging rubric for whether one user or another gets positive feedback or positive reception over their uploads. As builders with unlimited ups, we're allowed to skip the queue but at the cost of sometimes large scrutiny over our uploads, yet most of us don't dare to send our posts into the mod queue anyway because we confidently believe some posts can and will fly by.
At a larger degree though, the difference between having a post in the mod queue because you sent it there and having a post in the mod queue because it was flagged is that flags usually mean deletion, and the mod queue usually means grace. Perhaps because potential flaggers would let it fly by assuming no one approves it until after someone does, in which case it has already slipped from their eyes. Of course, there are users that still stare closely at these things cough cough.
So yeah, it is very much a psychological problem like OOZ mentioned in forum #126728. Hence why I don't hold a lot of respect for uploaders (at some points even disdain) that just choose to auto-refresh and monitor their pixiv/seiga feed for uploads to quickly snipe. That goes double if they then exhibit minimal-average tagging effort on them just so they can get their name on it as Rastamepas implied in forum #126722.
OOZ662 said:
Also keep in mind that these "upload bots" being referenced are always going to fall prey to "the candle that burns twice as bright lasts half as long" and that will always be the case regardless of how much effort is put into trying to retain them. Danbooru's a hobby, and while any hobby can be fun to dive full-force into to begin with you're going to either have to pull back eventually or you'll completely burn out. Currently, we don't seem to have anyone filling this role to such an astounding level as users like Mr_GT have in the past, but is that really something to worry about? Do we need users cluttering the place up with every half-acceptable image barely tagged and rarely sourced and edging out the attention that could be spent on more obscure but quality posts from odd copyrights? Does seeing people do that really somehow inspire others to do more themselves? It seemed quite the opposite to me, but I was also much newer to the site back then.
Danbooru isn't dying. If anything, it's retracting and as a result is probably fitting its intended purpose as a quality art gallery more closely as more "grassroots" uploaders appear and less "firehose uploaders" exist. Flagging supports that same dynamic, reminding uploaders that can take the criticism that they should take care in what they're uploading. Unfortunately, many people immediately assume that a flag is the result of someone directly attacking them, their effort, or both instead; I don't see how that can be solved without conflicting with the core moderation feature besides perhaps just making flagging a toggle instead of requiring a reason, which is usually the thing that gets people fighting about it. Even then the response "there's nothing wrong with this picture" will join "I've seen worse" on the top of the Most Used Argument list.
I completely agree with the first paragraph, since I only became an uploader after lurking pixiv for so long I got fed up with artists deleting their own work and hard-to-find quality posts that just weren't shared yet. More than anything though, I appreciate the "grassroots" uploaders a lot more than the "firehose" uploaders, but it sometimes feels like an underappreciated effort as the posts that we usually find don't get the upwards of 25 scores from popular works by popular artists. Combine that with the fact that some users like seeing their names at the top of the user reports when sorting by score... it does feel like a meaningless competition sometimes if not often.
The concern I have at large is if these grassroots uploaders will continue to do what they're doing and if new ones will show up. Maybe flagging isn't just the problem there though.
