Sorry, just need to get this off my chest, and it's a bit too off-topic to put as a comment on a pic, I thought I'd put it here instead. Sorry if this is just going over things people have already gone over.

Now... I like e621's blacklist system. It's pretty much perfect- not only is it really fast and simple to add things to the blacklist, not only is it pretty airtight thanks to tag aliasing and implications, but there's even an easy toggle in the search- you can temporarily turn off elements of the blacklist, just in case you get curious about what's behind there, and you can do that with the click of a button. That's a feature that plenty of sites don't have.

The problem that kicked off the rant... is people who don't use it. And sure, we've seen the problem and the resulting response thousands of times- people go on pics and comment hurtful things like "Why does this exist!!?" when they should've just blacklisted a tag or two, followed by someone shouting at them to use the blacklist feature. But I'm talking something subtler- people silently downvoting pics that they should've had blacklisted.

People who have more niche kinks, like guro, or cbt, or abdl, or things like that, know what I'm talking about. e621 is filled to the brim with hundreds to thousands of pics that are high-quality, made with love and care by artists that know what they're doing, pics with soul poured into them, that sit at low to negative votes despite having decent numbers of favorites, simply because they cater to the wrong kinks- because of people who don't use the blacklist, then downvote pics that, if they did use the blacklist, they wouldn't have seen in the first place.

If you don't like a kink, add it to your blacklist. You'll never see it, ever again. Save downvotes for pics that you dislike for reasons that the blacklist can't fix.