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.

I agree with you about downvotes. "Waaah, it's a kink I don't like, Imma down vote it!" seems to be the reasoning for some downvotes here.

I've noticed on my posts that often the first vote will be a downvote. Obviously someone might just not like the art style or something.

But then I've also noticed, and more often than I'd like, at some point everybody in the comments gets a -1 vote. More often on my MLP posts. So after posting I check back to see if someone's asked something, like a few people have asked for the music, I checked the artist's twitter comments, found the song, posted it.. and everyone had a "-1" vote. When they weren't creepy or bad, just things like, "I like this" and "I really like the music, does anyone know the source of it?"

Often someone, or I will, vote them up to 0 again, as it feels a bit unfair when someone gets downvoted simply for saying they like something.

One thing that, I know why it's done but kinda niggles at me, is that when you upload a better version of a post the score resets. So you can have a post that's on 100/200+ votes only end up with about 30. The reason it bothers me is because some people will search by score, to see only the "best" images, and a previously high voted post can easily get half or a quarter of the upvotes.

I'm not sure if it's already a thing, but I know the janitors/admins can decide whether to copy over favourites or not, I feel a similar thing should be implemented for the voting. So if a post is replaced by an image that's no different except a higher resolution, it can retain it's high score. That'd obviously works for low scores as well.

This isn't really a new complaint, which you seem to be aware of. Plenty of people are guilty of this, but continue to do it for various reasons. The truth is most people on the Internet are lazy and can't be bothered to maintain their blacklist and keep up with the latest tags, as well as how they evolve with aliasing and such. With me, even if I see something I'm not really into, I don't get bent out of shape and feel the need to downvote the post and make the artist feel bad, even though their work might still be of high quality, regardless of it's content. If everyone realised that it should be about the quality of the post, then this wouldn't happen, but everyone's entitled to their own opinion, so anything featuring gore typically gets bad treatment from the community. The best thing is to ignore it and focus on those who appreciate the niche tastes you're referring to.

Two things that don't go together: extreme fetishes, and a need for validation.

I feel the same, especially when it comes to something like censored posts. Everything about it just make me despair, not because it ruins my boner or anything, but it brings a lot of issues I had to deal with, and don't even get me started on decensored artwork, unless if the original artists made it. It's like it was done by a 5-year-old, and they still continues this practice!

I'm at least glad if some artists find a way to post uncensored works somewhere, but I won't dig into that subject deeper, especially when it comes to Japanese artists.

Gotta admit, I feel tired of saying it, but it still haunts me to this day, especially outside of e621.

cerberusmod_3 said:
I feel the same, especially when it comes to something like censored posts. Everything about it just make me despair, not because it ruins my boner or anything, but it brings a lot of issues I had to deal with, and don't even get me started on decensored artwork, unless if the original artists made it. It's like it was done by a 5-year-old, and they still continues this practice!

I'm at least glad if some artists find a way to post uncensored works somewhere, but I won't dig into that subject deeper, especially when it comes to Japanese artists.

Gotta admit, I feel tired of saying it, but it still haunts me to this day, especially outside of e621.

not this shit again

i don't like the voting system pretty much at all and wish we didn't have it.

Ratte said:
i don't like the voting system pretty much at all and wish we didn't have it.

I kinda think about that sometimes. Everything I could upvote I fav it instead. Everything I could downvote would probably be blacklisted or ignored anyway.

So I barely use the system. Right now, it just feels like it just divides the best results into two tags: order:score and order:favcount.

Ratte said:
i don't like the voting system pretty much at all and wish we didn't have it.

I can see the point of voting on comments, enough downvotes and they get hidden, so at least people can avoid the creepy ones easier, but the general voting on posts could just be replaced with favcount, as it'd give a better idea of what's popular.

I get the feeling most people don't vote, and it's also kind-of hidden, only being text links, vs a great big green favorite button. The top voted post currently has a score of 2521, but 6734 favourites, which is also the most favorites as well. So yeah, it is a bit pointless. Plus favorites usually get carried over between updated posts, it'd make it more accurate as well.

CCoyote said:
The difficulty is that the OP is assuming two things: first, that a lot of people are upvoting and being countered with others' downvotes, and second, the motivation of anyone downvoting.

If it's a niche kink, then it may not be getting a lot of upvotes to begin with. That could account for the low score, rather than the assumed downvotes.

If people are indeed downvoting the artwork, one can't assume it's because of the kink. People don't even agree on what the voting system is for, much less when an upvote or downvote is merited. There's an element of subjectiveness to begin with on whether any given piece is "good." And from what I've read here in past conversations, gobs of users upvote, downvote, and favorite without even really thinking about it. The low scores can't necessarily be attributed to the niche kink.

The problem with that is, for most pics, you also get a count of how many people favorited the pic- and it's a safe assumption, going into it, that the people who favorite a pic are going to *outnumber* the number who upvote the pic. Thus, it stands to reason that even in a post with a low amount of favorites- typical of certain low-exposure kinks- if the faves are higher than the score, that's due to the number of downvotes lowering the score.

Go ahead and search 'guro'. Turn off the blacklist temporarily if you've blacklisted it, just so you can see what I'm talking about- and then look at the scores of the various pics. A high number of them don't just have low scores- they have NEGATIVE scores, meaning that more people are downvoting them than they are upvoting them. And with so many of those low and negative scores on one tag, it stands to reason that they all must have *something* in common that's causing people to downvote them.

...However...

Pupslut said:
I can see the point of voting on comments, enough downvotes and they get hidden, so at least people can avoid the creepy ones easier, but the general voting on posts could just be replaced with favcount, as it'd give a better idea of what's popular.

I get the feeling most people don't vote, and it's also kind-of hidden, only being text links, vs a great big green favorite button. The top voted post currently has a score of 2521, but 6734 favourites, which is also the most favorites as well. So yeah, it is a bit pointless. Plus favorites usually get carried over between updated posts, it'd make it more accurate as well.

You make a very good point. This site doesn't force people to upvote a pic that they've faved, something that I went back to check. Add that with the favorite button being more obvious than the upvote/downvote buttons, and it becomes actually fairly plausible that people favorite without upvoting, something that I had been assuming didn't happen.

However, that probably reinforces what I've been saying, too- if people have to go out of their way to vote on a pic at all, a pic having negative downvotes says that a lot of people are going out of their way to vote on it. And thus, if a kink has an excessive amount of people downvoting the pics tagged with it, no matter the artist or quality or whatever... that does suggest that a fair amount of people are indeed going out of their way to avoid using the blacklist, then downvote kinks they don't like.

Pupslut said:
general voting on posts could just be replaced with favcount, as it'd give a better idea of what's popular.

On the basis of previous discussions on 'how do you favorite / upvote', I question your assumption here. For example, several people said they favorite things more as a 'bookmark' than a statement that this is good; and they would in contrast upvote the things that they actually liked. Other people would fav things they liked and also upvote them if they really liked; A third category would do the converse (upvote if liked, fav if really liked). IIRC there was also a fourth category of 'either do both, or do neither'.

Personally I currently sort by score instead of favcount, but IMO they are both mildly effective measures of quality.

Possibly (favcount * score) (or some weighted variant) would turn out to be a better measure than either individually.

I actually started using a score cutoff for my searches fairly recently. Sure I miss some stuff from less-popular artists, but it cuts down on the amount of trash I have to wade through.
I also use downvotes for posts I think are overrated.

hiekkapillu said:
not this shit again

Sorry about that. I was just expressing an opinion. After all, censors is one of those things that most people are lazy to put it on their blacklist.

cerberusmod_3 said:
Sorry about that. I was just expressing an opinion. After all, censors is one of those things that most people are lazy to put it on their blacklist.

dude. you really should learn to recognize when it might be time to stop. you have probably talked about this same topic enough on these forums in numerous threads to fill a small book. you surely know how to talk about other topics.

savageorange said:
On the basis of previous discussions on 'how do you favorite / upvote', I question your assumption here. [..]

I did think of that, but I also thought that most users would favourite as they liked something, and the users that were just bookmarking wouldn't make too much of a difference in the overall numbers.

savageorange said:
Personally I currently sort by score instead of favcount, but IMO they are both mildly effective measures of quality.

To be fair I usually sort by score if ever I do. Most of the time I don't sort by anything.

The problem with score is that I often feel bad for uploading a better version of a post if the old one has a high score, as almost every time the better version gets a lower score. It's one reason I suggested earlier that janitors/admins could have an option to move over the score as well, if it was just a higher resolution without any actual change.

Though as far as I'm aware, there's no system in place for moving votes, so it'd be a lot of work on the coders' part to implement it.

savageorange said:
Possibly (favcount * score) (or some weighted variant) would turn out to be a better measure than either individually.

Hmm.. Looking at order:score I'd say:
(favount + (3 * score)) / 2

On average, from a quick glance, there's one vote for every three faves, maybe a bit less, like two and a half faves for one score, so there's a slight weighting towards score mattering more.

"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."
okay, and what about people who don't put tags that you have in your blacklist? and then file illegitimate complaints against you when you try to add said tag to something? Blacklist only works if people actually add the fucking tag you have blacklisted to the piece.

Oh forgotten thread, lost to the ages, arise and return to the frontmost pages...

nyotamwuaji said:
"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."
okay, and what about people who don't put tags that you have in your blacklist? and then file illegitimate complaints against you when you try to add said tag to something? Blacklist only works if people actually add the fucking tag you have blacklisted to the piece.

Next time, maybe you should have linked to this topic and created a new one specific to this other issue. The other side of the coin where people don't/won't/even try to remove blacklist tags. BTW: Had to add a bunch of feces tags because uploader forgot. Reminded them to do it next time so hopefully it fixes itself. XD

If a post is missing tags, you should add them yourself.
Closing the topic.