Judging by the amount of negative votes on post #22414, I think the attached discussion concerns us all.

This person is consistently posting terrible 'art'. Arcturus's position is that people should simply tag-blacklist the user. I honour Arc's general 'hands-off' approach but in this case he is wrong. That's not what blacklists are for.

Blacklists exist to handle matters of personal taste.

Overall quality rests in the hands of the mods. It is the essential asset of this site, and they MUST ACT to protect it.

e621's system cannot operate the way FA does, with an "anything goes" approach. It would drown in a sea of crap. How many new users is this site going to recruit if the front page looks like it's drawn by a psychotic six-year-old? And established users should not be building up a library of blacklist tags just to screen out crap art. We haven't had to do that since the days of the VCL.

Requests to the mods:

Please act to restrain this user, because he's annoying.

Please generally enforce the "high quality" requirement of the ToS, because your site depends on it.

"high quality" in this case, refers to the data of the submission itself. Poorly compressed gifs and jpegs and such.

This is, essentially, a matter of personal taste. The artist obviously liked his work enough to want to upload it. And you know what? That's fine with me.

We are not here to make value judgements. If we did, I would probably end up removing a lot of stuff on here because I didn't like it. But, I don't want to operate that kind of place.

This is a place where anyone can post what they like, regardless of 'artistic merit', providing it isn't horribly artifacted, or watermarked obnoxiously.

And if you don't like it, like I said, the tag blacklist is there for a reason.

And if you don't like this freedom that this site enshrines, then, I'm sure you can find other places that support such elitism.

You won't find it here.

Isn't there a way to just filter out any images below a certain rating? Sites such as Digg and Youtube do this with comments, and it generally works very well.

Arcturus -

Thank you for making your decision clear.

You might want to disambiguate the term in the ToS to avoid further such misinterpretations.

Since I do not find it possible to reconcile my point of view with yours even on such fundamental matters, I withdraw from further attempts at active contribution to the site.

In the face of Sturgeon's Law, and a world which stubbornly persists in finding "artistic quality" a meaningful term, I wish you luck.

Regards,
M.

Oh for the love of fuck, ANOTHER whiny 'waaah the mods won't cater to my whims so I am LEAVING FOREVER AND ANNOUCING IT IN PUBLIC WAAAHH' crybaby post.

It's like we're back in middle school again. If you don't like the site, leave quietly and retain some tiny shred of your dignity, or email privately if you MUST air your grievances; don't be a giant crybaby about it and make a scene like some bratty child. Jesus.

I'm an elitist bastard too, so screw you guys!

But seriously, I guess I'll be employing my vote-down more often just for styles or themes I dislike now. Also, we could do with some stats regarding how many pics hover at zero forever before deciding that merely a piece's score should form the core of a filtering system and set policy accordingly. Indifference is the killer.

And score is unidimensional; posters' tastes aren't.
It kills me to see candy-flavoured CG cub crap of fuck-all artistic merit or erotic charge get voted to the sky while my favoured carefully-observed real media pieces of that lovey-dovey shit all in dowdy browns and sepias get ignored. Is sad elitist bastard ;_; ! But I know *your* preferences are different. I'm torn.

(I mostly refrain from voting up my own posts, and from voting down expressions of sexualities I'm not turned on by. Because I don't play that game, and I accept I have no clue when it comes to gay stuff.)

So should we just declare a voting war and vote directly according to our whims on all posts?

(Yes, ignoring tagfilters here for the moment.)

Anyone who thinks the score actually means anything is pretty retarded IMHO.

Also super duper LOL at whining that people don't vote up/ignore the crap they like and pretending their particular taste in porn makes them special/better somehow. I am coming to the conclusion the average age of posters here has to be like, twelve.

> Anyone who thinks the score actually means anything is pretty retarded IMHO.

Like I said. Probably it's not that broken a system, just that it lacks nuance. Might be a good enough baseline for deciding skill; let's see if that plus tagfilters improves my experience.

Shit, *everyone's* a critic! More power to 'em.

The bombast was a sham, mellis. I don't puff myself up like that really most of the time. Chill.

We're all a little frustrated by these kinds of arguments. It certainly was not the goal when we opened things up like we did to invite people in to tell us what to do re: running the site.

We resisted takedown requests regularly, from the artists. You think we'll do any different for people saying "I don't like this, get rid of it"?

I despise all of our users equally. It is only though this equilateral matrix of hated for everyone on this site that I can achieve perfect objectivity.

Whiners are more of a problem than contributors of contentless content.

Regex is your friend. Knowledge will save you long before complaining will.

First of all sorry if I bring up dead stuff. But I just don't get this at all. If I don't like the quality of a picture or dislike the content I just leave it be and look on those I do like. Giving criticue is rather easy, say in a constructive way and supportive way to help the artist to become better, thats criticue, destructive critisism is just complaint about the art but doesn't do anything for the artist.

And if you really never want to see pictures that you think is bad, the solution is simply blacklisting it. And it will never show, except when bad tagin have been done. Complaining doesn't take anyone anywhere. It is like telling a two year old to clean the house, wash the dishes and clean the clothes.

And if we followed the "Baaww Quality Baaww" we would only have art from Dark Nek0gami, Shinigamigirl, Kaadath, Necrodrone, Chimera Synx, Dr. Comet (Which doesn't give out free stuff anymore), Nezumi (Which many dislikes but the art still is Good quality), and a few more. So the point is, it is better as it is now than it would be then. So stop your whining and be a grown up or even better Grow up and don't whine every second.

mellis said:
Anyone who thinks the score actually means anything is pretty retarded IMHO.

Pretty fucked up shitting dicknipples often got negative rating below -10

Jazz said:
Pretty fucked up shitting dicknipples often got negative rating below -10

But lots of other good stuff gets downvoted too. Hence trolls. If you don't like a picture, tough. If the picture sucks, and violates rules, it's deleted. Nothing more can be done. The mods don't need to waste their time on a system that basically manages itself.

Jazz said:
Pretty fucked up shitting dicknipples often got negative rating below -10

(
the search has a nice function "score:<0" will only show art with scores below 0, I suppose it'll hide those results if you put this search string on your blacklist.
)

edit: Okay, it doesn't work on the blacklist