Historically, porn has organically decided which platform or formats become dominant. It’s incredibly anti-censorship, but walks many fine lines.
As Reddit now and tomorrow reveals more weaknesses, where will the OnlyFans creators, porn posters, and all those grassroots porn communities go? The creators need to make money by showing to a large and interested user base. The users need lots of content to choose from and be fed constantly, with very few hindrances between them and their…goals. Many of the niches actually have respectful and healthy communities, too. Those people deserve an easy to use platform, just as much as people that want to look at cats, some of those groups, arguably more.
The thought of how to pose this to the Fediverse, now, has been on my mind for weeks:
Can the fediverse rise to the task? Does it even want to? Should it?
Personally, I think it should absolutely try, but I’m not sure it can do so without several deep strides in tech and development. I’m aware this is a hot af take, but it’s undeniable that the internet IS for porn, and denying that would be a huge opportunity loss for inevitably winning this popularity context.
I think a lot of it comes down to what value you (or any user) puts in the votes.
Personally I do not care about downvotes. On Reddit it was a bit of an issue since the default would be to hide comments with negative votes, so someone could easily be muted from the conversation by coordinating or alt accounts. As of now, I don’t see this problem here.
Also, I don’t fear being harassed or stalked by random people online. I had a stalker on Reddit who’d message me every cakeday for several years. I found it funny and just gave them a bit of shit talk until they went away. I can see how some people might be more scared of stuff like that.
The only accounts I’ve blocked on Reddit were spam accounts, and I frankly I don’t care if they can see my posts. They probably don’t even read any posts.
Stalking on real life is lot more dangerous and nuanced. I know some who have had issues with this, and their online presence was the least of their concerns.
Anyway, I generally agree that the federated networks should use this opportunity to do better than Reddit or other social media whenever possible, and if it being customised hiding, then fine by me.
yeah honestly I see the communities votes as somewhat a tool if there is a lot to go through but another aspect I would like is for it to weight votes. I can’t login in anymore so I have no idea how the project is going but wts2 had where you can put a trust score for users 0-100 based on how your like their content or comments. That is exciting to me to as I would prefer the feed to be based on my opinion of the quality of peoples stuff rather they have generally garned through gamification on the community system.