Blocking users and Vote power

I’d like to take advantage of the awesome new features to ask for more. We are greedy users.
 
First, find a way to blacklist no only tags but entire users. This is not my idea (I’m proud of not blacklisting anything… anything) but have read about it many times. This could avoid much internet fights clogging the images, and the “burn in the ninth circle of hell” comments
 
Second, distribute voting power not equally. To illustrate this point I was going to upload a screenshot, but to avoid drama I’ll just transcribe a conversation:
 
User1: For God’s sake people, blacklisting exists. Use it.  
User2: But I can’t downvote it if I block it!
 
And then a facehoof. Voting should judge the quality of the work not a way to spread hate.
 
Hope to hear some feedback!

How does this whole not equal voting power thing work? Because from what little info I got, it sounds like a veeeeery bad idea

Blocking users sounds like a good idea… until you realize some of our most notorious users also upload a great deal of “good” content, but are only remembered for the bad stuff. For comments, it makes sense; for images, there’s the very real risk of people doing more “harm” to themselves than good.
 
 
As for voting… well, we’re very well aware of the problem with how some users use the downvote button. It’s not just a problem with “obvious” topics like fetishes; there are users that will downvote near every instance of some ship they don’t like, or almost all images of some character they despise. And then we have people that downvote pretty much anything, just because they can.
 
It’s a thing we’ll have to think about.

I’m all for the voting one.

@The Smiling Pony  
>some of our most notorious users also upload a great deal of “good” content, but are only remembered for the bad stuff
 
The same can be said about artists (i.e. Hoihoi). And every tag. I think everyone who actually hides tags knows fully well that could be missing out on some good stuff. That’s the price we pay. It doesn’t mean the option shouldn’t be there.
 
As for the weighted-voting thing, some other sites I frequent use it but I have no idea how they do it. The easiest way would be to tie it with that average votes system that seems to have been scrapped.

@dt  
Which is why I keep the filters to the minimum. I don’t like missing out on things.

Started a topic with good replies: Yay!
 
@The Smiling Pony
 
I do understand that blocking users could block thousands of images, I wouldn’t do it, but I read some people would like it even at that cost. Of course I’m not talking of the mods blocking people if someone understood that. Only people adding users to their black list. Maybe it could only hide their comments, and prevent them to contact the via message.
 
@Princess♠Molestia  
@dt
 
I have only experience with one site. The voting power is calculated by many factors: how much time they have been members, how much have they contribute, how others have voted their contributions. It would be a huge change, not saying it would be easy.

@Mentira
 
Eeeeeeeeeh. I prefer what we have now. Simpler is better if you ask me

@Mentira  
>I wouldn’t do it
 
Most people wouldn’t, and that’s probably the best reason against it. If I was a coder, I wouldn’t be that motivated to work on a feature most of the board wouldn’t use.

For the voting power.
 
How about deminishing returns on tags.
 
The most up/down voted tag determines the value of your vote.
 
So let’s say someone is a twidash hater and has already  
down voted 300 twidash pics then all his negative votes  
on twidash pics are less valuable.
 
But if the picture has only tags where you haven’t up/down  
voted much your voting power is higher.

A more basic question: What is wrong with down-voting? What is the problem with down-voting every image, or every image of a certain kind? What exactly are votes trying to measure? Until we have a metric, any change will be arbitrary and pointless.

In my opinion the votes are there to measure  
the quality of a picture.
 
So you should up vote pictures that you think are well made  
or have a meaning that you endorse and down vote pictures  
that you think are crappy or convey a message that you dislike.
 
So when you just down vote a tag, you ignore the quality and  
just judge the pic by the shelf that it sits in.

@Splitframe  
Since the content and the message are inseparable, and the tags are a representation of the content, voting based on tags is a perfectly reasonable behavior.
 
Furthermore, if people block tags they dislike, then tags that are widely unlike will wind up have higher scores than tags that some dislike and most do not care about. The score winds up signifying nothing.

@B2C
 
 
Well, yes, but content != tags.  
Tags just roughly describe what you see or to what category  
the picture belongs to.
 
Lets say we have two pictures based on a fanfic.
 
One is really really well made the other one a crappy  
mspaint picture. Both roughly depict the same scene.
 
I would upvote the good one and down vote ( or don’t vote on )  
the crappy one.
 
Now someone comes along that totally hates the fanfic  
and down votes both. His intention was more down voting  
the fic than down voting the piece of art itself and  
that distorts the vote.
 
For down or up voting I would never relent on tags.  
It’s a decision for each picture anew.
 
And just because I don’t like the tag or what it  
represents doesn’t necessarily means that the picture  
is bad.
 
I, for example, dislike shipping, but I also think that  
this picture ( >>179696 (deleted) ) is really great and upvoted it.
 
It’s a blurry thing I know and some people judge different,  
but even personal preferences aside I think down voting because  
of tags is just wrong.

Oh a little sidenote.
 
My first suggestion was just an idea how a new  
voting system could be handled.  
I would like it to stay the way it is…

@Splitframe  
But in your example, the someone who came along didn’t vote based on tags, (s)he voted based on content; the portrayal of the events from a fanfic. If the tagging system did not exist, (s)he would have voted the same way. What you seem to be suggesting is that we ought to vote based on its artistic merits; that we should let the medium, not the message, dictate how we vote. However, the medium is the message.

@Splitframe  
Agreed.

@B2C
 
 
I really see your points and they are mostly valid,  
but that doesn’t mean that my points are wrong.
 
The whole “measurement” is a tricky thing, I think.  
And the boundaries are blurred and not just black and white.
 
When I would judge my vote behaviour it would be sometimes  
because of how well the picture is made, sometimes even  
a not so well made picture gets an up vote because it  
had a nice/witty joke or just depicted a nice moment.
 
Of course a tag can, and I think will, push your decision  
a bit in a direction because, like you said, it reflects the contend in a hashed sence, but it can’t be the only criterion.

@B2C  
>Since the content and the message are inseparable, and the tags are a representation of the content, voting based on tags is a perfectly reasonable behavior.
 
Um, no? An artist trying something new and getting downvoted because what they previously did is not fair and only discourages their progress.
 
And please don’t fucking try the argument “If they can’t handle criticism they shouldn’t be an artist.”

@dt  
>Um, no? An artist trying something new and getting downvoted because what they previously did is not fair and only discourages their progress.  
I don’t see any connection between what I said and this.
 
>"If they can’t handle criticism they shouldn’t be an artist."  
Criticism? A number cannot be a critique; critiques have contents. If a person is interested in watching numbers go up, may I suggest some sort of RPG?

@B2C  
It’s an issue because it’s really god damn recurring and petty.
 
We have a guy that doesn’t like Blueblood, so all images of blueblood on the booru have his downvote. Artist comes and sees the votes, he doesn’t understand why that vote is there. There’s no comment with criticism, he didn’t do anything in the image that could incite ire, and it’s decent quality. But there’s a downvote because someone doesn’t like that fictional character. That is not an exaggerated example; we have many people that do that for whatever completely inoffensive they dislike, and it’s not doing absolutely anything positive for the artist or the community.
 
Tags and filtering exist for a reason. If the majority of the community doesn’t like content X, then they should block it. That it gets a high score from the people that do like that content should be meaningless to them as they’ve already blocked it.
 
Downvoting things you can filter is the same as going on YouTube and downvoting videos of things you’d never watch in the first place, or going to SonicBooru and downvoting everything. The content isn’t for you and wasn’t made for you, so downvoting it is little more than petty spite.

@The Smiling Pony  
I agree that it’s petty. I agree that tags and filtering exist for a reason. But when one combines tag filtering with image voting, one gets sampling bias. Comparing the number of views on a youtube video with the number of upvotes on a Derpibooru picture is not meaningful because youtube gets way more traffic and has a different community with different standards. Likewise, having this sampling bias makes it equally senseless to compare the scores of any two pictures that have different tags. It renders voting meaningless in every way.

@B2C
 
 
Somehow I get the feeling that you look at this from the  
wrong perspective.
 
If you don’t like Basketball, why would you watch a game  
of it and rate how the teams perform? If you are not  
interested in learning more about basketball it is  
not your kind of content.
 
And so, if you are a Spike hater why would you even  
want to look at Spike images and if you did how  
could you distinguish a good Spike pic from a bad  
one when all you see is your Spike hate.
 
I think what you want to say is something like  
“When I don’t like Spike I have the right to  
down vote ( dislike ) every picture of him”  
But that distort the meta-information and overall  
voting much much more than the blacklisting.
 
We don’t want to know how much of the fandom like  
character X or Y more. We want to know if this  
particular piece of art is more liked or disliked  
by the community in terms of artistry.

@Splitframe  
>We want to know if this particular piece of art is more liked or disliked by the community in terms of artistry.  
Ok, both the current system and the proposed systems are great for that. The mathematical flaws in the system only appear when pictures are compared to each other. Like, say, on the ‘Lists’ page.

@Splitframe  
“Voting power” solutions sound neat in theory but in practice they’re exceptionally complex to implement. It’d be nice if we could track a guy and say “ah, you always downvote twixie, so your downvotes on twixie-tagged images don’t count for as much” but that’s extremely complex to track, what with tags changing, images deleted or merged, the interference of other tags potentially leading to wildly arbitrary weightings, not to mention it makes the voting model itself much more complex, and you potentially have to retroactively update every image a user has ever voted on EVERY time they vote because it changes the weightings when they do… sure, you could write a system to do this, but it would be horrible and complicated and very intensive to actually run.