MaybeALittleBitWeird

People go in and downvote every post?

Yes. A common issue has consistently been that people will downvote all posts for a specific community or subject, whether that’s something gay, a specific hentai, or a more niche fetish/kink that they don’t personally find appealing rather than blocking it. These posts are usually relevant and quality submissions for the community that they’re posted to, but end up with negative scores because of differing preferences.

I know this is an incredibly divisive topic and I don’t envy the position this puts admin in. For what it’s worth, I appreciate that you’re trying to make it work and involving the community in the process.

Downvotes are a useful tool to shape a community and help with moderation, but with the size of the active posting population as well as the broad reach for posts across the greater Fediverse downvotes don’t lend well to fostering the human element. It’s fine to have them with a larger active community where people can form their own content bubbles, but pretty much anything that’s posted here ends up at the top of local for a few hours and is going to get a lot of eyes on it that may not enjoy the premise of the community. You’ll have no posts to downvote after the community has chased away anyone who posts though.

With Yiffit, pornlemmy, and now Lemmyf.uk all shut down this is the only dedicated nsfw instance left that I’m aware of. It honestly just seems like Lemmy in general is hostile to nsfw content.

You could downvote from another account but it wouldn’t be federated and tallied for anything but your home instance.

I really don’t think anything has fundamentally changed with the community or platform since the decision to remove downvotes in the first place. I just don’t think the population of Lemmy as a whole is large enough or mature enough to use them in a responsible manner and it will continue to be used as a “this isn’t my fetish” button rather than any indication of quality or community relevance just like before.

I agree that the spam problem has gotten worse over time, but I really don’t see downvotes doing very much to fix that. Most of it is from content sellers. They only need one post to do well to get their visibility and they almost always get at least that much so they still end up rewarded for the behavior in the end.

If they post that same thing in a community about fetish x, then the community can simply be blocked by those so inclined.

The problem is the majority of people don’t actually do that. They just downvote it to oblivion. That’s a significant part of why they were turned off in the first place.