Hahaha! I have used this username (here and on reddit) for years, and you are the first person to call that out. Excellent!
First and foremost - thank you for everything you do running lemmynsfw. You're doing an amazing job and I, for one, appreciate it tremendously.
Re: downvotes, I still believe that downvotes open only to community members is the way to go, but I appreciate you're doing what you feel is best and if you think it's genuinely improving things to turn them off entirely, you do what you need to do. I'm willing to be convinced, I truly am, but I haven't been yet. That said, I found a workaround to my biggest problem with it - hiding read posts without voting - so I don't have to upvote things I don't like just to make them go away. With that in place, I can live with it. At the end of the day, I just want to be able to browse without seeing the same posts more than once.
Re: donations, it's truly a shame that you haven't been able to set something up. I was here right at the beginning, and I was a very early donor, because I truly believe that Lemmy needs a dedicated place for NSFW content, I want lemmynsfw (and Lemmy as a whole) to succeed, and I understand how much it costs to host such a place. So I'd be very happy to donate again if you can find a channel. That said, I don't want to have to do so using some sort of cryptocurrency. Not only because, like Lemmy itself, it's not quite there yet in terms of usability, but also because (unlike Lemmy), at the end of the day I find the entire crypto world to be very scammy and shady, rampant with bad actors. Not to mention that Trocador app you linked to elsewhere doesn't seem to handle setting up monthly recurring donations, which is what I'd like to do.
My suggestion would be to investigate Epoch as a payment processor. I have joined multiple porn sites in the past, and they've all used Epoch for their billing, and at least I personally have never had a problem. They seem on the up-and-up to me (but again, I said investigate - please do your own due diligence). What I don't know is if they handle one-time donations, or if they just do monthly billing.
Re: Gallery, I'll be honest I'm not that interested in new UI's for Lemmy. The default UI + TamperMonkey scripts (LemmyTools + Lemmy Keyboard Navigation) work great for me and pretty much reproduce old.reddit on PC, and Sync took me all of 2 or 3 days to adjust to on Android and now I'm cool with it. I think it's wonderful you want to keep contributing to the Lemmy universe, and it's awesome you found someone to help, but just speaking for myself, I'd view this one as pretty low priority.
Once again, thank you. You invest so much time and energy here it's crazy. Hope you get the donation channel issue worked out very soon, so I can start contributing again.
I was going to write a long point-by-point refutation of your post, but in the end it boiled down to this:
Dude, blame capitalism for pushing people to sell their bodies for money. If you really care about the degradation of women in porn, devote your time and money to anti-capitalist causes, from universal health care to supporting living minimum wages rather than poverty-level minimum wages, from universal basic income to building guillotines for billionaires. Those things will do far more to help women than trying to blame individual porn stars for the degradation of women and making them somehow responsible for working for women's equality. At best they are making content that they personally enjoy and at worst they are doing what they need to pay the bills. It's capitalism that drives young women to get into porn who don't really want to be there or don't have the maturity to be there and as a result get taken advantage of.
And stop gatekeeping what people like in the bedroom. Some people like slow sensual lovemaking. Some people like to be hurt and degraded. Some people like whips, chains, and leather. Some people just want missionary with the lights off. It's all good, and if you don't like it don't watch it.
I commented on the original thread about the decision that I thought downvotes for community members only would be a good solution, and I'm very glad to see it under consideration. I have voted in the poll accordingly.
Meanwhile, I do appreciate the viewpoint expressed so eloquently by @WooBoy@lemmynsfw.com, and want to express appreciation for their contribution to the community and empathy for their experience. As a user who subscribes to communities that interest me, pretty much keeps to my 'Subscribed' feed, votes on posts, and sometimes comments on posts or participates in discussion, but who hasn't really posted any OC, my interest is of course in expressing my satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a post, and marking it such that it no longer appears in my feed when I have 'Show Read Posts' unselected in my preferences.
I bring up the latter point because I'd ask, IF you ultimately make the decision NOT to make downvotes available to community members, would it be possible to institute some ability to hide a specific post (rather than block a user), or mark a post as read. This could also be a workable alternative.
Sincere thanks for being proactive, transparent, and willing to consider community feedback.
I just want to go on record saying I do not like this change, though I do understand the good intention behind it.
It seems there was a simple and elegant solution discussed earlier in this thread - only allow downvotes of you are subscribed to the community where the post is. I know this would need to be implemented by the lemmy devs; is there someplace we can request or vote on such features? A whole tagging system may be nice, but it's overkill for this problem.
Meanwhile, genuine question, how do I hide posts that I have already seen that I would have downvoted? I have already joined a bunch of communities, and I only look at my Subscribed feed. I have lemmy set to not show me posts I've already voted on. Thus, my feed is always kept fresh, and when I log in I just see what's new in those communities to which I've subscribed.
So, now I see a post that I feel doesn't live up to the standards of a particular community. It doesn't break any rules per se, and it's not report-worthy, it's just not a good post. Normally I'd downvote and move on, and I'd never see it again. So now what do I do to ensure I don't see it every time I log in? Lemmy doesn't have a 'hide' or 'mark seen' feature (another good feature we should have), and I don't want to upvote the post because it's a bad post. I also don't want to block the poster, because their next post might be great! What do I do here?
I hate to make this post any longer, but I'll just provide an example. Within the last couple days, I saw the same post uploaded to both gonewild and to adorableporn. I upvoted the gonewild post and downvoted the adorableporn post, because at the end of the day it was a pretty average nude picture, perfectly reasonable for gonewild. But not, IMO, anything that could be called adorable. That, to me, seems like specifically the kind of situation that calls for a 'downvote and move on' response. So now how do I hide that post without blocking that user, who is otherwise posting good content?
Well damn, I must be getting old, because I'm not picking any of them - they all look like babies to me.
Watched my wife masturbate with a vibrator a couple nights ago while I was locked in a chastity cage for locktober and only allowed to watch. It was very hot.
Emily Willis, no contest
Just want to say thanks for all the work you put into this, and for keeping us informed. It is appreciated.
Thanks again for all the good work. It's very much appreciated. Especially what you said about supporting our LGBT community members. I may be a cishet white male, but I'm firmly devoted to love and tolerance, and it pains me to see that kind of hate in the world. Thank you for at least keeping it off of this site.
First, thanks for the fixes. As far as the donations, I'm currently donating through github. I've never used the ones you mentioned. In theory, I wouldn't have a problem with it, but I'm not familiar with them.
I'd like to know they are safe. Both from the perspective of keeping my data secure, and knowing that they're not going to blast me with sketchy ads or malware when I visit them to set things up.
Oh that's really a bummer :-(
What about making a free onlyfans or fansly where someone could "tip" to donate? You wouldn't have to actually put up any content.