What’s the purpose behind the score system for images, aside from the “sort images by score” search option? There are a lot of images that get downvote bombed for subject matter rather than breaking any rules or for technical quality. Similarly, there are often hostile comments on these images. If it’s more general purpose, then what’s the problem with someone making a bot to auto-downvote every image with a certain tag they don’t like, compared to manually downvoting them?
The purpose of downvotes is to discourage low-effort or spam content. Personally I don’t understand why people think it’s for anything but that. The fact that people have abused the system to do that is sad. :(
Can you tell how many users are making use of the site’s API for things like customized image downloaders, or other ways of accessing the site’s content? Following that, how much of the userbase customizes their experiences like this?
Most of our traffic is via the main site, the API counts for a sizable but comparatively tiny fraction of traffic IIRC.
Do you ever make it a habit to mess with the user’s personal filters to mess with them, or is that an uncommon thing?
I’ve only ever used this power for manually adjusting filters of people who consistently complain about certain kinds of images, if it is the first time and they don’t deserve to be banned for $REASON, they’ll get a filter adjustment.
Wait, so you just jumped straight from “not a member of the community” to “in a position of authority over the members of this community that I was never a part of”? Don’t you think that that would pose a problem with being able to connect with the members or see things from their perspective, especially regarding community culture?
Most of the stuff I do is on the backend of Derpibooru, from a server administration standpoint. I really started moderating as much as I do in order to feel like I was doing at least something resembling something good because of crippling depression (still have it, not as much but days feel really long). Most of the things I help out with on Derpibooru are thankless, code reviewing and episodic triage support for when things break.