Oh dang you guys! Holy F

@Miram pfft. You should be giving me attention ffs

@SW-User Shoooooo, Nanori is more than enough.

@Miram Nonsense 😤 I require all the attention

@Classified

Let me ask you this: how long do you continue to believe someone when they are not providing you evidence of the things they claim are happening?

@JaggedLittlePill Depends on whether they reasonably can give evidence. When it's about legal issues, odds are we never see evidence. I'm not an expert in legal things, so I hold open the possibility that the case can get damaged if too much is shared. And if that is a correct assumption, hardly anything or even nothing will be shared, because the other party might find something in that to use.

@SW-User I saw the dv when it appeared and if you click on the emoji bar you’ll see it. Others have posted reactions so it doesn’t show. But it is an example of how ridiculous the downvote is. I left the conversation before the discussion of predators was introduced so I didn’t see that. Apparently people wanted to take advantage of Andrew’s presence to ask about it, but they should made their own post rather than hijacking yours.

@TexChik [c=4C0073]i doubt it will ever deter the ones who abuse the dv function, coz there are way more non vip, compared to vip peepz .. so they have a huge playing field to abuse the dv[/c]

@SW-User there won’t be for long , and I suspect there are more VIP members than you think .

@hyg346 [c=4C0073]oh i agree and i was about to reply that people just dont want the DV .. but the post got closed lol[/c]

@SW-User that's a good way to handle it, too. stop listening to complaints

@DrScissorhands

@Degbeme

@DrScissorhands

@SW-User [c=4C0073]and orange face looked better than that post xD[/c]

@SW-User you lost me on that one
lol
Orange face?

@SW-User [c=4C0073]nvm lol .. it means .. yes it got ugly[/c]

@Gangstress [c=4C0073]it's in the 50+++ replies to andrew's reply[/c]

@Nanori https://similarworlds.com/groups/admin-announcements/4264411-What-do-you-prefer-for-the-Downvote-Feature?sort=1

@Nanori if the mods stormed out now we can talk about anal. Before they come back

@InOtterWords [c=4C0073]it was too many comments that were irrelevant to the topic being discussed [/c]

@PirateMonkeyCabinet [c=4C0073]i like your reply very much .. and i completely agree with you on all points of it![/c]

@PirateMonkeyCabinet
O think sometimes we forget that admin are just two guys who run this site as well as holding down full time jobs.

I don't know of any other site where the admin are as collaborative as this one.

And i have seen them listen to feedback and change things. They did that immediately when they made peoples feeds public. They listened and they fixed it.

And yes people give their feedback, but admin cannot please everyone. On the whole people do not like change but they adapt.

And they have, in the past few years, done so much to make this site safer for minors, maybe you do not know what it was like here before, there will always be more they can do which is why it is amazing that they will converse with us and they will respond to messages. It is an ongoing conversation, and yes we get frustrated at times but they have never taken it personally. There are times i have challenged them and they respond fairly, thet also have been very quick to respond when i have been harassed.

Look how much they do, not just what they haven't done

@InOtterWords I think we've actually partially had this discussion before when I at some point previously called them out on their, in my opinion, lacking ability to take constructive criticism. Maybe I'm confusing it with someone else and it is my memory playing games, but your points here are eerily similar to a response I've gotten in the past.

That said, I do think in the end we'll have to agree to only maybe partially disagree. The way I see it, your points and my points are in many cases not even mutually exclusive. With some exceptions, I think a lot of our points can both be true without negating each other.

I can't truly speak for everyone else on this, but I am well aware that they are primarily a two-man part-time development team. That is not an excuse though. If they have overreached on their project scope then that is on them, something they need to admit and accept, and adjust their scope and milestones accordingly to something more realistic. As the experienced developers they are supposed to be... with the amount of years they have under their belt in the field, this is something they should have been well aware of. So yeah, while I'm sure all developers can fall into the trap of being overly ambitious, I don't buy "they're just two people with real jobs" as an excuse for them in this case.

To address your point about minors, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you on that point. While I do think it is stupid that they are allowing minors here, and that their reasoning for doing so are silly, yes, they are doing active work to make it somewhat safer for minors. In that regard things were different five years ago compared to now. That wasn't part of my complaint though, was never part of my point, and is frankly an entirely different debate.

But even so, they can do a great job on one arena and be absolutely abysmal on another. They may very well do a great job protecting minors (again, that's a whole other discussion) yet they can still at the same time be doing a bad job otherwise by introducing features that are ultimately negative to the user base, by brushing off, dismissing and ignoring valid criticism from users about both plans they have and features that they have already deployed into userland.

Maybe you and your friends are someone they have chosen to listen a lot to, but there are many here who have experienced the exact opposite, and I myself have experienced them actively trying to delegitimize posts by ignoring 99% of the post and trying to dismantle a single quote in the post to make the user look bad. They may have listened to one or two groups of the community, while being dismissive to the rest, so while I may not have done a good job of presenting that in my initial reply here I don't think our points are mutually exclusive.

They may very well have listened to your feedback, maybe to the feedback that your group of friends provide, but looking at the amount of pushback they've been getting from users the last year or so seem to indicate that at least in that frame of time a lot of users don't feel like their concerns about the sites functionality are being taken seriously. Even long time users who used to actively support and defend them are now pushing back with frustration.

They do get a lot of flak, and I'm sure a bunch of it is unjust. They have to suffer insults which isn't really okay to do. They may have admin tags, but at the end of they day they are still just human beings with human feelings behind that screen. Many users would do good to remember that... but at the same time that applies the other way too. When the admins look at their statistics they see a lot of numbers, but they too would do well to remember that each of these numbers represent a human being with human feelings too.

And I say this because - while they do seem to ignore most constructive criticism replies - the times do reply it feels like it isn't about addressing the concerns presented to them, it isn't about considering whether the user has a legitimate point or not... unintentional or not, it feels like their replies are almost always centered on "winning an argument" than seriously evaluating the points, that it is more about a "hey, [username], we know better what you want than what you do, we always know best" mentality. Their attitude adds fuel to the fire.

Users aren't always right. I'm not always right. I'm not saying that they should just mindlessly do whatever users tell them to do. And you are right, you can't please everyone. But I do think the admins need a reminder that they are not infallible either, and that the behind-the-scenes statistics they have access to may be an indicator, but not an explanation. They get a lot of feedback (both of the constructive kind and the straight up insulting one), they can't address all of them personally and reach out to every single one, but they would still stand to benefit by being more open-minded and a tad bit more active in debating with the community.

I do want to object to two of your points though:

[quote]On the whole people do not like change but they adapt.[/quote]
You are right in that people do not like change and that many will adapt. That said, that doesn't imply that a change is a good one. Just because you can adapt to a change doesn't mean what may have happened that lead you into that situation is just totally okay.

I believe many will adapt, yes, but I believe that is because they don't have much in the way of alternatives. There are plenty of social networks out there, but - and I've said this a lot - the subsector that SW operates in has little to no known competitors. There isn't to my knowledge any SW-like alternative out there, thus the only two options are adapt and still have something to scratch that itch (even if it may have gotten worse) or leave SW and have nothing. If there were more in the way of competitors I do believe we'd see a lot more exoduses.

[quote]Look how much they do, not just what they haven't done[/quote]
Speaking for myself, my complaints generally aren't with what they haven't done. My complaints are with what they have done as well as how they treat legit criticism levied towards them after they have done something. My complains are often not with what they haven't done, it is with what they have done, like the manner in which they implemented and changed features, like the groups, like the feeds, like the downvote. These are things they HAVE done, not things they haven't done.

@iamonfire696 same

@Nanori wasn’t the appropriate place to make those comments. They already had a plan for the downvote. They just wanted to placate us by making a poll to make it seem like they cared what we thought.

@JaggedLittlePill [c=4C0073]downvote poll thread, admin announcements[/c]

@SW-User He closed the post. I was going to respond to him directly because..honestly they just don't like being called out.

And you notice Andrew takes the heat and Nuno does not.

Andrew is at least ...always...the one who puts his neck out there.

@BlueGreenGrey https://similarworlds.com/groups/admin-announcements/4264411-What-do-you-prefer-for-the-Downvote-Feature?sort=1