I just got this question randomly in my head when I thought about some deleted posts (I don't have the links :c) which were pretty nice, had a good amount of upvotes, but were deleted for being "poor" (Quality, edit, etc).

I'm sure lots of you have seen posts like this. Now here's the thing, considering art or an edit is "poor" is probably the most subjective deletion reasons of them all so I think at least for this case it should be considered the users upvotes and comments. If you have any recent example of this it would be awesome!

The problem is people can bot upvotes on any given post. Due to someone botting upvotes, the top posts now are unremarkable excerpts of a completely random and forgotten anime, and a bad CGI image of a robot dinosaur. Which I dislike, because there was a time where the top posts seemed much more legitimate.

Last time the subject of upvote botting came up, Jerl said it's been happening for a long time, and didn't seem to care about solving the issue.

While posts in general may earn human upvotes, any scripting nerd with a petty grudge can just bot whatever posts they want. Including horrible fetish images or low quality work. It's not really a reliable source of what's good and what's not.

Moderation will never be based on score. Even setting aside botting, there would be a lot of legitimately bad posts that we would be forced to keep if score was factored in.

Our quality standards do not necessarily reflect the quality standards of our users, nor are they intended to. Just like all of our rules, they're based on what content we want on the site, not user feedback.

It goes the other way, too, by the way. We won't delete something just because people complain about it.

I think upvotes should give XP

Bad idea. The vote system can be easily exploited.

I only use the score system for 2 things:
1. Look at what's someone's most popular post, incluiding mine.
2. Confirm my theory that regardless of the tag, the most popular post of almost every tag will include lolis.

I noticed that. It is quite telling.

look up custom_udon,and tell me about the huge amount of upvotes.

of all the many hundred thousand loli pics we have,this artist somehow upstaged it.

I know about him. The man produces high quality 3D loli shit. It is expected that in a place in which loli stuff gets the most of upvotes, high quality 3d loli shit well, get a ton of them.

That totally almost never happens, there are just like 20 posts in the top which are clearly a joke from mods or a random troll.

That's where mods job enters, of course if it is a post that breaks the rules it's gonna be deleted, that's exactly why I emphasized so much SUBJECTIVE deletion reasons such as this one which I accidentally found yesterday thanks to the last comment: video-cdn3.gelbooru.com/i...055f6c5b9bf27ca214ea.webm (post #5544668). It had 184 upvotes, a comment complimenting the animation (with support of the community) and another one sad about the deletion of it. I'm not into furries and the animation is clearly not the best, but you can clearly see that the guy who did it definitely knows his stuff. It really makes me believe that the artist just chose to do it in a "paint style". It definitely didn't deserve to be deleted imo.

What I try to say is basically: Moderation should never be based ONLY on upvotes. If mods see something that objectively breaks the rules (illegal content, scat, gore), just go on and delete it, but if it's something subjective (poor: art, edit, cosplay) take in consideration what the community has to say about it. Unfortunately if a good post gets deleted the same day it gets uploaded it's obvious that it will not have the time to get people's support, but that's what the "restore an image" thread is for. If a post that doesn't break any rule has managed to stay up for good amount of time while collecting upvotes without being flagged and then suddenly it dissapears because someone decided it looked bad even if it was doing great... idk, that sounds kinda weird, right?

This is basically a win-win because mods can avoid wasting time on dealing with people complaining in the restore thread for good posts being deleted and for users it's good because they get to keep their favorite posts.