Thank you for taking the time to write this down and explain your pov so polite and articulate. Breath of fresh air.
Honestly, you make excellent points and i see no reason to not reinstate the downvotes in the AI communities except maybe technical? Its definetly worth to explore the option.
You also seem to grasp that there are real problems atm with attracting new oc posters and forming a positive envirronment for them to fool around in. The irony of the case is, despite lemmy's pretty rough handling of sellers that is just what lemmy will end up with. They are the only ones willing to put up with the mean comments, downvotes, lack of community and overal negative vibe, cause they have monetary reasons.
I can take my content anywhere online and go have fun pretending to be a pornstar in my free time. As an oc poster other sites offer me more protection from harrasment, im here cause i actually believe in the project decentralization, federation, open source... its the future. I didnt know that 200upvotes did the same as 200downvotes exposure wise btw.
There are other tools that could help the situation too, 2way blocking would be nice or the ability to make private and invite only communities, to be able to control the audience a bit while the community can develop. There is strength in numbers for this kind of thing and once the groundwork has been layed, those posters will have the support they need to move on to the wider lemmyverse. Just an observation but i think the ai community on lemmynsfw seems to already be in the next stage, which is good of course.
Well time for some coffee here. Still in pyama and all :D
Well this is unsettling :D