Well it's not bad, though I still think it would be better to give the user the option to see a mix of what they want. Less mindless clicking around. I wouldn't know if that's possible with the system that you're thinking of implementing, and this isn't something worth throwing the whole system out for, though if it's possible to give the option that would be nice.

Letting the user features what they want in order on their profile is great! Making this an art site instead of a social media site is the right way to go, most definitely. You can also have a social feed in some far off tab for people to select if they're one of the few people that prefer that.

The number one priority for modules is to make an artwork module. Why? Because is this not mainly an art site? As for the others, definitely necessary for the future, but art should always take priority over anything else on this site.

Oh and I seem to notice in the gallery tab you can't hide/show artwork, multimedia, stories, and photos separately. That feature NEEDS to stay, as a lot of users have a huge mix of things. Sometimes you just want to see art, but that person has a lot of fursuit photos. Other times you might just want to read stories. Maybe some people have PCs that can't run multimedia, so they'd rather hide those completely.

In short, yes FN is heading in the right direction!

There's a reason the star system has been phased out of most websites.

As for posting something new and only receiving downvotes, there would probably be a reason that they'd receive downvotes, as I doubt people will go out of their way to single out new users and downvote them. As I said in my reply to Star Seer, votes should be public to mods/admins so they can see any potential abuse and take action, similar to Reddit, which has rules against downvote spamming users and such.

For stopping abuse, downvotes and upvotes should be public to mods/admins, and downvote spamming a specific user should show up as a red flag. Punishment for that can be as simple as removing all of that person's votes and suspending their voting privileges. Reddit and Imgur have vote systems that work well.