Bigg

The tall man who posts

I'm a writer and indie game dev of indie games with cum in them. One half of @BPGames. Most recent project - Opportunity: A Sugar Baby Story.

Other Accounts

@zippity - goofy porn game screenshots
@BiggHoggDogg - this is where I do most of my porn following & sharing
@BiggBlast - high-volume shitpost/screencap posting

Current avatar by @julian!


Bigg
@Bigg

(I recohosted said post earlier, go read it for context).

After thinking about it for a bit, I think disallowing loli/shotacon is probably the most pragmatic move, based largely on the argument that allowing it, even under mandatory filtered tags and geolocked to regions where it's legal, opens the door for Cohost to gain a Reputation as The Loli/Shota Site, which could bring with it both an outsized influx of people wanting to post loli/shota art as well as a lot of negative PR off-site.

(Edited in a readmore to reduce timeline spam)


Bigg
@Bigg

Edited in a readmore to reduce timeline spam:


Thinking about it more, while I think the reputational argument is relevant, I do wonder if the reduction in moderation headaches isn't equally if not more valuable from a long-term perspective.

With loli/shota allowed, the line between allowed content and disallowed content is very clear-cut - media featuring actual human children or photorealistic depictions of children are right out, boom, done. With it banned, walked back to something like "sexualized depictions of minors are not allowed", you've now given yourself a whole host of aggravating moderation rulings to make:

  • What constitutes "sexualization" of minors? Does art of two teen characters kissing count? Is art of a minor in a swimsuit automatically sexualized?
  • What about characters with minor-like appearances that are technically of-age in canon (the classic 500-year-old child vampire)?
  • What about characters who might become of-age over the course of their specific continuity (Fire Emblem, for instance)? Are moderators expected to know the difference between the younger and older designs of each individual character?
  • What about ageing-up minors? What is acceptable evidence of ageing-up?
  • What about non-human characters? What would constitute an unacceptably minor-ish depiction of a griffon? A minotaur? A dragon?

Reading these, your response might be "well, I'd know a violation if I saw it". Great! Good! Because now you have to go case-by-case every time one of these borderline cases gets reported to you (and they WILL be reported to you, because Cops). Every single one of these cases requires brain power from a human, and the dev team frankly does not have humans to spare - the conceit that this would be easier to moderate is absolutely laughable and bears no connection whatsoever to reality. More time spent moderating these edge cases is less time working on building site features and is also very soul-draining as fuck.

I still ultimately believe a ban is PROBABLY the right call for now, but I think it's something worst revisiting down the road when the site is more firmly established.


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in reply to @Bigg's post:

I'm so frustrated about this and I'm not sure I'm 100% on your side on this but I'm definitely leaning that direction if only due to "please god stop being fucking weirdos to the admin team" is generally my overall stance on... anything.

I do not like Cops, of any flavor, and definitely not Fandom Cops. I do not think there is any way to engage with them on an administrative level other than complete disavowal. But I'm also aware that to do something like that from the position of cohost-as-site would come across as dangerously authoritative from a dev team that has been (remarkably, gracefully, arguably dangerously) hypercommunicative throughout the entire dev process is... thorny.

"Cohost gains reputation as lolisho site" probably helps no one in the long run. However, "cohost caves to online puritans on this one" could be quietly walked back in the future. There's gotta be a middle road to walk here and the more I think about it it's just to admit the ban for now and quietly remove it a few years down the line.

If security and longetivity is the overall goal I think you gotta take the path of least resistance in the growing years, even if I personally hate it. I've blocked sooooooo many people off those comments. Wretched people!! Wretched cop impulses.

I think it's also possible to draw the line (however tricky that line gets, as per commentary in the followup rechost) and then absolutely refuse to move it further. Granted, most attempts to do this sort of thing have usually been... not great (see: what happened to LJ and Tumblr) but Pillowfort's been doing a good job of it so far.

Biggest thing I hope staff will take to heart is that the meanest, cruelest, most petty users who'd sell you for corn chips for not complying to their Every Pure Demand are also the ones that are toxic to site culture in the long run (if they treat you that way, they are absolutely going to treat other users that way) and that them following up on their threats to leave is actually one of the best things for community health as a whole.

absolutely, 100% agree. I also think, frankly, this could be something you just enact the ban now and then quietly walk it back in a few years when the site is more stable/has bandwidth.

speaking very honestly, if the hypervigilant coptypes on here can't SEE the content, they won't be reporting it. having a robust system of tag muting and hiding makes it better for all users, including the hypervigilant coptypes.

This is a thoughtful post and. Yeah. I really, really don't envy the staff at all.

I am in this weird place where I don't want to see this stuff and my experiences with the people in communities around it have been bad (mostly chuds, not predators), but also 80% of the reason I left Twitter was because I could not take yet another 20k like tweet talking about wanting to aggressively murder people over what is, at the end of the day, not real and having to see kids dunk on people they supposedly think are abusing children in exactly the same flippant, cynical, tone they use to dunk on fans of rival K-pop groups. I got so fucking furious at having to talk about this shit just to write "please do not bring it to my door unless someone is an actual predator abusing real people" because the alternative is getting jumpscared by someone assuming I want to have a giggle about the icky gross stuff some random person is posting (and it invariably turns out to be a queer kid reading manga and not, like, the people who think preferring lolis to real life women is masculine empowerment). I can't take the active efforts to kill empathy toward other people and I can't take the conflation of "cringe" with "danger," especially when the end result is cringe becoming a killing offense.

I have had more exposure to legitimately triggering discussion of real life child abuse since this started to be a thing than I ever did back when people were posting screencaps from Boku no Pico or whatever everywhere as a joke.

I'm not sure whether it's possible to draw a line that prevents the verifiable slippery slope that starts with "no content that eroticizes child abuse scenarios" and ends somewhere around, "if you don't check the canon age of these characters who could easily be 30 in both design and characterization before saying they're hot, this site will be unusable for three days and multiple people will decide their friends are unforgivable monsters for not thinking it's a big deal," but Pillowfort's TOS is not bad; they ban NSFW content of any character that appears prepubescent and default to US obscenity law otherwise. IIRC this got them some backlash for not taking a hardline stance against all NSFW content featuring minors, but it meant that people who refuse to use any site* that doesn't validate their desire to ruin lives over Naruto porn fell off.

*Except Twitter, Tumblr when it allowed porn, Ao3, and any other site they can't not use.

Also I would very much like folks here on this site to consider that while "but if they ban X, they'll eventually ban Y!" probably sounds like disingenuous bullshit to a lot of leftists after years of it only coming up in the public discourse when someone tells a famous person or politician to stop being racist, it is very easy to track the real, not-hypothetical impact of deciding to purge stuff that is Weird and Gross but does not do any measurable harm. It's the reason no trans person can publish anything that isn't My First Validation Affirmations and get widespread attention for it without some part of our own community deciding it was irresponsible to have written it. Someone will say, "It's fine to write dark fiction, you just have to avoid romanticizing these self-evidently bad things!" and by the end of the discussion the conclusion will actually be that writing dark fiction is dangerous because audiences are the biggest dipshits on the planet and romanticization is anything that doesn't treat them that way.

This is specifically something I'm thinking about because I saw some comments in the staff post that were veering a little close to "yeah, and this other stuff, too!" which is how communities And This Other Stuff, Too their way into treating reading fiction like a Twitter argument where the only goal is to spot dogwhistles.

Yeah, I've had Pillowfort in mind through this whole debacle as well. I remember scrolling through the comments of the post where they announced that policy and saw some irate teenager yelling about how the site's "gonna get what it deserves."

Cut to now, where PF's on their second month in a row of getting 100% funding from user contributions. Lol. Hard to say how long that'll last in Today's Economy(tm), but it seems like they're doing just fine without the fandom cops. (Who probably weren't giving the site any money to begin with!)

Yeah I'm basically in the boat if like, I don't think we should allow lolisho stuff on both pragmatic and ethical grounds but I sure don't like the way that people are advocating for the position I pretty much agree with cuz they're tying it up in some ideological axioms I do not like at all.

Frankly, I might be very sympathetic to a lolishota content ban on the basis of not wanting to engage with the legal and moderation problems, then banning all the asshole cops on the basis of “but we don’t want your righteous attitude on this site either”.

The cop attitude is concretely and imminently unsafe, and the behaviour in the community discussion threads shows why.

in reply to @Bigg's post:

Yeah, you put this stuff into words far better than I could have. I'm immensely glad to see other survivors speaking up about the harm that fandom police are doing, too, as someone who came here looking for an escape from that toxicity. Spiteful as it sounds, I hope all of those people fuck right back off to Twitter.

I'd rechost this, except that I know some folks following me are trying to avoid this topic and I don't think there's a way to add a CW to rechosts? (To any additions you add to the post, yeah, but not the original content itself.) Bookmarks it is.