HypatiaPhoto

Hypatia

@HypatiaPhoto

25, white-Latinx, plural trans therian photographer and musician. Anarcha-feminist. Occasionally NSFW

discord: hypatiacoyote

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HypatiaPhoto
@HypatiaPhoto
kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca
bruno
@bruno
This post has content warnings for: cw discourse as in discourse about cws.
hellgnoll
@hellgnoll

There was actually almost exactly this debate brought to Mastodon by entomologists posting about their scientific research, much of which involved the public education of people who by-and-large live in a society where insects (and wider "bugs") are seen purely as disgusting pests - and they wished to discuss the beautiful creatures they were studying in light of the need to normalize this common part of our ecosystem

They were, of course, largely chased off Mastodon, or science instances were added to mute lists, because there were a lot of people who felt their particular phobic triggers should take cultural precidence and indeed that it should be normalized to hide insects (a category of life currently undergoing a mass-extinction event all aorund us) instead of showing them to the public.

I am a clinically recovered arcahnaphobe, so I don't exactly have an even-handed say in this mess. But my short version of it is: This is a bad idea, a bad practice, and indeed users tag muffling their personal triggers is what the cultural norm should be. CW'ing a common form of life that is necessary and integral to basically every thriving above-water ecosystem on the planet is not great! And spiders are part of that too!

HypatiaPhoto
@HypatiaPhoto

We don't have a correct answer here because we do have friends and partners who are genuinely arachnophobic but man the way society treats arthropods and invertebrates as a whole as disgusting monsters that should be killed is so fucked. we remember on Twitter there was discourse for a while because someone posted their pet centipede and a bunch of people responded with "kill it with fire!" gifs and variations of. And that was someone's pet! Random strangers were threatening someone's pet because all they could see was a monster.

kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

I think overall tagging and being able to muffle by tag is a much better solution for most potentially triggering content that affects a subset of users, and at this point it is one of the things that I think Cohost does quite well as compared to Mastodon in particular.

It's by no means perfect, and I think that the ideal solution would include some ability to granularly control post visibility and/or tag visibility, because right now, tags are used extensively both for discoverability and for content filtering, and that if you don't want your post to be discoverable, you have to use a full CW instead of just tagging it. (AND you also can't use common tags to be able to find your own stuff later without it being discoverable under those tags.)

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in reply to @bruno's post:

authorx
@authorx

Yeah the first time I encountered the idea that using a cw on everything that might be triggering or objected to could be detrimental was food, seeing someone on Twitter talk about how seeing pictures of food treated as something to hide triggered their own trauma about it really made me reconsider how I'd been doing that on Twitter. Since then I try to tag/hashtag pictures of food on Twitter/cohost/etc because it's an intrusive way to let it be muted without implying it should be. I started doing that with selfies on Twitter as well (I think I'm worse about remembering that consistently though), after a friend mentioned it mutes those words bc seeing other peoples' selfies can make it dysphoric. I didn't take it as anything against sharing selfies generally, and didn't want it to come off that way to anyone else.

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damon
@damon

I really don't get the thing of people complaining about others' selfies making them dysphoric. It seems horrifically self-centred and incredibly arrogant to make demands like that.

Like if you're that distressed by other people merely existing maybe social media is just not for you

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authorx
@authorx

I mean... my friend wasn't demanding out of anyone, just making a polite request, which I decided to follow, as a friend? Yeah, some other people can be rude and forceful about it but just saying "if you have dysphoria maybe stop talking to people on the platform they're on" is a pretty unhelpful response.

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nex3
@nex3

this is a perfect example of something that shouldn't be a content warning, and should instead be a tag. this platform has the tools for people who don't want to see food to muffle that tag, but there's absolutely no reason to think that discussion of food doesn't belong in the public sphere (and in fact claiming it doesn't could be harmful to a separate group of people)

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dog
@dog

When I see people chastised for not putting their selfies with faces behind a content warning, I think… did you think about what this might do to peoples’ feelings about their bodies?

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artemis
@artemis

i dont like photographs of bodies. im not really sure why. i enjoy seeing people IRL, i just, dont like photographs of people most of the time unless they're a minor part of the picture

nevertheless i dont request a CW of it, i just dont follow people who post selfies regularly

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xinjinmeng
@xinjinmeng

I miss when it was a "read more" so people could just put in there "My opinions on alkaline batteries" or "pictures of my cat", so a wall of content wouldn't clutter a timeline. And then people could just type in "cw: snakes" if they wanted to purpose it as a content warning.

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ahoyitsjoy
@ahoyitsjoy

I'm arachnophobic and I agree. On Twitter I would just mute the word "spider" and hope that people said the word when they posted a picture, but of course that also means I would miss out on posts that used the word, but were not actually even talking about real spiders (such as: "they climbed up that wall like a spider").

It's nice here that it's really easy to not see things I don't want to see via tag mutes. I wish more social media was like this. Might be less pointless negativity if it was easy for people to avoid things they don't want to see, without having to impose on the person posting it to hide it for them.

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Tavi
@Tavi

This has been kinda my thinking on how I tag food lately. In general it doesn't seem like something to hide behind a content warning, but also ensuring that I tag food, food pics, meat, beef and pork in particular for different reasons helps to keep cohost more accessible to several groups of people that have good reason to want to avoid those things, by making it easy for them to muffle or silence those posts.

Just that cohost has such a robust tagging + muffle/silence system in addition to content warning system I've been feeling makes it a step above other social media sites lacking easy use of those features in both my confidence using the site and recommending it to others. Granted, and very important to remember: these features rely on the community making good use of them to be most effective.

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MrBehemo
@MrBehemo

I respect spiders. I think they are amazing creatures. I don't hate them, and I'm glad they exist.
On the other hand, if I accidentally get a good look at a picture of a spider, there's a good chance that, just like in real life, I'm going to be uncomfortable and jittery for like the next 8 hours.
Now, that's not your problem, and I don't ask you to spoiler tag anything or hold back from sharing the wonderful things you find in the world and want to share. But if I follow someone and they regularly post spider pics, I would unfollow them, similarly to if they regularly posted stuff that was too violent for example. That's my responsibility, and not necessarily something you should have to care about. I guess we all get a choice whether we want to share only things that are most accessible, or if we want to share what matters most to us. Some times the latter is more important.

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MrBehemo
@MrBehemo

Yep! I know and I appreciate that. :) My reply wasn't meant to sound like a complaint, just further discussion of the interesting topic. I've slightly edited the ending in case it accidentally sounded preachy.
Like I said, it's my responsibility anyway. I appreciate the fact that you're even thinking about it, and it makes me wonder what I might post sometimes that I should tag.

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amelyssan
@amelyssan

it's ok to tag something without the letters 'cw' as a value-neutral guidepost to potential viewers, and my understanding is that there aren't partial matches in the tag muting system here, so it's immediately expedient to drop the letters "cw", letting them be implied as one needs imo

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robinjay
@robinjay

I think my ideal would be a system where the content markers were both described in a neutral way, and where both the poster and the reader could indicate a preference for whether the content should be automatically hidden (the poster on a per-post level, the reader on either a global or per-content-source level; with the reader's preference taking precedence of course)... but I'm also all but certain that much granularity would be too many points of friction for an awful lot of users.

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robinjay
@robinjay

it’s close! it still describes them in terms of warnings, and it doesn’t have poster controls for indicating whether they think a specific post should be hidden by default (if the reader has no particular preference), but it hits most of the other points and is definitely the closest i’ve seen to ideal

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Space-Reptile
@Space-Reptile

i usually have stuff filtered out by tags, but then people on tumblr (back in the day) did this wierd thing where they would put slashes in their tags so it would avoid filters on purpose, basically shoving a post i didnt want to see into my feed going "screw your filter".
This led to my filters getting very bloated as i had to account for tampering, spelling errors and mutators such as "cw: spiders" instead of just "spiders"
(example, i dont hate spiders, love the things, they eat mosquitos)

Twitter has this great system where you can mute words, including someones @ handle as it simply looks for the words in a post and doesnt rely on tags, that kind of system shud be universal as it completely removes the need for tagging or flagging

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