I’m Ruby。 I’m roughly 20 apples tall
ルビーです。背がりんごを20つぐらいです。

I drew my profile pic and banner. The gameplay in the banner is from dragon quest 1 for game boy that I recorded myself.


staff
@staff

hi there. we wanted to clarify some things, in light of the community guidelines post yesterday:

  • it is currently against site policy to post lolisho and it will be removed.
  • while this was unwritten gray area before yesterday, this has been the case since day 1.
  • we made technical changes to the site to attempt to ensure that people would have as little accidental contact with this material as possible, even in the instances where it got posted by users in ignorance of site policy.
  • the inclusion of lolicon/shotacon in the public mandatory content warning list was to provide full transparency around what we are hiding; as we have said many times, we do not want a mysterious algorithm governing what you see. it was not intended to suggest that the final decision about this policy would be to allow it in contradiction of user wishes.
  • the reaction yesterday has made it obvious to us that a large number of people consider anything short of a total ban to be personally unacceptable to them.
  • regardless of this, we do not appreciate the tenor of some of the discussion on the original post, and in our e-mails and support tickets. we have been refraining from moderating the comments because we don’t want to be seen as censoring discussion, but the feedback we’ve gotten has caused immense stress to a small team, hence this emergency post.

we are currently working on final policy wording. we had wanted to get structured feedback before making any decisions, but the community response has been loud enough that we are fast-tracking the process. jae will be out tomorrow for yom kippur, but we’ll try and have something out by the end of the week.

thank you again for your feedback.

Aidan, Colin, and Jae

EDIT 10/7/22, 8:15am PDT:

In an attempt to reduce the amount of unconstructive nastiness and name calling in this comment thread, we are going to be removing comments (both "on our side" and not) that detract from actual conversation.

Please note: due to the sheer load, we will not be sending emails to users whose comments were removed. These removals will not be held against you in any future reports. This is a special situation for many reasons. If you have any questions, you can email us at support@cohost.org


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in reply to @staff's post:

Addendum: Whoever is leaving these three nasty comments or emails, I don't understand your sense of entitlement. We are on a site Aidan, Colin, and Jae built and coded from scratch, were excited to share with us, and designed to rebuild a niche that all of us understood as something we wanted. We are invited into this house as guests and the least we could do is not trash it. What a terrible show of gratitude for people who have done nothing but try and give us their best.

You could have just posted "We will not be allowing this" from the start, rather than stirring up the pot by pretending it was going to be a discussion. You did harm to your users.

You're making a lot of bad faith assumptions here--and ignoring the fact that it was already not allowed. The question was more about how to codify policy in a way that sat correctly with the userbase, a question that other websites have not have the courtesy to ask. Please remember that this is a small website run by 3 people that is simply trying to exist in an ethical capacity. At least try.

It was already not allowed? Then why this conversation? If we're going to talk ethics, let's discuss the ethics of posting an ambiguous statement that you may allow child pornography if enough people agree? I would call that unethical.

I understand it's a small team but they're doing something big and if they are going to bring this topic up so poorly, they should rethink what they're doing.

Both posts make it relatively clear that it is already not allowed, it was simply not codified yet. It was brought up in this way almost certainly because it became urgent as a result of the growing userbase and an increase in questions and concerns. This is part of assuming good faith, is understanding the reason why this discussion is happening at all. You are assuming this conversation is happening because they were considering "allowing child pornography if enough people agree," divorced of any context or thought that went into starting the conversation in the first place.

Please assume good faith. Please.

I do appreciate what you're saying, but I don't think that they approached this topic in good faith. While they are unpleasant I believe "trauma" responses are legitimate when traumatic content is inflicted on victims. I know of the people who run this site, not personally, so I am sure they've dealt with this kind of thing personally. A bunch of fighting over child pornography could have been avoided by saying straight up "We don't allow this stuff, stop posting it". If that was the intent of the first post, it was not clear and the call for discussion and user response led directly to pedophile communities (shudder) deciding to target this place.

I want to be a big good user here, but I've been experiencing trepidation, and this kind of thing makes it harder.

Given that there are survivors within the communities you're blanket describing here I think it's important to assume that if a call was not handed down without user discussion, it was in order to give survivors a chance to make their feelings heard.

They're trying to do the right thing, and the right thing is not obvious. I know that because I know these people personally, because I am a survivor, and because I know other survivors. Trying to give people a chance to share their feelings on very tough issues is not in and of itself harmful, nor is it enabling harm, and assuming so does not feel good faith.

before commenting on this or the previous post, please stop and ask yourself: "am i a CSA survivor?"

if the answer is no, please do not comment about how decisions like this impact CSA survivors. please do not comment about what increases the likelihood of CSA. if you have not experienced CSA, you cannot speak to any of that.

i was raped at 14. the person responsible did not use the modern internet, had never seen lolicon or shotacon, and did so because they were trying to abuse me, plain and simple. i am not an anime character, i am not an anthropomorphic animal, and i do not want to be compared to one.

regardless of how you feel about this issue, a staff post on Cohost is not the correct place to have these discussions. you can absolutely have them elsewhere. these issues are larger than what a given social media platform allows users to post and losing sight of that is a massive disservice to those who suffer abuse.

As a CSA survivor with a similar background, thank you twice over for making this post.

(Might delete this later as I've become more reluctant to have my trauma history on the open internet, but I wanted to +1 this in some way, until comment liking is implemented.)

I don't like talking about this on the open internet whatsoever but I am so triggered by the way people are talking about this that I needed to say something. I am so tired of people CSA survivors being infantilized and spoken for.

for what its worth from a random, as another survivor i just wanted to thank you for your patience and grace in explaining this, even while people have shown extremely bad faith in response

+1, also agreeing as a survivor here. It sucks that people are deciding to behave like this. A policy on this kind of thing should be thoughtful and nuanced, and they absolutely were trying to do the right thing by seeking feedback.

It was pretty obvious to me that y'all weren't personally fans of that kind of content (quite the opposite, actually) and were posting out of a desire to be completely transparent and involve the community in decision-making as much as possible, even/especially when it comes to objectionable content. Anyone who read that post as a covert attempt to push the lolicon agenda or whatever was very much doing so in bad faith.

Those folks are welcome to reflect on their tendency to see things in black-and-white, or they can go back to Twitter.

want to make clear that I support all of staff's statements and actions on this issue, and the way it's been handled makes me appreciate being a Plus! subscriber even more.

the nastygrams are going to impact you more than statements of support, and a lot of supporters are going to be quiet as well for whatever reason. to some extent, this disproportionate impact is reasonable, you should weigh emotional appeals with appropriate gravity, but in this case, especially when the decision has already been made, I hope you all remember to consider the kinder responses as well. lots of love

both posts have made it clear that it was never allowed. both posts were saying "we want communal input in how we should explicitly codify this into the rules to make sure we are doing it right"

I'm not at all a fan of that kind of content, but you know what i'm even less of a fan of? Folks who run around yelling that it's identical to actual CSAM and that anyone who ever draws a possibly-underage boob is a pedo groomer. I hope you can make Cohost an unsafe space for folks like that specifically, tbh, whatever the decision you end up making about this content.

+1, and especially see @kadybat's earlier comment about how that kind of thing is frustrating at best and harmful at worst to many actual survivors.

(I'd probably use "unfriendly" moreso than "unsafe" here since unsafe implies that someone was just vibing and got jumped on for not doing anything (as opposed to the puritanical folks who send death threats to people for shipping 21-year-old and 30-year-old anime characters, which is... very much not vibing), but that's a tiny nitpick.)

i think that both this and the last post are an incredibly responsible way to approach the subject. and its tough to talk about but because it got brought up we gotta talk about it. not stating the policy up front wasnt a bad idea, because if people are Fucking Normal it wouldnt be a problem. but i think its evident that people arent and tried to read between lines that weren't there and make judgements about what they thought they saw. i think it really shows a lack of maturity on the part of these people.

im a firm supporter of what you guys are doing and hope y'all can have a piece of rest and a good holiday.

When I joined this site I saw so many posts from other users about wanting to build a better community than the giant, toxic sites they were leaving. That makes it all the more disappointing to see that the reaction to a poorly-worded Staff post is an old-fashioned Tumblr Dogpile with accusations and hatemail.

To be fair, I misread the original as well, and I was waiting to see your final decision before making my own. I'm glad to hear your clarification on your stance and your steps to protect users from accidentally seeing this kind of content. I feel a lot more comfortable staying here knowing that those rules are in place and won't be going away.

Users getting upset and uncomfortable with these topics is 100% understandable (I wasn't in a good mental place after reading the original either), but I feel like that shouldn't get in the way of remembering that there's human beings on the other side of the Internet, and humans can make mistakes even when they're doing their absolute best. A few steps of asking for clarification and details (Or walking away and getting some breathing room if someone isn't in a good place to ask those things) before accusing people of being the worst kinds of criminals is an important tool to create a community that can work together instead of a hellsite cesspool.

Take care of yourselves, Staff. You're doing great

Well said.

That makes it all the more disappointing to see that the reaction to a poorly-worded Staff post is an old-fashioned Tumblr Dogpile with accusations and hatemail.

TBH, I'm choosing to look at this as a sort of taking out the trash. Or giving the trash the chance to take itself out? Those users didn't join when the post was made, they were here all along. Best for them to make themselves known (and to show them the door, if applicable) early on.

(And to make it clear, when I talk about showing people the door, I'm talking about the way people act. People are welcome to have whatever opinion they want about whatever fiction, but being hateful in response to a small team trying to be transparent is not okay. Acting as if a policy miscommunication about fiction is as exactly as repulsive as if someone abused a real child in front of them is not okay. I know this is easier said than lived when a site's trying to get off the ground, but in the long term, communities are far healthier without that behavior.)

they are fake. they are literally fake. i don't like that shit either, but so what? i can just not look at it. there's no moral argument to be made here. no one is hurt by the creation or consumption of loli/shota. people are capable of separating reality from fiction. just as rape fantasies are extremely common, it's really not weird to have fantasies about underage fictional (fictional!!!!!) characters. who cares what people jerk it to as long as no real people are involved?

to reiterate on my previous comment, i don't believe that sort of content has any merit to being on this site, and to expand in light of this post, i am looking forward to its removal alongside the new policy wording

aside: it is odd for the list of mandatory content warning topics to be in a separate page/document than the community guidelines, especially given the suggested content warning topics are listed directly

This is really hard and messy and I'm so sorry you've had to weather so much stress over both the details themselves and responses. I have a lot of respect for y'all and faith in the website that you've taken the time to get it right, wishing you the best.

Please take care of yourselves. I'm sorry anyone's been making this hard on you. No one should be yelling at you guys or leveling accusations over this. I'm sorry if anything I've said has contributed to staff stress, and I don't think this needs to or should be decided quickly or in a moment of high stress.

(Though from a moderation perspective, going by who shouts loudest and most vehemently won't show you the actual community opinion, just highlight the people who are hardest to moderate at. And people who call you pedophiles for a post inviting community feedback on policies quite frankly can't be placated. They're already acting unacceptably and reaching for the most emotional language possible. An anonymous vote of some kind would probably be needed for actually gauging community sentiment.)

(And fwiw a large number of people will consider a total ban personally unacceptable, especially a ban thorough enough to satisfy the people heavily triggered by underage content who want to levy a total ban about this, which honestly could easily include banning depictions of age gaps between adults and sfw references to relationships between teenagers. You're not going to make everyone happy, here, and no matter what you choose, some people are going to feel unsafe in the community.)

I very much agree with the second paragraph here. I do feel like simply looking at the comments section of these posts won't be sufficient for gauging what the majority of this site's users want. I feel like ideally we should have an anonymous poll that only users who were verified prior to the original post can vote on (obviously to prevent people from potentially calling their following of outsiders with no context from spamming one side of the poll). It would definitely go without saying that some people are hesitant to put forth their thoughts on the matter out of fear of being blasted with vile replies.

Thank you for your tempered hard work on such a fraught topic! I'm so sorry to hear you received such abrasive feedback. All that said, I (having missed the original posts) went back to look at the comment sections and even with the amount of aggressive replies, I was equally impressed at the amount of people commenting on both(all?) sides of the discussion with immense thoughtfulness. It gives me hope to see cohost pull through something extremely difficult like this!

Transparency and communication is appreciated - it's what makes cohost cohost, and I thank you for doing the hard work (but hope you're able to find a place that's sustainable and healthy to maintain)

This was originally a reply to adrienne's post but I'm making it its own post for ease of visibility.

My suggestion: regardless of the final wording of the ban, make it abundantly clear that harassing other people over fiction on this site is not welcome and will result in warnings, then disciplinary action.

  • If someone finds content on the site that's banned, they should report it to staff and if necessary block the person instead of organizing a witch-hunt.
  • Having opinions about what sort of fictional content is acceptable is okay. Posting those opinions on your own page is okay. Harassing people (specifically, reblogging from/commenting to tell them they're gross and wrong and making callout posts about how someone ships things you don't like) is not. The block button (and eventually, tag filtering) exists for a reason!
  • Something less directly actionable would be stuff like tagging a post about how much you hate a ship with the ship's tag - I get the feeling that moderating this would be a HUGE pain and full of severe gray areas, so I think instead of making it a hard rule to not post hate in the tags, it would be better to suggest that people CW for fandom negativity if they're going to tag a fandom into the post?

Come to think about it, I feel like a section offering guidance - not rules! - about what and how to CW and how tags work on the site would be a good general addition!

I think bringing shipping wars/fandom stuff into this discussion is muddying the waters. Most people who find this content objectionable aren't doing so because of fandom infighting and that's such a big can of worms that it needs to be its own discussion outside of this.

You're completely right that it's independent from fandom infighting, but the logics overlap a great deal for how things get collapsed together, some of which we can see in the two cohost threads on the subject.

We've got people saying fictionalised artwork depicting underage characters is 100% identical, and 100% as harmful, as an attack on a human child. Survivors of CSA in the threads are extremely not a fan of being minimised by that logic, in many cases.

But that loops around to all the great points made in this comment on the other thread (https://cohost.org/staff/post/124903-community-guidelines#comment-0e2ad2c3-3b88-4225-9741-7fe11c7fe951), particularly around what a moderation system will need to be able to handle.

The fandom-stuff/shipping wars thing that Phosphor brought up connects to this, in that just as there are people here saying that fiction is the same as an attack on a child, there are people who say that a story depicting an age gap relationship is the same as rape, that an abusive relationship is as damaging as actual abuse, that the people writing those stories are themselves abusing their audience, etc, etc.

Even if 'the line' get put somewhere that seems clear, there WILL be situations that having a framework as Phosphor describes will be helpful for Cohost to have set up ahead of time.

I still think it's going to muddy this conversation even if you feel it overlaps. This isn't the time for two birds one stone, and turning it into a fandom conversation trivializes the whole thing. It shifts the focus from "is this content acceptable to the users here" and "is this content harmful to users" into arguments over what cartoon characters people like or what shows people get mad at.

From my perspective it's not two different stones, it's the same thing. This is a conversation about acceptability and harm, as you say, and I know people who have been doxxed and accused of being an abuser for supporting ReyLo fiction on the logic that fiction is just as harmful as reality. "Is fiction as harmful as reality" is the same foundational crux as the current moderation debate. My angle is that no matter what ultimate decision is made on moderating material like this, some kind of framework as @bazelgeuse-apologist proposes is a good idea. For a concrete example, Pillowfort banned depictions of characters that appear underage in sexual situations, and I still see folks attacking it for being a 'pedo site' because it didn't go far enough in banning OTHER things that they saw as directly equivalent to pedophilia. This kind of conversation comes up whenever moderation frameworks get going, because they are thorny, inevitable, and complicated. Precisely since that's true, nailing down a "don't attack people if you think they've broken the rules; use the report function in this way instead" rule is a useful safety net.

After I posted I thought I needed to clarify that: I meant age-gap between adults. I can't find the link, but just the other day I saw people howling that a manga featuring two adults, one 22 and one 30, was age-gap and thus rape and how dare the publisher promote this...

No worries, ideally I'd have been clearer to start with! And like you're right, that IS bizarre - it's just bizarre in a way that overlaps with the current issue at hand. Because like we've seen CSA survivors in these threads saying how bizarrely repulsive and damaging it is to say "the crime that was done to me is just as bad as someone drawing an image on a computer." The whole thing is extremely complicated and messy, which is why it's great staff are looking into it. I think that what @bazelgeuse-apologist proposes is a good idea because it's a safety valve regardless of what overall decision gets made.

I really liked the way yall handled this. I learned a lot of nuance about the topics that I didn't know before. This is a COMPLEX topic with many shades of grey that I hadn't thought about.

Real sorry about the reaction you received from some people.

Just want to offer some constructive feedback: Have you considered contracting a professional sensitivity reader to proofread blog posts about sensitive issues before uploading them for the public to see?

I appreciate you're a small team with a small budget, and it's great in general that you have direct, open communication with the community, but you don't want to take any chances when this kind of controversy can get out of hand really quickly on social media and become a make-or-break issue for a website. The more the site grows, the more intense and difficult it will get to moderate comments and do damage control in response to a controversy. The best way to address this type of issue is to avoid it altogether if possible.