belgianwaffle82

belgianwaffle82

@belgianwaffle82

Also goes by Waffle.

Art blog: @FrostbiteGator

 

Flat and forever sleepy introvert.
30. Hobbyist doodler. Video editor. VR scalie.
Likes theme parks and roller coasters.

 

Currently using this space for random reblogs and talking way too much about VRChat.

 

Ask box open, anons welcome. Ask about things, or tell me things! What's your favorite theme park memory. What's your favorite/worst roller coaster?

 

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cohost patch notes vol. 61

happy friday, coposters! we’re a day late for a simple reason: we forgor. small week this week, jae and colin are both working on big projects that didn’t quite make the cutoff (Asks and Necessary Refactors in advance of the Public API, respectively). here’s what we’ve got:

  • Unbroke One World Story
    • fixed a bug where isolation: isolate was being added to posts from the First Age of Posting
  • Fixed the “log in” button in the profile when viewing someone’s profile while logged out.
    • Clicking it wouldn’t do anything. Why is that? Because we didn’t tell it to do anything
    • We’re not totally sure when this broke but we’re pretty sure it worked at one point.

hopefully we’ll have more for you next week. thanks for using cohost! :eggbug-smile-hearts:

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in reply to @staff's post:

rudytuesday
@rudytuesday

it has been a year since cohost was created and there are still no completed community guidelines. where is the transparency on this massive issue that affects the entire userbase and has been mentioned by them multiple times over the course of the past six months, especially when this site has branded itself on staff transparency? all you gave us was "we are working on guidelines" in the update after one post about it got any visibility and then nothing.

i understand that start ups are unpredictable and priorities change on a minute-by-minute basis, but the way that this issue has been handled and consistently buried after has not gone unnoticed. you have made big promises to the nsfw art community, so what happens to the users who are iced out by tos changes and have to scramble and make other plans? a blanket apology and then the site carries on? those who are made uncomfortable by certain types of media also deserve to know what this platform will and won't tolerate, and the more time passes and the more the userbase grows, the more harm will be caused by the decisions made in either direction.

while i would like the lack of transparency to be addressed too, at this point i only ask you acknowledge that staff has received and is considering this message.

thank you.

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bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

*nods!* I do want to acknowledge the following:

  • I'm super grateful for and very excited about all the neat new features being added to the site! As a dev I know that even "small" changes can have a LOT of work hidden behind them, and that between all the various papercuts and managing the surges from Twitter nonsense it's super easy to get squashed, especially when you've got health bullshit happening at the same time.
  • Also something I know as a dev: legal/moderation stuff is way harder to summarize and more fraught to communicate than technical stuff, and usually something you want a lawyer for (and they're expensive), so I get not being able to say as much on this front.

That being said, I'm still also eagerly awaiting a Community Guidelines and a ToS finalization. I trust that y'all care genuinely about the userbase, and I know that, conversely, at the end of the day, those documents don't mean shit in the face of lax moderation/a manchild billionaire buying out the platform/[name your favorite social media enshittification here]. But it's still nice to have those things in writing, especially for things that might not be as unambiguous as "bigots can fuck right off."

I'm also still interested to know what safeguards y'all have in the case that Stripe decides to drop Cohost on account of it hosting adult content. Especially when tipping lands, since then you'll see people directly paying NSFW artists and not just the site as a whole.

Totally understand that these aren't questions with straightforward answers, and that y'all might be treading carefully around them while you unJenga the pile of Things Needing Done. That being said, speaking for myself at least, even answers like "we're aware of the risk with Stripe but are still researching alternative payment processors" or "we have a list of things to address in our ToS but are waiting on/are looking for a new lawyer" or "it's on our minds, but health issues and current events have taken a lot out of all of us and the only site improvements we're capable of braining right now are technical ones" are fine!

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jkap
@jkap

we haven't forgotten about the community guidelines and they are a top priority; we've avoided saying much because we didn't want to go into too much detail until we had a 99% draft. we're in the final stages and will have more to say soon.

sorry for being vague, kara's out today and i don't want to say too much without its approval since it owns that project.

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kaara
@kaara

Surprise, I'm here. Let's talk about it:

  1. Why has it taken so long to make the new community guidelines?
  • I was hired in January of 2023, with one of my responsibilities being to head this project. It took me a few weeks to get going, get comfy with everything, get trained up, etc... By mid-to-late January, I was pretty up to speed. At that point, we had thousands of tickets in our support backlog and after a discussion with the team, it was clear that this was the highest priority project for me to tackle. Getting this done took me a little while, only wrapping up in late March. After that, I spent some time making sure our support platform would be able to handle increased volume in the future; hopefully we would avoid a backlog like that ever again. I'll also be honest in that I needed a week or so to just kind of lay low, too. I had been busting my ass for a while. In essence, I've only begun to start work on this in the last few weeks.

1b) What about before 2023?

  • Hiring takes a long fucking time
  1. What's the status of the guidelines now, when will they be done?
  • At present, we have a 2nd draft done. I'm currently setting up time with some industry folks so we can have them review it. Their input will be incredibly valuable. I am unwilling to give a concrete landing date at this time, as I am moving next week and also we may need to do some revising, but I expect it to land in the next few weeks. Worst case scenario, sometime in June if we have to revamp the whole thing (unlikely)
  1. Why the lack of transparency?
  • Frankly? There hasn't been much to say. With our support backlog just being finished, we only just recently got to sit down and do this. Before that, we had only outlined our anticipated changes and stances. On top of that, these are obviously highly contentious topics, and bringing them up and walking the same debates each week and getting called all sorts of horrible things by everyone all the time isn't great for the team's psyche. While the above first reason is the primary one by a long shot, there's definitely been a sense of...well, not being extremely keen on bringing it up for our own wellness too. Especially as we didn't have much to share or say yet. This is passing the buck onto y'all, and for that I'm sorry, but I don't fault anyone here for wanting to avoid the psychic damage.
  1. What's going to change?
  • We'll talk about this when it's ready, but we will be providing the promised follow-up on rules we discussed a while back, as well as some small changes, one or two new additions, and some formatting and readability changes. All-in-all, not too much will change.
  1. What about the users that have been "iced out"
  • This is totally fair, and I'm sorry. The reality of a 4-person crew is that when we prioritize certain projects, others get left behind. It sucks that it has such an impact, and I agree that we could have done more to be transparent about our (lack of) progress while I worked on the support backlog.
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rudytuesday
@rudytuesday

i appreciate this response, but with the users who are left in mind i want to emphasize that it is imperative for platforms welcoming nsfw artists to understand the circumstances under which those artists are seeking other platforms when advertising to them, and that false promises are to the active detriment of those communities. there are oversights in all aspects of social media management but the consequences for us specifically are random, unpredictable and unfair, and any platform that claims to support us will have to go that extra mile to meet our needs.

for example, one of the first things a nsfw artist will tell you with regard to monetization is that stripe does not process payment for nsfw works, so a subscription or tip service run through them is not viable for us. i can't speak to the future of cohost and i wish you all the best but i would highly recommend establishing a line of communication with the nsfw community of some sort, especially before making any further moves in that direction.

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kaara
@kaara

We're very aware of the difficulties regarding payment processors and are actively keeping it in mind as we continue to move forward. As you mentioned, false promises are detrimental, and as such we've refrained from making them to the best of our ability.

We'd like to be welcoming, and that will mean continued dialogue with the community and evolution of the website. Cohost is in active development, it's not Done yet.

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bazelgeuse-apologist
@bazelgeuse-apologist

Tumblr has an "askbox" feature where people can send you a message, anonymously or not, and you can post the message to your blog with a reply to it! (Or reply to it privately, in the case of non-anon asks.) It became a big fixture of the site culture, with things like "ask memes" that were lists of questions with numbers or emoji associated with them, and people could send in a number/emoji to ask you the corresponding question.

Very curious to see how Cohost will implement them. A big feature with asks was that their anonymity allowed shy folks to interact with more ease, but as you'd expect, it left them wide open for harassment and for other toxic behavior as well. It wasn't until VERY recently, IIRC, that Tumblr even let you block senders of anonymous asks.

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lexi
@lexi

Clicking it wouldn’t do anything. Why is that? Because we didn’t tell it to do anything

the worst thing about computers is that they do exactly what you tell them to do

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Fluffies
@Fluffies

Regarding isolation: isolate, we trust the beings here so we really don't think this would at all happen, but does this leave the door open to an old post getting edited, then rebugged to put it in front of new eyeballs, and causing any of the harm the isolation was meant to prevent in the first place? (We believe that was the reason it got changed).

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

Technically, yes. But IIRC, the First Era of Posting ended during the closed beta. (I believe One World Story is actually the post that prompted the end of the First Era.) If so, then everyone who has posts that even could be abused in such a way is within a social link or two of staff members, and also has been very well behaved for the last year, many of them becoming pillars of our little community. I have confidence that no one would do this unless it was very funny.

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