i guess follow me @bethposting on bsky or pillowfort


discord username:
bethposting

shel
@shel

I've been noticing a trend of people talking around things in their content warnings. "A certain rich asshole" "That wizard game" etc.

Please don't do this. This isn't TikTok you can say fuck shit die kill cunt on here without consequence and nobody is namesearching Elon Musk to argue with you about him.

The purpose of the content warning is so people can filter out the post! But using euphemisms you are evading those filters and preventing the tag muffling feature from working for people who have filters set up.

It's also just confusing. Sometimes I actually don't know what your euphemism refers to and so I actually don't know what I'm going to get when I open your post. I'd rather you write it in as explicit language as possible. "A photo of my cunt" is a better content warning than "A certain pink thing ;)"

Thank you.


lexi
@lexi
This post has content warnings for: we should kill elon musk.

xenofem
@xenofem

I just think maybe we should have a little conversation with our good friend Mr. Musk... Send a couple of the boys over, to show him our appreciation for all the work he's done, capisce?



You must log in to comment.

in reply to @shel's post:

yes this. i once saw someone put a content warning for talking about death and the content warning itself was like... the vaguest way you could possibly explain it. like i had to actually see what was censored to actually understand what they were warning about. and that does the exact opposite purpose of what a content warning is for.

like i'm not bothered by stuff like that usually myself but if you're censoring even the content warning meant to describe what you're censoring, you've gone a step too far.

if your content warning is like... something someone would come up with thinking of a memory of something they heard next door to describe what they're blocking out, that doesn't help! it's like the la croix of content warnings. we need the actual thing listed (like in my example, cw: death) not just some vague explanation that kind of reminds you of death, if you think about it lol

As far as we can tell it's not actually true on TikTok that you can't say those things either, it's basically just folklore that those things get you penalized. But the algorithm is so opaque that everyone just accepted it as true

cohost desperately needs a popup or something with a list of guidelines for CWs. there are way too many people that don't use them correctly and it's infuriating having to add half a million different aliases for like 3 actual things to my filtered list.

either that or just, suggest existing CWs like tags. in fact, why isn't that already a thing??? it literally shows the same tooltip but never gives you a list of words or phrases like tags do

I don't think this is just TikTok, because I see people do it that afaik don't use TikTok. I don't know if it's a general fear of The Algorithm or spambots, or something deeper about a fundamental misunderstanding of how CWs work.

I've had people react weirdly about CWing or not CWing things, and there are some people who simply refuse to type a word or name like it's some magic swear (yet don't necessarily object to discussions on the topic and might even engage in them as long as The Bad Word remains untyped).

So I wonder if some of this is due to reactions like that, and as a result not being sure when to CW, or thinking the CW itself is triggering, but the end result is having to solve a sphinx riddle to determine if I want to read something or not. Which is particularly obnoxious when the answer is "not" and I have that term blocked and thus would not even have to think about it if not for the cutesy nicknames.

Twitter also has this problem of me being in a constant muting arm's race and having to unfollow some people I otherwise liked because people just Do Not use any consistent identifying terms to refer to news like, idk, unlabeled videos of graphic police brutality. NOT a topic to vaguepost about, or even RT without warning. (Doesn't help that for a while mutes didn't apply to retweets, but that seems to have been fixed. Or maybe I just unfollowed the doomscrollers.)