This post has content warnings for: cohost lolicon drama, expect convos about csam mental health abuse etc..
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in reply to @lori's post:
I feel like in the span of time it took me to type this up like 500 people posted their anger in the comments of the staff post so now this looks too much like preaching to the choir lmao I swear none of those were there at the time there were only a couple of angry posts.
Thank you so much for this post, honestly. Give me a hundred years and I wouldn't be able to word this position as poignantly as this. As a victim of grooming via fictional content like this, it genuinely makes me feel insane to constantly be exposed to the absolute worst people shouting their support of porn of minors on every single nsfw space, to be accused of hating other survivors or being anti-kink or being a puritan despite myself being as far from these things as humanly possible. The word gaslighting gets thrown around a lot, but in this case it really does feel like that, or at least adjacent to that. So seeing brilliantly worded posts like this makes me feel a little less insane.
That's why I posted it honestly, because I was losing my mind seeing so many people acting like this is totally normal when I know everyone I'm talking to off-site (even ones who have accounts here) feel otherwise.
I don't want to make a whole new post about this but just something else I've been seeing a lot: so many people keep bringing up slippery slope arguments, if it gets banned then what's next. My experience in most online communities I'm in, some of which have existed for decades so are pretty thoroughly tested? Nothing comes next. Like, they just ban this and it's gone and that's it. So I don't buy the slippery slope shit, that's not what I've ever experienced in real life and I don't need to entertain hypotheticals when I have real experience.
As someone mostly outside of this discourse, but who has been thinking hard on it since yesterday (mainly because I really like Cohost and want it to improve/succeed), thank you for this post. I found myself tilting towards an opinion last night because many of the "thank you so much" comments were posted before the harder-to-write "what is this nonsense" comments.
Sometimes I wish I could pull people outside of themselves for a minute and let them see what they look like when they say certain things, and what can be so easily inferred from their modes of argument. Like, there's one person in the comments over yonder who I am very willing to believe is genuine in their "working through trauma" argument, from how they reacted both before and after the reversal--they were neither "hooray this is great" before or "how could you" after.
And then there's a dozen other people.
(Sorry in advance I've basically written a second whole blog post in response)
I've been a Cohost skeptic since the early days, I'm not shy about that. But this stuck out to me because "I really like Cohost and want it to improve/succeed" is exactly why I think this post is important. Whether Cohost succeeds or not isn't a big deal to me personally, I generally like seeing people succeed and it'd be cool if Cohost was trucking along living its best life in a decade, but I'm not really invested in it as a platform. For me, I am just kind of fascinated by online communities at a meta level, and the recent era of the big corporate social media waning has led to a lot of new sites, which has led to me watching a lot of new sites and watching what they do from the ground up. I'm fascinated by communities, their dynamics, how they conduct themselves, I always have been.
I'm going to keep rambling for a minute but I promise it's going to wrap back around to your comment. A while back I wrote this post. One of the admins had made a personal post, I don't remember it in detail but it was basically about sort of taking it personally when people had problems with the site. Now, in their defense, the post explicitly said that these were just feelings they were having and it shouldn't stop people. But...well, anyway, the link explains what I felt about people's response to that. I bring this up because I've seen a site like Pillowfort absolutely botch their public release, which you need to get right to get the kind of interest and influx of users you need to stay sustainable, because they had surrounded themselves with fanboys and early adopters and yes men who would always just say "great job staff!" And never point out problems, bugs, etc. People who later noticed problems, including the massive security issues that caused them to have to close back down to invite only, were dismissed as haters and people went "why can't they trust the admin, she's just one person, she's doing her best!" But saying that didn't exactly help her out in the end, did it? At the end of the day it was the fact that they didn't push for these things to get fixed during beta and wouldn't report any problems or concerns and just heap on empty praise that let things go that far to begin with.
So, here's where I get done with backstory and get back to your thing: Cohost succeeding. As I said in that post, a staff that surrounds itself with Yes Men who say oh good job love it thank you so much staff wonderful all day ends up not resolving its problems. And a site that doesn't resolve its problems dies. I think a lot of people think they're doing the staff a kindness by not getting into arguments about policy here, not saying "hey I think this sucks staff", etc. Because they see them as people (which is great! you should!) and they don't want to hurt people's feelings. But it isn't kind to them to not speak up. If last night went different, and the cub/lolicon people said "great job staff!" and the people upset by it just quietly left, what they'd have is a significantly smaller site largely frequented by cub artists. And what they'd have then is a problem, because the site already isn't even close to sustainable. They're losing money like crazy. Frankly part of why I've been skeptical since day one is because as soon as I heard that they were paying themselves a salary and this wasn't some hobbyist side project, I went "oh...how are they paying for all that?" And unfortunately we still don't have an answer for that. It's been like half a year with no financial update, but the last ones we had were not looking good. The only halfway good month they had was the one where Elon made a lot of people mad and they got a bunch of yearly subscriptions (so even if those people stuck around, they wouldn't get more money from them for another year). So by saying "hey, this sucks and you should change it", versus just quietly leaving or biting your tongue, you make it clear that the site isn't a niche site for people into this art. And that literally helps cohost financially. Not making the rules like that in the first place would have helped more, of course, and they had a lot of people who left or weren't willing to subscribe or settle in until this was resolved the first time this discourse happened months ago, but ultimately the site is a lot more likely to be able to survive if it doesn't become a niche haven for a specific kind of artist.
And just to really drive that home, here's what will ultimately happen: Cohost is going to introduce tipping for posts, and eventually they are going to end up on their payment processor's radar when they realize a lot of those tips are going to porn (whether it's cub or not, whether it's drawn or not, doesn't matter to them). Cohost making their stand on allowing ANY kind of porn is a massive risk to them financially. Ethically I strongly agree with them allowing porn (that doesn't include children of any kind, that is). But this is the capitalist nightmare we live in. Other sites didn't ban porn because they're prudes, they did it because they need to be able to process payments efficiently to survive financially. Cohost is going to run into the same problem. It's easy to say you'll allow porn or die, it's easy to say you support sex workers, but when the options are "shut down the website and lose the paychecks paying our rent right now" or "get rid of some content on the site", it's not as easy of a choice. But if you picture a scenario where a lot of people leave over the cub thing, and a lot of the people remaining are here explicitly for the cub thing, and then suddenly they're forced to ban it to keep being able to get paid for Cohost plus and not shut down...then what's left of your userbase?
I have more thoughts but frankly I already wrote you a novel, posting before my Vyvanse kicks in is always a mistake. But the tldr is, if you want Cohost to succeed as a website, sometimes that does mean taking a hard stand and saying "no, I won't put up with this content being here," and doing so is a kindness to them even if it feels negative at the time. Setting things on the right course is vital to keeping a site like this running, and if you think the site is veering off, the only right thing to do is speak up about it. "Thank you so much!" doesn't feel as good when your site is in shambles a few months later.
Never need to apologize to me for writing a long reply!
My interest in Cohost succeeding is kind of a mixture of a lot of things--appreciating that it's just a small team of Actual People, liking the site design, finding a lot of interesting posts on here about all sorts of subjects, etc. It reminded me how much Twitter had (at least for me) crowded out blogging and journaling for so many years. And I'm sure my feelings will change over time. (looks back at 25 years of other websites)
I agree with pretty much everything you wrote. I have a tendency to empathize too heavily with people sometimes, and it can really cause whiplash at times like these, trying to figure out when or if "calming things down" is healthy and when it's sabotaging a righteous reaction.
Agree about the financial updates too. I don't want to hear "hey we're out of money" 12 hours before a major change any more than I wanted to hear "here's our controversial policy" that late.
I don't know how to finish this comment, so I'll do the old middle school essay trick of restating my premise. Thanks for the reply!
In the name of nuanced discussion I'm gonna chime in.
I was totally content to stand back from the discourse entirely because I have no problem with the rule and can see it was handled miles better than FA trying to implement a rule before deciding what the rule actually is.
And I'm totally on board with people being angry and rejecting respectability politics. If you had ever seen me on the bird site you know this is an understatement.
I only waded in when a few people started using that anger as an excuse to engage in regressive moral essentialism of the 2010-tumblr-TERF variety.
Because aggressive belligerent moral essentialism--especially the kind that insists its good and moral goals constitute full permission to just straight up make up an ontologically-evil guy to accuse you of being--is the kind of trauma trigger I'm not sure I personally can share a website with anymore, now that I've had some distance from it by going cold-turkey from outrage-click algorithm sites.
Sorry I literally can't parse this are you calling people who are against lolicon/cub stuff terfs
Edit: lol nm I see now, you're one of those people who goes on about "feelings yakuza" and "antis" that I just posted a different post about and that's a block on sight at this point, grow up and learn how normal people social dynamics work, the world isn't a fandom.
as someone who's both been groomed via fictional cp and harassed for years for being outspoken, especially when i was younger, against it (including in too-aggressive, too-angry phrasings that had people trying to doxx me at 20), i really appreciate this post. it encompasses my feelings as they've developed over the years perfectly, and while i know i am here many months late, i really just want to thank you. i've watched friends been attacked recently for saying this sort of thing on tumblr and called anti-queer, watched people defend a woman who sexually harassed me for trying to talk to her as a survivor of this sort of grooming... it's just really nice to see this position articulated so well. anyway that's all i guess. didn't mean to make this comment so long but yeah.
I'm glad it made you feel seen, when this site went through its big Lolicon Debates this rhetoric was absolutely everywhere, and then I spoke to and/or heard from so many survivors who had the same experiences as you. But they were so tired of being attacked and called anti queer that they didn't want to talk about it openly anymore.
Yep. That's basically been me over the years. I'm tired of being harassed and beaten down, so I don't say as much myself anymore. Sometimes I feel guilty but it's just too much. People attacking me, asking for details of my trauma, mocking me, stalking me...at one point people were using my damn kiwifarms doxx despite calling ME a farmer for being uncomfortable with lolicon and saying it should be unacceptable. It's exhausting.
Wait, they allow fucking cub on here??? Fucking YIKES. So that's why a saw a cub vore post on one of the tags I followed. I just instinctively reported it.
Since it's been a year since you made this post, I'm assuming the staff haven't changed their minds? Do you still recommend people being vocal about not liking this policy?
Well, the cub rules flip flopped several times. The current rules are that it is not allowed. However, if it was posted before it was banned, they won't remove it. So...it's allowed to BE here, it's not allowed to be POSTED. If you're seeing cub stuff being posted NOW, then definitely report it.
It's...still a pretty bad fucking state of affairs, but I like to be clear about what it means for it to be "allowed" at the present time. It's both banned but allowed to exist (as long as you got in pre ban)
That is so wack. Like, the fact alone that the staff even allowed drawn CP (that's what it is, I'm not sugarcoating it) at all is wild to me. Like, art that is CLEARLY intended to just sexually arouse the audience in regards to depicting minors is a massive NOPE.