chirasul

I AM TTHEGGR FN SJFKN GOMMR BAOSLQP

I'm Chirasul!

I'm a mushroom!

I am a storyteller and artist. I will sometimes post NSFW things. This is my main account.
I am working on a cool project called Coelary, which is about about a lot of things but it's mostly about being a queer adult.

 

   ✨✨✨🍄✨✨✨

    I'm non-binary.

   ✨✨✨🍄✨✨✨

 

OTHER ACCOUNTS:

  🎨  @CWF (art account)  🎨

  🐛 @coelary (bug people)  🐝

  🔞 @inkycap (it's porn!)  🔞

 

Please give these accounts a follow if you enjoy the things I make and you want to see more.



staff
@staff

hi everyone,

thank you for your extensive feedback. we're making the following change to our new community guidelines

old

do not post sexually explicit non-photorealistic visual art of fictional humans (including characters that appear to be human) who are apparently minors.

new

do not post sexually explicit non-photorealistic visual art of characters who are apparently minors


the effect of this change will ban non-photorealistic visual art of non-humans. this primarily affects content like drawn cub pornography.

this is the only change we're planning for now. we'll continue to read your feedback and if we need to make more changes, we'll do so in the future.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @staff's post:

kind of embarassing that your direct acknowledgement of this is to basically go "whew people sure got mad we explicitly allowed cp"

also i don't think there ever is any unnecessary vitriol around cp. it feels a bit ridiculous to have to say this

Going to suggest that the original post could possibly use a prominent "This has been edited since it was first posted, please see (link to this post)" at the top, as many people might just be directed to the original post even after this update, and are more likely to see the 100+ comments about the previous guidelines than they are to see the word "human" struck through in the middle of the post.

It's a good choice but the swiftness with which it was reversed really begs the question whether the staff really believe in any of this at all. This is the kind of decision you should have pretty strong feelings about as a community team. It shouldn't be a dial you're turning back and forth then looking at the audience to see if they're booing. Changing it is the right choice, 100%, but was it for the right reasons? Because without that there's nothing stopping it from flopping right back. It doesn't exactly inspire trust.

This is a concern, yeah. The degree to which Cohost just occasionally makes a baffling policy decision - and quickly reverses it upon the userbase threatening to walk - is cumulatively sapping my confidence in the platform's long-term viability.

pretty much where i'm at. how did it take an entire site threatening to leave when on its face it was a bad idea that should've required no user input? don't have underage sexual content, boom, next policy.

i don't have time to deal with another internet community where obvious stuff like this isn't caught before it sees the light of day.

yeah. like, as respectfully as possible, it is a little confusing seeing months of deliberation lead to them setting and then immediately walking right back into the same exact beartrap from the first guidelines post

edit: lmfao 3 replies posted within seconds of each other saying the same thing 🤝

this is pretty much how i feel right now. the fact that this was given the green light in the first place, AND it was to go into effective the very next day should be setting off alarm bells left and right.

that said, i'm glad to see a platform that actually listens instead of just turning around and saying "no, that's our final decision. shut up and take it". but even still. holy fucking shit, guys.

i am very, very concerned about the future of cohost.

That dial analogy is extremely apt. There's no suggestion here that staff actually changed their mind about the original policy, just that they got a more negative reaction than they (somehow) expected.

It wouldn't be so concerning if this drama wasn't a result of having this exact same drama half a year ago. It's not the first time they've waffled on this exact same rule.

sucks
After like less than a day you are wussing out? Doesn't make me feel like a lot of thought actually goes into decisions and it's all just bowing to clout pressure. I thought you would be more thoughtful and knowledgable about the kinds of weaponization and harassment that policies like this are abused for to marginalize queer expression.

What's your reasoning there? It seems like a lot of queer people are using babyfur, abdl, ageplay, etc to express themselves and their identity. You may not like them but that doesn't change the fact they are doing it. Going by recent happenings on other websites where they expanded their prohibitions and the backlash that received for being overly broad and chilling on queer expression I don't see why this policy would be any different.

So do a lot of cishet people, so I don't understand this logic. It's its own thing that is not inherent to queerness and I don't trust anyone trying to link the two in an era where everyone is trying to paint us as child predators.

Going to suggest that more transparency about how (waves hands all around) this happened would be appreciated. Not just the policy, but its modification/reversal.

"The feedback we originally solicited, while sincere and well-intentioned, did not take other important factors into account, which were brought to our attention by your comments" would be nice.

"We fucked up" can also do work.

This decision seems entirely reasonable to me, and I think it will likely lead to a slightly easier moderation process for you long-term, but I am slightly discomfited by the decision-making process displayed here. Obviously, it's good for a site's staff to be responsive to its userbase, but it took you seven months to write the original rules, and must have known that the provision in question would be controversial. I'm having trouble understanding the process that leads to the creation of such a rule, followed by its reversal after a few hours of angry comments. I'm extremely curious what you expected the response to be, how this differed from that, and how that discrepancy led to such a quick reversal after spending so long writing the original rule.

When this came up seven months ago, I commented that if you solicited feedback on controversial topics like this in the future, it would be advisable to offer a low-effort, anonymous commenting method like a poll or form, and @jkap wrote, "Agreed that this is absolutely also something we fucked up, and you can rest assured we won't be making that mistake again." However, you still seem to have only solicited feedback via public comments and email. Given that, it's unclear to me how you determined that "it's clear most [users] wanted this to be changed." While, again, I think that this is a reasonable change, I don't think there's any way you can tell what most users think about it from those venues over that time span. Obviously, there is a portion of the userbase which feels extremely strongly about the issue, but the comments and emails immediately following an announcement like that are obviously not going to be a remotely representative sample. I can't know what your emails looked like (though I can guess) but I'm sure that comment section would have been extremely intimidating to anyone who wanted to speak up in support of the rule.

Ultimately, I just don't want the rules of this site to be determined by whoever can yell at staff the most. While, once again, I think this particular change is reasonable, it's very easy for me to imagine a world in which a segment of the userbase gets up in arms about any number of controversial topics or paraphilias being allowed here, @staff makes a post addressing it, and those comments being filled almost exclusively by people who are upset that it's allowed. When that happens, how will staff determine what the majority of the userbase actually wants (if that is indeed the threshold), and when it is necessary to change the rules accordingly?

Edit in response to the commenter who blocked me immediately after replying: Apparently, repeating it three times in this post wasn't enough, so I will be explicit. I do not have strong feelings about this particular rule, and would happily continue using the site either way. It would have been fine with me if "cub" content had been banned from the beginning. My concerns are entirely to do with the process that led to this rule being adopted in the first place, and then immediately reversed upon angry feedback, particularly without making any changes to the way that feedback is collected.

If it is necessary to disclaim, I find pornography depicting fictional underage characters (human or otherwise) personally repellent and upsetting, and I do not ever want to see it. However, I also don't consider it my business what fictional content others create, share, or consume. There are other types of content I consume that some people consider upsetting and even immoral, but which the rules of this site currently allow. I do not want to log on in the future to find that staff made a big post about how that kind of content is allowed, and then changed their mind and banned it after getting some angry comments and emails.

Hopefully that comment will serve to demonstrate my point about these comment sections not being representative samples, since even a comment like this of the rule change will result in that kind of attack.

"Ultimately, I just don't want the rules of this site to be determined by whoever can yell at staff the most."

This is the one thing all of us should agree on. It was true the way the rules were a few hours ago and it's true now. It's an extremely noncommittal moderation style and it erodes trust.

I’m going to be honest, the question of “eroding trust” here is completely baffling to me. It seems like what you’re implicitly asking staff to be is the kind of parent figure who sticks “the rules” because to change their mind would undermine their (own perception of their) authority.

Staff are not in loco parentis. They’re not authority figures whose decision-making must above all be propped up by “sticking to their guns”, and they’re not mom and dad who have to put up with our shit no matter what because they love us. They may decide to make a course change based on the pragmatic questions, “what is going to make my job possible to do” or “what is going to make it easier to come in to work every day”—independent of ideological commitments. (To some extent, “work should be something that is enjoyable but does not consume every waking momentis an important ideological commitment, going back as far as the original manifesto, and it’s one that’s clearly on display in the weekly patch notes.)

The question of NSFW content is a pretty thorny question, one which most other websites handle by banning it outright, or by having completely opaque moderation policies (that frequently marginalize and suppress queer and BIPOC creators). What inspires trust in me is to see staff grappling with issues such as community guidelines in the open, and trying to be maximalist about it without copping out on safety. Because the wrong thing to do would be to say, “well, such-and-so content is not illegal so we won’t do anything about it”. The legal regime around sexuality is deeply unsafe!

What has harmed my trust in staff is the following:

  1. They should have foreseen this reaction, or a reaction similar to this. If they didn't, especially after the discussions that prompted these rule changes, it speaks very poorly of their foresight and understanding of their userbase. (That said, I think they did understand this reaction was coming, given that they said they were "bracing for a real tough week.")
  2. If they did foresee this reaction, then they wrote a policy they knew would make many users upset and published it anyway, then reversed it when it did in fact turn out that many people were upset about it. This seems like straightforwardly bad decision-making to me. Either they should have accepted the upset users as the cost of what they believed was the best possible policy, or they should have never published that rule in the first place.
  3. They spent seven months, in consultation with outside experts, writing what they believed to be the best possible policy, then reversed it in a matter of hours. Either the initial process was hopelessly flawed and unreasonably slow, or the reversal was hasty and reactive.
  4. After assuring me that they "fucked up" by not offering an easy way to anonymously provide feedback originally, and promising that they would not "be making that mistake again," staff made no changes to the way they solicited feedback for this announcement.
  5. There has so far been no transparency about what led to the reversal of this policy other than that they got yelled at a lot. It's hard to imagine that anyone brought up new points they were genuinely unaware of, and it's impossible for them to have actually approximated anything close to a representative sample of the userbase. Obviously, as you note, I don't want staff to refuse to stick to their decisions even when they know they're wrong, but hastily changing the rules any time a relatively large number of people get upset with them is not a good or sustainable way to be responsive to their community. If they want their rules to be subject to user feedback, I would much prefer any sort of formal process for soliciting and processing it, rather than just opening comment threads and the support inbox and trying to guess how many users are upset.
  6. Ultimately, the basic reason I have lost trust in staff is that I have no idea how they will respond the next time there is a controversy about a certain type of content being allowed on the site. There are many types of sexual content that are currently unaddressed by the rules, but which plenty of reasonable people think should not exist anywhere on the internet because of a perceived potential to cause harm. The speed with which staff rolled back a policy they obviously considered for a long time, regardless of the merit of the policy or its reversal, does not make me confident that they will defend users' right to create and consume "objectionable" erotic content in the future, which means that creators and consumers of fetish content are living here on borrowed time.

(Again, to make this as clear as possible: I do not have and am not expressing any strong opinion on the policy itself, just the process by which it was arrived at, announced, and then reversed. I personally find "cub" content objectionable. I believe staff should make any decisions and policies necessary to ensure their safety and comfort.)

I think it's kinda disappointing that decisions about this seem to be made largely based on whether people yell at the staff for it. "we consulted experts and came to the best decision we could, then changed our mind because the comment section was mean to us." this is not a sustainable way to run a platform and there will be more and more things demanded this way if the staff continue to show that they are this vulnerable to being pressured into changing the rules

On the other hand, ignoring objections simply because they’re “too” loud and “too” strident is a good way to marginalize disadvantaged groups who might be justifiably angry.

Staff are not parents who need to stick to “the rules” because changing them would undermine their authority.

repeating myself here but it is extremely telling on you that you even thought it acceptable to make that original guidelines update containing what it did. no amount of immediate 180 can erase the original faux pas. especially without even addressing why this edit was made.

that being said even with this edit there's still some very fucked content in that guidelines update. and it's embarassing to see so many people immediately go "oh whew ok thanks" completely forgiving the op. it's even worse seeing people more mad that cp is banned. truly this website had already attracted some neat folks.

i don't have any stake in the actual policy either way, but i just want to tell all of staff to stay strong. This whole situation was gonna be messy as heck no matter what you did, and despite everyone yelling in the comments, i assume the vast majority of people know you're trying your best to make this website be as comfortable as you can, long-term. Thank you. ❤️

This sucks and I'm tired. I've seen this song and dance a million times before. It starts with an innocuous statement the vast majority agree with, and the lines keep narrowing. All's you need to do is glance over at FurAffinity's latest rule-change controversy, or Tumblr as a whole, for a look at where this stuff goes. There's a reason, even as a queer far-left person, I've just gone full 'mind your own business' when it comes to fiction, and focused more on thinking about what actually does harm rather than obsessing over what someone might be thinking.

Even without taking the shrinking margins into account, what "looks" underage? Chibi art-styles? The 'thousand year-old dragon' trope? What about the opposite, where a character is explicitly under 18 but looks like a fully grown adult? What about various countries' age of consent laws? Tons of 'sexual awakening' stories will just use whatever the minimum age of consent is. The debate on that is a whole separate thing, but the tl;dr is that EVERY country does this. To act self-righteous about one country doing it at 16 when your own does it at the stroke of midnight of 18 is pure hypocrisy, neither is healthy if the only thing stopping you is the legality.

But then you just keep running into more problems, because the kind of people who think it's their job to morally mandate what fiction is and isn't okay will keep running with it. Aged-up characters, including post-canon works, are next on the list, as if anyone who was once a minor is forever a minor.

I've been dealing with these 'progressive puritan' types for ages now, have you really seen just how bad they get? Ageplay is normalizing pedophilia. Best friends are "incest-coded." Breathplay is "necrophilia coded." Anyone 18 to 22 is a "postminor" who can't be trusted to consent, especially if they're neurodivergent (bonus if you realize this is just eugenics rhetoric). These are the same people who call any porn of trans people fetishistic, even if a trans person made it. It's just reactionary puritan garbage repackaged for young queer people.

The solution to this stuff is enforcing the need for content warnings, inbuilt opt-out filters, etc. Crack down on people who aren't considerate in their tagging, and give people the tools to curate their own experience. If people complain about things they've chosen to view which is appropriately tagged, that's their own fault.

Remember when Itaku declared that all art of overweight characters needed to be marked as explicit?

The thing about the Feelings Yakuza is that they're in it for a) moral essentialism and b) a crusade to show they're on the correct side of the moral essentialism. Those function like fascism in that any time the enemy is defeated a new enemy must be found immediately or the movement self-destructs in infighting.

If everything is absolutely pure and anodyne and uncontroversial, they'll find a way to make some part of it controversial and go to war all over again. Probably LGBT people, if history is an indicator of future results.

But since moral essentialism isn't how people or reality work, even trying to oppose genuinely bad things turns into tumblr-book-of-grudges behavior where actual behavior is treated not as a matter of morals but as a signifier of which side of the Fundamental Attribution Error ingroup/outgroup divide someone belongs on. Even when moral essentialism is dealing with a bad thing it does it in a counterproductive and side-effect-heavy way.

"Whiteness is defined by what it's not. If it's not contrasted with something else, it ceases to be an identity. [...] Go seeking an 'other' to define yourself against." - Ian Danskin, Endnote 2: White Fascism.

See, this is more reason we need to stand strong on issues like this: it's really, really funny when the feelings yakuza starts in-fighting. Watching them melt down on drawing lines between aged-up or post-canon, how much of an age gap is okay measured down to months, or just how close people need to be before it's "too incest-y"? Actual comedy gold. /hj

Transparent attempts to conflate CSAM with fiction aside: Yes. I've been on the internet since 1999, I can tell you categorically, with 24 years of experience, that basing bans on what 'enough people' find 'icky,' rather than actual expert opinions on what does and does not cause harm, will always be a slippery slope.

Because when you do that, you run out the biggest of the freaks, which changes the balance of what 'enough people' find icky. Which will then get banned, which runs out the next group, which changes the balance, which gets banned... Etc. We've literally JUST NOW seen this, going from lolisho to cub, especially when "young looking" is totally at the discretion of moderators. From there it's ferals, from there it's xeno, from there it's taurs and digitigrade legs, from there it's furries in general; incest, into "incest-coded"; gore, to snuff, to somno. And unless you're REALL

You can just say I'm being absurd with no evidence if you want but I've lived the process repeatedly, on loop, since the literal last millennium, lol. Run out the freaks, now new people are the freaks, rinse and repeat.

"Transparent attempts to conflate CSAM with fiction aside" I added the term virtual to distinguish "not literally csam but instead depicted child sexual abuse" from "actual photographed csam". if my usage of the word was poor, thats my bad. if this were a legitimate "first they came for the communists" situation then maybe i would agree with you to some extent but the subject were covering is depictions of children being sexually abused... like, what? how is this the hill you want to die on, exactly? people are trying to equate the staff of this website to furaffinity and inkbunny (neither of which i even use! not everyone is as online as you, and theyre not going to have the same perspective as you, and that doesnt make you The Principled Internet Understander.) the two options here from what youre saying seem to be either if you ban cub then youre an art nazi because you'll ban significantly less extreme art (eventually), or, you let people post all of it? which is such an absurdly false dichotomy. there can be a middle ground, and maybe the staff arent as dumb as youre implying they will become

The thing about that middle ground is that at some point it requires saying "no" to the people who respond to every change like this with something to the effect of "a good start but I won't be satisfied until this one more thing, and also you're fundamentally a predator if you hesitate to agree" which is already happening in real time in this very situation.

That's not to say the line can't be drawn, of course, just that doing it will draw the zealous ire of people who like making spurious accusations. So the natural inclination will be to try to avoid setting them off.

im being criticized over other hypothetical people's opinions on said line even though I think what i've been saying has been rather balanced? im not trying to be some moral crusader. my whole point was that there are some obvious places to draw the line and people are literally arguing that even an attempt to be nuanced about where that line lies is a slippery slope that leads to... idk. i dont care anymore

"im being criticized over other hypothetical people's opinions on said line even though I think what i've been saying has been rather balanced?"

Welcome to being on the other side of precisely what I was talking about I suppose.

People are trying to be nuanced and getting accused of being predators IN THIS CONVERSATION.

Hell I personally just got accused of fighting to protect rape culture for daring to emphasize the need for nuance in the discussion instead of declaring all problematic fiction be purged. That's what I woke up from my nap to just a few moments ago.

Funnily enough, this thread looks so much nicer after I blocked all the people being disingenuous, inflammatory, or just completely ignoring the original post, and it looks so much nicer now! It turns out that curating your experience is actually a very smart thing to do. How relevant.

In my case the trash took itself out after I asked why they were deliberately triggering the exact trauma I had just told them about my experience with in an attempt to drive a queer person out of the conversation through fear and pointed out how they were repeatedly using not just TERF-adjacent arguments but TERF-verbatim arguments.

Said it better than I ever could have.

This discourse and discussion is exhausting. I really hope Cohost doesn't end up turning into a space its originally planning was to not become.

Wish I could heart comments. +1

As long as you consider 'apparent' to be in terms of a (fictional) age of consent, then it's all good.

I don't want a return of the Twitter-era nonsense where people would call artwork of smart adults 'apparent children' because of their body size - let Washu from Tenchi Muyo be herself!

Thank you for this update, I still have some concerns about the main policy and rambled in my own post about it. But this is much better and I want another voice in the comments here reflecting that.

i sent an email and almost posted a very long comment on the other post before i saw this one. i expected this change to happen, but the near-instant 180 on this issue is unfortunate, especially when there are already silence/block and filter options to hide content that may be (very understandably) upsetting to some users

it's bad enough that so many folks are eager to call CSA survivors pedophiles for finding their own ways to publicly cope with it and process it -- it also lead to a lot of potentially triggering discussions that shouldn't have needed to be brought up in the first place for the sake of debating this

like some other folks said, if this was gonna be the end result then staff should've banned lolisho and cub from the outset instead of dangling the carrot above them and backtracking when a bunch of people got upset about it. i fear that a lot of people are now assuming the worst about each other when they see someone having Any sort of reaction to this stuff.

ok my essay is over. i'll still be on this websight because i love the people in it. thank you for all the hard work, and take care 💜

Worth noting that cohost permitted at least cub since the outset and only made revision after encoding this in site policy and then immediately repealing it after backlash from a vocal minority.

I agree that if Cohost had taken a stronger position initially instead of putting it off, they would very likely not be in this situation right now.

Well this is unfortunately disappointing.
But if the concern is access, then here's a thought:

Why not permit the exploration of sexual topics with fictional underage subjects, only on private accounts? It would give space for those to express and find community where they need it, while also preventing it from being easy to access by just anyone.

nah this sucks actually. I'm not even particularly into cub but if you're just gonna cave to people who cry the loudest I'm sure something I am into will end up on the chopping block eventually.

really, with this site's overall good tagging and muting system, it wouldn't have been hard for people to avoid seeing things they don't want to, if some moderation energy was dedicated to enforcing mandatory tagging of potentially triggering taboo content

In this giant pile of comments I did see at least a few cases of "Glad you did this but I won't be satisfied until [new demand]" in real time.
One of which demanded a standard that would, were it applied more broadly than to one site, demonize every public library in America for daring to allow YA coming-of-age novels that haven't been completely autoclaved for maximum corporate-friendliness.
I suspect that was not intentional, but unintended consequences are what opposition to nuanced analysis gets us.

Honestly I was debating whether to even bring it up because I don't think trying to litigate it would be productive in the current situation, but I guess I was under the impression that it was generally agreed-upon that written fictional works acknowledging that libido doesn't suddenly kick in at 18 and is in fact a thing that teenagers struggle with (especially in a reflection of real life society where the people who are the most dangerous to them in that regard are also the ones trying to make them too repressed to talk about it in any context with anyone--to protect themselves from being reported) was not considered to be categorically intolerable but a subject for individual-basis-discussion-of-merit-or-issue instead, for the very reason mentioned in the parenthetical.

It makes me wonder if all these people Suddenly disgusted with the rules even read them at first. Is feral art being banned next because of zoos? What about noncon?
I don't feel like this was a decision based on site polling or whats best for the site, and more a decision based on people pulling out money. Which is fair in some ways I guess, but now this and the other post are just massive block lists to me, to the point that I'm not sure how comfortable I am using this website.
People equating drawn art to csem is not safe for survivors. These people. are not safe for survivors. I hope the rule allowing written content stays at least, or people venting about their abuse will end up a bannable offense too at this rate.
All this really does in the end is make financally-stable people feel better they don't have to use an icky block function and make people who vent with their artwork have to move to sites that Do allow MAPs and zoos and csem. It's pushing them back further into the depths of the internet, closer to the exact kind of people that abused them, and I bet all of these people would think that's a good thing.

Sorry if this reply comes off as abrasive but it's 5 am for me and I am so, so tired.
Won't be replying to any replies on this message either btw

I wanna say, I immensely appreciate how transparent cohost's staff is with what they want the site to be, and especially that they're themselves active users of the site. On any other site, seeing this policy change made so quickly would have me worried about whether it slides farther and farther back (see FA's recent policy change, which it seems fairly clear influenced some of these policy decisions?) until the site wasn't a safe haven for porn creators at all. But staff is clearly trying to be as open as possible while minimizing the risk of real-world harm and that effort is why I like using this site.

Glad to see the change mainly because of how difficult this place would've been to recommend to people otherwise. I wish it was possible to let survivors who use that sort of art to process their trauma find a safe place here, but there are way too many complicating factors for that to coexist with the rest of the site even with the great CW filtering system in place, and that kinda sucks. I don't envy y'all for needing to make these decisions when angry mobs are on all sides.

Thank you. I've been lurking around fandoms since the old days, when a lot of spaces had a more libertarian "anything goes, as long as it doesn't quote-unquote hurt anyone" approach toward content policy. I've seen a lot of shit and quite frankly I'm glad you take your role as community managers more seriously than that.

I'm not as well-equipped as others are to delve into the nuance of the discussions to be had here, but some have made a very good point regarding their worries: That this has potential to grow into further choices, leading Cohost to become a place it originally set itself not to be. I know there's a lot of discussion, and, well... discourse (as to be expected), but some of the people in here have raised rightful concerns about how an - admittedly quite reasonable - policy has potential to grow into something grim.

It's your website, and you make the rules... But I hope you all know to not head down the path other websites have before. Accidentally or otherwise.

man idc what's allowed or not, i only care that y'all aren't gonna let people shit all over each other like they did back when this shit started last year. just gonna casually not read the comments, which I'm sure are all rational and civil

I was on the edge of my seat for these updates all week, and I'm impressed with the result. This policy seems like it could accommodate the kind of community I'm looking for far better than I thought I could hope for, and for the most part I find myself thankful for the prohibitions just as much as for the things that are allowed.

The ban of explicit loli, shota, and cub art on-site is the part I'm least excited about, but it seems like even that won't have to hinder most people's ability to find deep friendships and meaningful self-expression, since people can express themselves with non-sexually-explicit art, explicit non-underage art, explicit text, and allusions to explicit underage art off-site. That's honestly still a ton of breathing room. Many daydreams and fun scenario ideas only need text. Lots of romance and shipping scenarios only need art that's suggestive or tamer. Many underage blorbos aren't even from sexually explicit media, so a lot of non-sexually-explicit posts about them would still be interesting to their adult fans.

Okay, I realize I'm basically selling this to myself based on certain genres of posting that appeal to me. 😆 It's bound to hinder and annoy some people who don't find it easy or acceptable to have to adapt to the limits, so I do worry about those who may be left behind by this.

Still, Cohost staff, I'm so glad to hear you'll work in good faith to understand people who find themselves on the borderline of the rules. I hope people don't wear out that welcome with frequent borderline cases, and if they don't, I think this starting point has a great potential to arrive at better rules over time. I look forward to experiencing the kind of community that can thrive within these conditions.

i'm glad that guidelines are finally settled even if they aren't in my favor, but as a heads up the people who call other people "weirdos" and "freaks" and drawings "csam" are the ones still using your site.

as a csam survivor who creates lolisho porn with encouragment from my therapist to empower myself and reclaim those very traumatic experiences, the comment section on both of these posts is abysmal.

you have officially harbored a safe space for antis. enjoy.

I’ve needed to take some time to gather my thoughts on this and brace myself to wade back into this immensely triggering comment section. Hopefully it isn’t too late to have my thoughts heard.

I am deeply saddened by this little ‘event’. This is frustrating to watch from the sidelines. I don’t want to have to speak up and “guide” staff, I want to be able to trust them to make the right choices. When a policy is determined over a “few weeks and [we] spent much of that time consulting with some outside experts” it’s changed within an hour because of comment section outrage? This is not encouraging to put it mildly. I should not feel like I need to fight for/against this-or-that cohost policy in a comment section flame war (and within the first hour of it being posted no less!). If you’re going to run a social media site on this scale you need to operate like professionals, confident ones. You cannot let your policy be determined by the angriest and most online of your userbase, especially over an issue like this. You have to be better than this. You need to make your own decisions and stick to them.

I’m going to leave my opinions on the current ToS updates out of this but I would hope that the staff no longer takes any input from the cohost userbase, does some serious self-reflection, and actually commits to their goals. On a social media site of this scale you cannot just turn a big dial and look back to the audience for approval. You have to run the website, not us.

nice. i don't wanna get into an argument about this but it does annoy me how people on both sides act like the only argument against fictional porn of non-human minors is "they're kids so its bad". there are other reasons fictional porn of non-human minors is detestable. glad to see a sensible decision made

I read through the comment section, and I really, really, really wanted to just, lie low and let my views fly under the radar on this one, y'know, stay safe by lurking, but my stomach is turning seeing the kinds of people this change has emboldened. Many others have made many great points that bear repeating, but I won't rehash them in depth. I think the points about the immediate reversal due to backlash being worrying are all significant, and I also think that it definitely would've been better to instead more strongly enforce self- and community curation tools like CWs and tagging.

What really has me worried is seeing very loud, very fervent bad faith asshole-tearing going on by people who agree with this change, devouring the carefully nuanced, often soul- and trauma-baring arguments just to decry anyone who takes even a slight issue with this change as a pedophile who just wants CSAM shoved in victims' faces. I think this website has a largely very solid culture to it, but I'm... my faith is shaken, I suppose. Please, just. Don't walk these lines back any further. Let the experts dictate your policies, and leave the mobs to devour themselves.

Once I've made this comment, I'll be blocking a number of people from the comments section, in hopes the most rabid bad-faith dunkers here make up the majority I could have the displeasure of encountering in the wild.

The internet is full of all kinds. Self-curation tools need to be emphasized and non-optional. Users posting triggering content without proper or adequate warnings should be breaking rules and/or breaching policy by doing so, because yes, victims of abuse should be able to see their feeds without being triggered by such content. And at the same time, users who engage with and process their trauma by creating content others may find triggering deserve and need a space where they can do so and share it with others who understand, and users who want them simply run off the internet or into poorly-moderated grease trap corners of the internet should also be found in violation of policy. Both (read: the untagged poster and the puritan) are engaging in anti-social behaviors that worsen the quality of the community and experience of the website for all users other than their own ilk.

And above all else, I just want one fuckin' website that can't be bullied into policy changes by angry threats from self-righteous mobs more concerned with enforcing their own sense of disgust on the entire world than actually engaging with the nuances of material harm.

Fuck.

Seeing enough comments like yours helps me feel like the culture of cohost may at least have some of this strong foundation among all the added weight causing it to wobble.
People early on predicted that there'll be not-so-wonderful cultural shifts as the community grows, as that's what always happens, but it's still sad to see it in effect.

I have no idea which side of the argument I sit in even after spending hours reading people's discussions on it from whichever side.
I'm ultimately for harm reduction, but the best way to achieve that is pretty clearly not cut-and-dried.

But what I do know for a fact is how uncomfortable I am by people on either side being overly reactive or dismissive toward the nuanced points made by other people.
Makes me want to cling harder to comments like yours and hope that these sorts of critical, nuanced, self-reflective discussions remain a core part of of cohost and not a part that would be pushed out into the sidelines.
That, despite the wobbling, we still have this as the central pillar holding it all up.

I agree. If it so absolutely paramount that nobody that doesn't want to see this kind of stuff doesn't, then they should have the relevant tags blacklisted by default, while strictly enforcing taging.

Decisions to restrict the freedom to share thoughts and content should be made carefully.

28 days late. CAPS for key points.

It is astounding to me, regardless of how a user personally agrees with the rewritten guideline, that there are users expressing genuine concern about this policy change and being attacked for it.

Please think carefully.
Any decision that takes 7 MONTHS TO BE IMPLEMENTED citing "seeking expert opinion" outside the userbase is something you'd THINK was a decision that the staff concluded was the best course of action. However, it looks the policy that was made with such careful consideration was REVERTED WITHIN HOURS.

Regardless of whether you like the new change or not, THIS IS CONCERNING.

The very quick change in response to criticism implies the staff was NOT CONFIDENT IN THEIR POLICY at all, or that they DID NOT FORESEE how the public would react. Furthermore, the posts fail to express what "new feedback" lead to this change. Did comments give any criticism that the staff did not consider within the 7-month deliberation, which again included "EXPERT OPINION"?

This change feels as if the STAFF IS PURELY REACTIVE to the most vocal parts of their community. I question why a policy around a controversial subject that the staff weighed heavily WAS NOT at least given a way to ANONYMOUSLY VOTE at it is (AS ONE USER CONTINUALLY SUGGESTED), because I doubt the "expert opinion" they received was enough judging by the events.

Community, do you really think in context THE WAY WE ARRIVED at this conclusion is good? Or is the END RESULT the only important thing?

Such a shakiness to their policymaking leaves me unconfident.