prefacing this with "there are UX improvements we can make to adult content display so don't get mad i'm making a joke here"
it's very funny to me every time we get a support tickets that boils down to "i clicked the show adult content button expecting a joke but instead saw porn" b/c honestly idk what you expected. if you click the "show me porn" button on a website that allows porn you will probably see some porn. just how it is.
the CW on masto got abused so quickly that it became meaningless within days, and I'm pretty sure tumblr either had something like that, or at least had widespread mockery of the concept, so everyone assumes that if they click through a cw it will always say some shit like "fuit gummy."
The fact that people are actually treating this place like words matter, and like it isn't just a flaming shithole abandoned shortly after birth that everyone is squatting in, but assumes will burn down at any moment, is going to throw a lot of folks off balance for a long long time.
yeah it really seems like there's a shocking amount of "wait this place is good actually what the fuck"
we're planning to elevate "read more" to more of a first class feature to hopefully cut down on CW abuse even more. i don't consider putting spoiler warnings in that field to necessarily be an abuse but would still rather have a different system
One thing that might help (both with people reading them as jokes and more generally) would be knowing if there's going to be an image behind a CW.
yeah there's UX changes coming to both CWs and adult content to make things more useful overall. going to solicit user feedback on some of it before we make changes since things could be disruptive.
The fact that the Mastodon CW system started out as a spoiler tag, and simply got its UI text changed, really shows. The feature's well-intentioned but the way it's designed lends itself better to the jokes than to actually using it as a proper CW system. I don't think it's a surprise the culture ended up developing big problems with it.
It was definitely always meant to be CW tags fwiw. It was meant to replace rot13 for horny posting mostly but like the pull request was labeled "content warnings" and everything. People started using it for jokes and spoiler tags on day 1 when the PR got merged and then there was immediately discourse about if that was ethical.
I don't think it shipped as a spoiler tag (I think it got renamed before it was first merged), but it was referred to as a "click-to-view spoiler system" in the original pull request that added it. It was renamed to "spoiler/content warnings" later. https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/460
Ehhh I think this is semantics. It directly says it was intended to resolve a GH issue titled "proper content warnings and sensitive content" and I was on the development team where we talked about this and we were all pretty universally in agreement that this was the content warnings system even if Blackle referred to it as spoiler tags in the PR. Tho of course Blackle even at the time acknowledged it might not be the best method.
twitter also recently introduced a similar feature to hide pics behind CWs and i don't think it's ever been used for its intended purpose. it's always an extremely cringe meme or pun or something
correct, nearly every single time I have ever seen it used it was for an unfunny shitpost. The exception is adult tags used on porn so tame it couldn't thrill a bishop.
Which is probably because proper porn isn't technically allowed anyway so nobody is expecting it
i knew this was probably happening Somewhere on Twitter but fwiw a ton of porn artists there do use it. mostly non-american porn artists now that i think about it
Honestly on twitter if its relatively tame nsfw, no gore or taboo kinks, posts do worse if you flag them. however for the stuff that people are actually hesitant to see engagement actually improves so i just use it regardless but i feel like im the only one. i rarely have to click to view porn on twitter.
Because theres an age gate i feel an actual OBLIGATION to mark my shit as adult. on twitter if i forget i get rewarded wtih more engagement and punished if i try to fix it because id have to delete the post. here i forgot to mark one of my posts and i IMMIDIATELY fixed it panicking "god i hope no one saw that" and the edit feature is the best thing ever.
