Being on Mastodon is fun, but holy smokes, those guys want you to content-warning everything, it feels like--even crying. And I'm like, what, a basic display of emotion gets a content warning? It's not even extreme sobbing over some dead body; we're not pondering skipping out on a viewing of Grave of the Fireflies because we're already in a downer mood; it just appears to be a character sheet that happens to have several headshots of example emotions, and crying happens to be one of them. I see them on more advanced ref sheets all the time.
I get the warnings for, like, blood or guns or spiders. I can imagine why someone might not want to see those, but yeah, I dunno. Like, by this logic, you could content-warning happiness, too, if you're sad and you don't want to see someone else being joyful. Like, where is the line between content warnings, and regular run-of-the-mill content tags? Is just the semantics of it tripping me up?
I think a lot of people on Mastodon have forgotten what Tumblr taught us about trigger warnings and trolls
this is sincerely one of the major reasons I just can't use mastodon. My friends on there are very soft hearted and want to protect people from harm but this leads to what feels like every other post having some content warning for something extremely mild or anodyne and I just can't deal with it. It's one of the few things that makes me feel that icy touch of "the conservatism of age" that we were warned about, so I have to keep myself out of it so I don't lose my empathy or sensitivity.
The issue is that it's a shibboleth for at least a couple of different actual divisions, some of which I don't care about and some of which I do.
The reason why a lot of folks, myself included, have a kind of kneejerk negative response to content warning maximalists is that historically policing content warnings is strongly correlated with white people on mastadon making it unusable for non-white people.
(In many ways, a descriptive tagging system combined with tag filtering would be a much better solution, but not enough people reliably use tags either -- it's me, I'm terrible about that. Twitter clout weirdos made tags so uncool that we haven't yet recovered, even on sites like Mastodon and Cohost where tagging is functionally crucial if you want things to be findable.)
Anywho, whenever I'm asked to CW something (either personally, or generally) that I wouldn't instinctively put a warning on, I try to sort it into one of two groups:
- is this a CW that is inconvenient to me just because I am not personally harmed by it, whilst others are
- is this a CW that is enabling people people with privilege to render the lived experience of others invisible
There are some things that are genuinely hard to put into just one of those buckets. A lot of political content is like that; there's a lot of political stuff that is just electoral gamesmanship and dunkfests which folks should rightfully be able to avoid, but there's a lot of political stuff, some of which is electoral, which existentially threatens folks' lives, and it's messed up to ask them to hide it by default.
In conclusion, Mastodon is exhausting
this is a real problem within the broad culture there. it was never explained to me why my face was so offensive i had to hide it from everyone, just an expected behavior i was supposed to have already known about. very alienating
