shapelessink

Queer artist & writer

  • He/She/They/It

Alexandra/Lexi
MFBC Archival Creature
I write and draw horny freak shit and also stuff that makes you cry - as I am wont to do.
"Can't a boy be confusing?"


Telegram Channel
t.me/+_aSxgndoXWc5ZmM0
Personal Website
shapelessink.com/
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in reply to @boarlord's post:

The platform has been explicitly supportive and encouraging of adult content since the very beginning (there's an entire screen full of paragraphs about it in the first staff post/the "introduction to cohost" that laid out their plans and goals, from months before the website was revealed to the public). Encouraging adult content on the platform and allowing everything they are able to allow to be posted has been part of the site's rules and ideology since before day one.

In my own experience, my very first attempt at writing erotica for an audience (on another, much smaller account) has received quite a few comments from folks who enjoyed it. I feel like I'm on a different website from the one you describe.

What concrete changes would you propose to fix these problems, while maintaining United States legal compliance so that the site as a whole can continue to exist?

Yes, I read that same Staff post. That’s what motivated me to join the site in the first place. Why I went all in. But stating their intended goals in a post made 11 months ago isn’t the same as achieving them 11 months later. The expression of their ideology should be self-evident in the experience of the site with each passing day; in fact, it should be a force multiplier as more people sign up. Maybe it will, I’m not discounting that! I even say in the post that perhaps there’s a missing critical mass. Later, I acknowledge how early it is for the platform and that Staff are seemingly doing the impossible.

In terms of concrete steps, what if Staff reminded everyone about this ideology in their weekly Patch Notes? Why not give us the option, if you’re an Adult Account, to get rid of all disclaimers/warnings/notices so I'm tacitly reassured that I belong here? I’m activated by many things but I know it’s my responsibility to manage my activation, not theirs.

And, to be clear, in no way am I suggesting breaking U.S. compliance laws. I don’t know why bring that up because that’s… absurd?

I’ve been a sex worker since 2019. I know how banks and payment processors can seize my funds at a moment’s notice. I’ve had to hand over biometric data to third-party verification monopolists like Yoti just to continue doing my job. I’ve filled elaborate release forms to prove that the people I work with are who they say they are. I’ve spoken to WIRED a few times about the intersection of erotic labour, compliance, and platform capitalism in the wake of OnlyFans threatening to ban erotic labour. How would making cohost a target for law enforcement officers wielding SESTA/FOSTA, or whatever version of EARNIT or the breakdown of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that the U.S. will eventually pass, benefit me and other erotic labourers? How would jeopardizing whatever relationship they hope to have with a payment processor solve things? It wouldn't, which is why I never went there.

And while I’m genuinely happy for you — I’d like to read your erotica! — my experience of this site is what it is and no less valid than yours. I'm confused as to why you think your experience is, or should be, universal.

Furthermore, let’s return to that Staff post. What it outlines, at best, is an acceptable use policy. It’s a few bullet points about acceptable behaviour on the platform, not a passionate screed about the marginalization of erotic labour nor "an entire screen of paragraphs," as you put it. I’m giving them a wide berth because we all have to start somewhere and I think there’s promise in a slower species of social media, but let’s not act like merely stating what is or isn’t allowed is the same as an ideological manifesto in defense of the work our most vulnerable users. We’re better than that.

Apologies if I came off as confrontational in that; it wasn't my intent. You've got more [any!] experience here, where I don't. I only mentioned US legal compliance because from what the staff post (and staff, elsewhere) have said, it seems to be their primary guideline in putting restrictions on content when they have to (and not just when they think they might be forced to, as has happened in the past on other platforms). Jae has said more recently they specifically have an ideological commitment to allowing as much as they can, but it was in a comment and those are damn hard to find.

Not trying to suggest my experience is universal or the only valid one, either, because it isn't! I think what I was trying to get at was that experience like that is extremely hard to define on a site like this as an effect of the website's structure, or the actions of the people running it, when it's so dependent on the behavior of members of a social network (in the graph relation sense, not the platform sense). We may well be practically using different websites even though we're both on cohost because my audience is primarily queer furries, and it may be quite different in composition and behavior from yours.

The no-visible-numbers approach Cohost takes (and the fact that personal metrics/analytics aren't yet implemented) makes it even harder to test, too. I have no idea how big my own audience is, or anyone else's, only that it's bigger on one account than on the other.

Getting back to my original question - I asked about concrete changes because I am legitimately interested in how you'd structure a site to encourage such things independent of social connections.

Why not give us the option, if you’re an Adult Account, to get rid of all disclaimers/warnings/notices so I'm tacitly reassured that I belong here?

Do you mean getting rid of the warnings you see on others' posts? I would personally like that option.

[also re: the erotica: i keep my pages separate and the other one pseudonymous, as I prefer they not be explicitly linked together. it's tagged appropriately.]

I have to apologize myself. I went all in on you and made a few unfair assumptions of my own. That’s on me. I’m sore because this discussion is another expression of a very old fight between payment processors, the U.S. legal apparatus, and, ultimately, trans and queer people, who make up the majority of sex workers. (One might argue that SESTA/FOSTA's real success was moving the Overton Window on acceptable violence against trans people and where we congregate online.) Still, no excuse for baring my tusks at you.

You’re right regarding the opacity of composition and behavior. Case in point, I’m also a furry, I’ve been one since the early days of VCL and Yerf. I rechost a fair amount of furry porn on this page because I want the folks I follow, the majority of whom are also queer furries, to succeed. Yet we seem to have vastly different experiences on engagement. Not denying your experience, to be clear, but pointing out the strangenesses of networked communities.

But I do know from experience that technical systems influence behavior in ways big and small even if you can’t measure them reliably. And if I follow a furry who is prolific on Twitter, Telegram, and Discord, but quiet on Cohost, I have to wonder why, even if it’s conjecture. The promise of this site rules. In my first few weeks, I gushed about it on Twitter and tried to convert all my friends. It reminds me of webrings and the early days of Furnation.

Regarding a concrete step, yes, that’s what I mean! With the warnings on top of warnings, it feels like I’m looking at erotic content through a chain link fence. What are the psychological consequences of such a hermetic system? I don’t know, either.

I'm often guilty of just liking content and moving on... I often feel like I have nothing to say. Guess it's a part of the Internet culture at large, "don't say you like it when you have a serviceable like button"?

I'm not sure how one would make a platform welcoming to sex workers while simultaneously keeping it "general" (as in, not being a platform specifically for sex work).

See, that’s fascinating because I’ve always thought of you as someone who does leave a comment. And I totally get it, I sometimes can’t explain why I like something or I simply don’t have the time.

All this began with me asking myself a few questions: why am I still here? What sets cohost apart from other places? What makes me want to stay? Right now, not a lot. Most of the folks I follow haven’t uploaded anything in weeks, if not months. What I share doesn’t go anywhere, erotic or not. I’m not really into shitposting. I don’t have the luxury to use the internet leisurely and a shitpost as a unit of content is still tacit advertising for the culture of a site, so, unpaid labour.

I think Twitter and Tumblr before SESTA/FOSTA (and the latter’s purge of Adult Content back in 2018) are good examples of general audience sites that were... if not friendly then open to erotic labour in a way that didn't make you feel bad for posting it. Yes, cohost allows adult content but I hear more about all the new ways you can block it and rarely about any new ways to surface it, preserve it. That isn’t to say they aren’t working on it or haven’t mentioned it in a post once but I shouldn’t have to obsessively follow Staff for confirmation.

For what it's worth, I've always always appreciated your comments! They really make my day!

I'm sorry that Cohost doesn't feel inviting/accepting. I personally find it more chill and better flowing than Twitter, but then again I am a "terminally online" person, for better or worth.

I'm really glad I manage to lift your mood with my comments. 😊

The shape and name of the like button is important, too. It used to be a star on Twitter back in the day, and treated as a "favorite" post. This changes the dynamic with interaction a fair bit, and you can imagine how "like" would later be used to drive up engagement.

Personally I feel if your system is going to be used like bookmarks it should just be bookmarks, and having a seperate system for kudos to nudge people with, to keep your bookmarks clear.

I don’t blame you, that’s extremely real and I appreciate you saying that 🤎

I hate how we got here. As a culture. Since making porn and porn games is what I do for a living, I really enjoy horny comments shared in good faith. I respect that that isn’t everyone’s stance but I also dislike the alternative which is to say nothing at all.

I feel this as well. I was rightly conditioned by my parents to be respectful toward others and to not reduce them to their sexuality. However, because I was never taught how to interact in regards to sex, that in turn makes it really hard to know exactly how to express horny thoughts in a mutually comfortable way... or to know when I should and shouldn't accept certain comments from others.

absolutely feel this. i'm an artist and i know a lot of artists so i have an okay sense for what unwelcome comments look like, but i still don't feel especially comfortable saying anything remotely sexual at someone i've never spoken to before, even if it's just "hey nice butt"

The silent consumption is something I feel myself, and now that twitter's added in the viewcount into shit it's all the more apparent that many, if not most people, just don't interact with stuff, be it out of fear, apathy, or otherwise.

I think that the microblogging aspect of twitter is to blame. The forced bite-size for content and relative ease to get in the flow of pressing the I Like This Button and Insert Into Timeline Button over and over (as opposed to stopping that flow each time to comment on content) has built a collective dopamine effect in how content, but especially NSFW content, is expected to be consumed on the internet.

Cohost, in this regard, is exactly the opposite of twitter. It doesn't care if the viewer runs out of content, since there is no algorithm it will simply spit out what content you're subscribed to and then immediately halt once it runs out of such. And then there's the content warnings, the goddamn content warnings. Nothing kills the mood harder than having to read through a warning that might potentially contain something you wouldn't want to see inside, only to find out that it's actually completely harmless and got past your whitelist because the person in question used very specifically worded warning phrases (tags?) that could never have been on your whitelist.

I get that Cohost is meant to self-moderate its community, and it has so far done so excellently in my experience, but the fact that there's so many features like this which make content, let alone erotic content just out of reach (where are all the comments on the OP, anyway?) is a huge detractor from using the site. A lot of NSFW folks I've seen that have used cohost--even the failthful ones--are burnt out and have gone back to other places, and I feel like this is a big culprit.

I really hope that the "just open up all the content warnings automatically" setting comes soon, since I feel like the current UX setup to let people hide their own content has been a huge failure. People need a way to sidestep this all at once until the kinks can get worked out in the system, and something else better comes out of it.

the "turn off all the content warnings" button can't come soon enough, i'm glad to mark my work with an appropriate cw for those who need it, but for me getting the kinks worked out of the system means literally getting more kinks displayed out of the system

Very much this. I appreciate that they now have a blacklist that creates a content warning as opposed to just outright hiding posts, but... I would also like something that shows everything besides that, please!!!

I say this not to be confrontational (not my goal at all), but as @atomicthumbs brought up above, we are extremely committed to allowing adult content and will continue to do so unless we are forced to do otherwise. this is an ideological thing for us, not a Business decision. and as you note, we are a small team who can't do everything.

so my question is: what do you want us to do differently? we've implemented several changes since launch as to how adult content is displayed, almost entirely to reduce any perceived stigma around how we were displaying it. we're open to further changes, and i understand you're not happy with how we're currently doing things, but we're dependent on actionable feedback for improving this sort of thing.

I'm not OP of course so don't want to talk over her, but one thing I noticed when taking a quick look through some NSFW content on here is that there doesn't seem to be any unified tagging strategy to surface this content. Granted, that can be a struggle in any subcommunity on this site, but maybe there's a big enough psychological distinction between "scrolling for shitchosts of a certain genre" and "scrolling for horny content"?

I wonder if it would be productive to provide some sort of auto-tag to everything marked "adult content" in the interest of providing a feed that surfaces all of the horny content on the site, regardless of whether it has the "nsfw" or "nsfw art" tags, or whichever tags you may be looking for. This would provide an overview that would certainly be too broad for most people's tastes, but that way consumers of NSFW content can see what the offerings are and maybe follow new profiles/common tags from there

Hi, I appreciate you writing back! Similarly, I write this not to confront. Here’s where I’m coming from followed by two pieces of actionable feedback.

I commend you and your team’s stated goals, I really do, but the reality is that it is no longer enough for a platform to simply say sex workers and erotic laborers are welcome. We lost that battle when SESTA/FOSTA was signed into law. When you reach a certain size, some combination of NCOSE/Exodus Cry/Visa/Mastercard/Stripe/Paypal may come after you and likely win. This is why GameJolt suddenly banned porn games and why everyone is quietly worried about Itch. Sex workers lost a crucial social media site they designed themselves roughly this time last year.

Broadly speaking, the solution isn’t technological but political. But that isn’t to say things can’t be done to make the experience of Cohost better. And I want this place to succeed! If I didn’t care I would’ve logged out and never looked back.

Actionable Feedback 1
I think what would help is an option to turn off all Content Warnings on other people’s posts. Leave them open without warnings or notices. I know what I want, I also know that there are hazards seeking it out. Like I said to @Atomicthumbs, that’s my responsibility. You can limit this option to pages that identify as 18+ to prevent minors from abusing it. Right now, I get a warning that says “This post contains 18+ content.” followed by a warning that says “This post has content warnings for: whatever” followed by a click-through button. I’m diligent about filtering tags and content warnings but even that can’t handle all the possible variations. The cumulative psychic effect is the same: There is something inherently wrong with this content and with you for seeking it out because it may offend someone, somewhere.

This may improve the deadening silence I and other erotic labourers experience, but I don't know how you test that.

Caveat
I recognize suggesting a fundamental change like this is no easy task and that requires time, research, scoping. I make no claims on Staff’s priorities, but I think there’s some merit to this change down the line.

Actionable Feedback 2
A clear statement of values located in an easy-to-reach part of the site that includes Staff’s take on erotic labour. Not just an Acceptable Use Policy, but an unequivocal statement. People need to know where the site stands and they shouldn’t have to dig through the archives or past comments to find out. Culture is defined top-down, right?

Caveat
No easy task, companies hire entire agencies to draft such a document, but that’s where we are with the internet. It may also be used against you by bad faith actors.