squircular reasoning

@spiders

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traitorous fifth column secret fae here to tear apart the human world floorboard by floorboard with my teeth

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squircular reasoning @spiders12/2/2022, 10:13 PM

liffy 💜@lifning

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 8:03 PM

Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.

nora @noracodes12/2/2022, 9:09 PM

Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 9:31 PM

Sorry! This post has been deleted by its original author.

liffy 💜@lifning12/2/2022, 9:51 PM

i think i would support a change to cohost where if you have adult content ticked you have to add at least one thing in the content warnings before the post-now button is enabled (save draft is still there), so the 18+ warning itself doesn't become meaningless across the site, but i dunno what authors of adult material would feel about this

squircular reasoning @spiders12/2/2022, 10:13 PM

accessibility perspective as an eye tracker user

i use the website with "expand adult content" turned on, because i already have a fatigue disorder so using the computer is super fucking exhausting anyways, and i rely on eye tracking in order to use the computer which makes everything take way more effort and spoons in general, and expecting me to have to click through again on a 18+ post, when i've already followed someone and so have implicitly agreed to see what they post, feels kind of annoying and like a unfair burden on me.

because i'm under the assumption that posts marked 18+ and nothing else are usually just some genre of horny, porn or just a lewd comment or whatever, which i probably actually followed them in part to see, rather than something actively upsetting which requires a content warning.

as it stands i don't really actually want people to use the content warning feature in particular to mark posts that don't actually have anything potentially harmful in them, because it completely defeats the purpose of the expand adult content setting, but currently that's like the only option, and that fucking sucks

and like maybe i could use the website with all content warnings also expanded but honestly, i don't really like that, because then posts which can deal actual psychic damage to me are auto opened just as often as cute porn that was tagged "cw: petplay".

if we get a repeat of mastodon cw culture where a huge proportion of posts are behind "content warnings" because they actually function more as a subject line, it just makes the website more unusable for me and more exhausting (and repeatedly needing to focus my jittery eye tracker on a tiny button and click it HAS contributed to me using masto less this year).

i would like for the adult content setting to have some other descriptive field that is not just the content warning feature, which i feel should be reserved for stuff that the person making the post in good faith feels is specifically potentially triggering.

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in reply to @xkeeper's post:

Mansa @Nekomansa12/2/2022, 9:08 PM

I think it might help if the adult content marker opened a line for describing the content

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 9:17 PM

yep. it is absolutely a ui/ux failure too

katherine morayati @morayati12/2/2022, 9:11 PM

quick question, apologies -- where would you put the description? the tags? the adult checkbox doesn't seem to have any input field for this that I could find

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 9:17 PM

the content warning system, mostly. it's really not surfaced in the ui well at all. :(

Kirobsi @Kirobsi12/9/2022, 1:13 AM

yes god please

in reply to @noracodes's post:

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 9:29 PM

i would argue that using unlabeled cws is, in fact, harmful: it's like email. imagine if no email you got ever had a subject line, so you had no fucking clue what was behind it.

the straw that broke my back w/ this, today, was one that was... a discord rant. it was not 18+ at all. there was not a single thing involved that had any reason to be behind an 18+ warning. but it was. edit: and it helps redefine the 18+ tag as meaningless. it doesn't imply anything. it doesn't say anything other than "you have to click here an extra time to read what's behind this."

there is no demand here to use specific or detailed warnings. it's just put something here so that i know what i'm getting into. even if it's just one word like "nudity". nobody should have to blind dive into shit.

edit: i'm going to just reshare with this instead of it being a comment

@yumegaze12/2/2022, 9:46 PM

one thing that could easily solve (or at least help a little bit) is if the 18+ flag didn't cover the headline. usually the headline is to give the reader context, it's the subject of the post. i still advocate for concise and descriptive content warnings though, since there's a lot of people that don't write headlines at all

but yeah, content warnings on 18+ posts is an absolute necessity

nora @noracodes12/2/2022, 9:49 PM

yeah, I agree with this; personally I would be in favor of always (or by default) collapsing posts that have a headline and don't have a --- readmore point.

@yumegaze12/2/2022, 10:05 PM

hmm i guess this could be useful? but even then, if people didn't use the content warnings correctly, we end up with the same situation. i think this "posting etiquette" is essential to make things work, maybe something detailed on the community guidelines

other thing i think doesn't really work well right now is the "18+ page" feature. every post is automatically flagged as 18+ content, and there's no way to individually disable that through posts... anyway

brl @brl12/2/2022, 10:01 PM

I mean, to date has it ever been anything other than furry porn here?

@AndreL12/3/2022, 5:03 AM

Nude photography is being posted. Your call whether that is art or porn.

in reply to @xkeeper's post:

nora @noracodes12/2/2022, 9:36 PM

I don't think it makes sense to call it harmful. Someone I follow is not harming me by not CWing something, by not using CWs the way I'd prefer, or by using unlabelled 18+ labels. I can always unfollow them, or in the worst case, block them. It can be frustrating; it can be rude; but I don't think it can be harmful. I find it frustrating when people don't CW certain things, but I would never message them to demand that they do so, or say that they'd harmed me by not doing so.

i think mastodon cw culture is toxic as hell.

I'm not sure what the relevance of this is.

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 9:41 PM

it may not be harmful to you, but imagine that you really didn't like seeing certain things (say, nudity) and now you have a culture where the 18+ warning can either be completely irrelevant (discord rant) or maybe that content you really can't handle seeing, and there's no way to know or even brace yourself for it.

it's expecting users to open random cabinet doors without telling them what's behind it. sometimes there's nothing behind the door, sometimes it's a cartoon boxing glove that punches you in the face. but that also implies "harmful" needs to be lasting, hurting harm and not, say, stubbed toes, where they'll eventually heal and stop hurting after a bit.

as for masto: it's because mastodon cw culture often devolves into toxic spirals of how everyone should post everything behind a cw for no real reason. talking about hockey? cw it. food? cw. the current weather? cw.

this isn't about that. this is about blank, empty cws. i do not care about how detailed or explanatory something is as long as it exists and is somewhat relevant.

nora @noracodes12/2/2022, 9:48 PM

that also implies "harmful" needs to be lasting, hurting harm and not, say, stubbed toes, where they'll eventually heal and stop hurting after a bit.

ah, this makes total sense to me. i'm still wary of calling this kind of thing harmful versus just rude or something like that, but i absolutely see what you mean; it can certainly make an environment hostile to be in. i actually do have that experience with Cohost, around some topics, especially since arbitrary string filters aren't a thing yet.

mastodon cw culture often devolves into toxic spirals of how everyone should post everything behind a cw for no real reason.

i guess i don't see the harm in people putting cws on things that you personally don't need a cw for. certainly, demanding that people cw things can be toxic, esp. in combination with other power dynamics, but who cares if the post about hockey says "hockey, click here to read more"?

in general, i don't really see why having more, and more descriptive, CWs is a bad thing, but i've definitely heard that opinion, mostly on here. if you have insight to share, i'd appreciate it.

edit: another user shared that it's a problem for eye tracker users because it requires significantly more interactions to read posts.

signal eleven @widr12/2/2022, 10:08 PM

mastodon culture around content warnings is so fucking toxic. i see some shit like someone posting about how posts that touch on politics should be cw'd in case someone doesn't want to engage with politics anywhere and i had to stay my writhing hand like Ashitaka

like the wrongness of the prevailing strand of attitudes towards content warnings there is so braided and labyrinthine it's difficult to even reproach coherently

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 10:11 PM

i saw someone doing it with hockey and i'm just like why. i love having to separately interact with every single post just to read banal, basic shit

signal eleven @widr12/2/2022, 10:17 PM

and when it intersects with "i don't want to see politics :) :) :)" and all the awful garbage thinking that entails it's just so much worse!! yeah hold on let me just carefully spoiler only the things that touch on the state of affairs in the world in a way that's dissonant with this specific dipshit's idea of the correct status quo. imagine humoring this kind of dumbass mindset and helping these idiots recreate a No Politics Allowed forum environment as if we haven't seen that before. reinventing the foundations of gamergate from primitive first principles lookin ass. im mad just thinking about it

Kay @Kayin12/2/2022, 10:08 PM

God this made me take a CW off of a post once which is like, such a UI failure for me to force me to chose between such stark visibility reduction for me wanting to restrict a small part of the post. I ended up using a readmore and a manual CW but there is supposed to be a system for this! 😭

Need some kinda 'inline' type of CW

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 10:09 PM

i believe these were called "spoiler tags" in the before times

edit: you can kind of do this with [details][summary]xxx[/summary]content[/details] tags, but it's not intuitive to anyone and requires knowing how html works, so

signal eleven @widr12/2/2022, 10:12 PM

yeah it also displays ~~out-of-line~~ as a block instead of even inline-block, and i can't figure out to make it inline nicely; i think it would be nice to have spoiler syntax markup that can darken the text inline while still showing the "why" like i've seen on some forums but idk what the philosophy or dev timeline of that sort of thing would be, especially since so far cohost has cloven pretty close to the most-correct form of markdown

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 10:16 PM

wouldn't really be much of a problem if they went with expanding, say, a custom tag, or allowed specific styling. toggleable hidden text is trivial, toggleable hidden text within the limitations of what cohost allows an individual to do is... considerably harder

signal eleven @widr12/2/2022, 10:19 PM

yayaya

Kay @Kayin12/2/2022, 10:21 PM

Well that doesn't fix other people doing CWs poorly, but it certainly helps me out, thanks!

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 10:25 PM

this site badly needs one of those toolbars with formatting tricks for the vast majority of people who do not and have no reason to be intimately familiar with html. i hope we get one eventually.

in reply to @lifning's post:

@yumegaze12/2/2022, 10:24 PM

aye, 18+ content should enable content warnings automatically so you can't post anything without describing what it is

(also good descriptions, to help the "filtered content warnings" feature)

in reply to @spiders's post:

X @xkeeper12/2/2022, 10:14 PM

the only thing i'd say re: your post is that "...specifically followed for that content..." only applies to things posted directly by people you follow. shared posts from followers is a different bag. but otherwise, agreed

~@modulusshift12/2/2022, 10:21 PM

as I understand it, 18+ warning reasons are planned as part of the broader 18+ policy, which staff is waiting on hiring the fourth person to finalize and implement. so, it's relatively near-term on the roadmap, at least, if farther back than it arguably should be.

nora @noracodes12/2/2022, 10:24 PM

Thanks for sharing your experience! Do you think a good halfway point would be putting content warnings for 18+ posts in tags with prefixes like "cw: topic"? This was the norm on Tumblr for a long time, due to not having a CW field, and with proper software support it worked pretty well!

Unambiguous Robin 🐦@Unambiguous-Robin12/2/2022, 11:34 PM

I basically agree with this.

I do think it's important to use content warnings with things, but I don't like the idea of just assigning "content warnings" to all 18+ posts, because... well, to be frank, I feel like it implies sexuality is inherently stressful or problematic, and I don't agree with that.

But I wouldn't mind if the "adult content" setting was modified so that it came with its own set of tags attached to it, separate from the "content warning" tags. Because even if I don't think sexuality is inherently problematic, it is very individual, and it's worth notifying people about what they're about to see.

ela @eladnarra12/3/2022, 12:24 AM

(and repeatedly needing to focus my jittery eye tracker on a tiny button and click it HAS contributed to me using masto less this year).

As a periodic user of eye tracking when my RSI flares up, I have a couple programs to lessen jittery stuff - I don't want to offer unsolicited advice, but if you're interested in more info just let me know! 🙂

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