An Immodest Proposal. (PLEASE READ) · 12:37am Nov 19th, 2020
The inability to shield disturbing content has always been a problem on Fimfiction. This problem has recently been getting much worse.
I may have a solution.
No, not the [Fetish] tag. This is different.
There's a lot of friction between people who use this website. We've seen it recently with Nazi stuff. We see it every time somepony posts a story about rape, incest, homophobia, foal sexuality, genocide, or diapers. People on all sides of each of these topics are constantly angry about it, and sometimes even do things to try to push those they disagree with off the website. Most stories with controversial content, some of which are thought provoking and well-written, get downvoted by people who have zero interest in reading them more often than they actually get read.
I think the problem is getting worse. Civility is becoming a thing of the past. People are doxxing, mass-downvoting, threatening each other, and generally just being horrible. It makes this wonderful resource on which we all rely less usable and much less fun, both for authors and readers.
Good authors have left Fimfiction over this, and most of you know I'm not exaggerating.
I think the reason there hasn't been a solution is that the obvious solution is terrible: adding specific content tags and an automatic filter for tagging, like Derpibooru. This is bad for many reasons. It would make the site more complicated to use, especially for new users trying to find stories. It would draw attention to the exact same content that people want to ignore. Additionally, it would open the door to outsiders using those tags to locate lots of objectionable stories of a single type all at once, so they can write up a trash piece in the Atlantic about how bronies are all—ahem—"WWII enthusiasts"... or far worse. None of this would be good for the website, authors, or readers.
There is, however, a simple solution that would work. In addition to the "mature" toggle, we could have a second, completely independent toggle for "taboo" stories and groups. Stories and groups that focus on genocide, heavy use of prejudicial themes, bullying/insult groups, diaper/scat/pee, incest, foalcon (or, non-sexual foal romance with adults), grotesque levels of gore, racial slurs, torture, rape, or anything else that the majority of people would find highly objectionable, would be marked with a special [Taboo] tag.
Three important points follow:
1) This is not related to the [Fetish] tag. Most fetish stories aren't truly taboo (e.g. transgender sexual themes, transformation, size difference, bondage, dubcon), and many taboo stories are not tagged fetish (e.g. genocide, torture, foal romance).
2) [Non-con] stories would automatically get tagged [Taboo], but that's the only tag that would automatically force it to be added.
3) This is not a new story rating! Non-mature stories can contain taboo topics. This is a big part of the problem, because currently, people who use the M filter are still exposed to material most users will find objectionable. An adult-foal romance, a comedy about genocide or torture, or incest romance would qualify as taboo even if the story is rated E, and there are several E-rated stories on Fimfiction like this as well as hundreds if not thousands of T-rated stories.
The entire point of the [Taboo] toggle is that you'd have to click a box that says something like, "I know I may be exposed to highly objectionable content, and I will turn the filter back on if I am offended".
Would this improve your Fimfiction experience? Plenty. Here's why.
1) Readers (and authors) would no longer flee the site because they're offended by having to be exposed to taboo topics.
2) Authors would no longer flee the site because they're tired of being assaulted, harassed, and threatened by people who have no interest whatsoever in reading their stories.
3) The voting system for stories with taboo things right now is garbage. It's a measure of how taboo a story is, not how well it's written, which means if you want to read literature that raises difficult questions or takes you outside your comfort zone, there is no reliable metric for which authors have tackled the subject well.
4) People are so angry. I am beyond tired of seeing story after story after story with a comment thread from Tartarus as people post attacks because they don't like (diapers, prejudice, incest) or whatever the story contains.
5) Right now, some authors intentionally don't mention taboo content in the story description, because keeping it secret means they're less likely to get vote-bombed: the only readers who will be upset are the ones who take the time to read the story—which is not fair to those readers, but if an author wants a chance at actually hitting the feature box with taboo content I understand why they'd be tempted to downplay what it contains.
Now I'd like to ask you to do something for me.
If you've been here a while I'm sure you realize this a legitimate issue. It's always been a problem, and it's getting worse right now. Even if you don't agree with my proposal, please signal boost this blog and link here so people can discuss the topic in the comments below.
Thanks. 
EDIT: I've been asked to clarify much of the above but I don't want to rewrite it (you'd miss the changes), so let me just add two things here.
1) Don't get hung up on the word "taboo". It could be "strong content" or whatever you like. The point is to have a tag authors can choose to put stories in when they know the content would be highly objectionable. This does not need to be policed by Fimfiction staff unless somepony posts something extremely objectionable and turns off comments. If comments are on, people who visit the story can just say "please tag this as strong content". See here for more detail.
2) Most of the content I'm discussing is more disturbing than the examples people are debating. When I talk about "prejudice", for one, I don't mean stories of LGBT people dealing with prejudice. I mean stories that use prejudice for comedy, sex, or to make a statement, or groups that are designed to insult stories, genres, characters, or authors. See here for more detail.
That's just called child grooming.
Also, I'm not sure this would be that different than the problems that come from having a complex booru-style filter on a site meant to host fan literature. It would put stories that have "here's why LGBTphobia is bad" and "realistic depiction of a fantasy/real-world prejudice" on par with "haha watch me fetishize different kinds of sexual abuse" which is more demeaning than anything else. I certainly wouldn't want to write a story that attempts to even just reference a heavy topic to be in the same category as the same person who is arguing for "muh incest" or whatever it is that's attempting to be softened lately.
This is a very interesting idea. I completely agree with you that the obvious solution is a terrible one, for the reasons you list and more. I think this one will run into some problems too, but I don't know that they're insurmountable.
Firstly, who decides what is and isn't taboo? The site has an international reach, and even the mod team come from (at least) two different continents. Age of consent varies country to country regarding all manner of sex acts, on top of things like drinking. If the legal standpoints are that varied, how much is that true of what is and isn't taboo as well? Sex outside of marriage would be taboo in some areas. In others, sex with young teenagers might not be nearly as taboo as you'd expect. So I think the site would have to reach a consensus on that. Is tentacle porn taboo? What about racism between different pony races? I think there's a danger that anything even vaguely unusual will be swept under the taboo heading, in which case everyone will turn off those filters so they can still enjoy things at the milder end, and therefore render the whole concept useless.
If I might float a possible alternative, what about an option asking if authors would like their stories to appear in the new/updated column on release? If you write, say, stallion x stallion romances, then there's probably a much bigger portion of the site that would see that in the new column and downvote than would upvote it. And those who are looking for that kind of thing are probably already in a group focused on it. So this might be a way to publish a story directly to a group audience, as well as your followers, while bypassing the downvoters on the main page.
I'm not trying to jump on this and say you're wrong, just that it's an interesting topic to discuss.
I'm for this.
Perhaps there is something to be said for specific content tags as well, though: we could have certain tags that automatically flag stories as taboo, and people who never enable taboo stories just never have to worry about those tags. People who want some specific subset of taboo content could still filter out what they find objectionable and don't want.
This (sort of) solves the "digging for trouble" problem with hitpiece writers because now it's a lot easier to argue that they were just out looking for trouble because they had to deliberately turn on the taboo view, and then further deliberately look for specific content tags. It's much harder for them to falsely depict this stuff in shrill "Kids could accidentally see this! Won't someone please think of the children!" terms that way.
I sincerely applaud your desire to do something about... uh, the messiness that is human society played out on a pony fanfiction site but—not to sound like a conservative arguing against socialism—I fear it is simply human nature—an urge deeper than the need for food, the drive to reproduce, even the desire to love and be loved—to argue with strangers on the internet.
5400643
But mommm https://xkcd.com/386/
The most obvious question that comes with this is who decides what constitutes taboo topics. Okay, a pre-cutie mark cmc clop fic is foalcon, but what about a romantic fic between the Student 6 with implied sexuality? Twilight banging Shining Armor is obviously incest, but what about one where she bangs a grown up Spike? Does consensual non-consent fall under taboo or just the regular fetish tag?
And what about people who enjoy incest fics, but find rape icky? Or who like mind-control rape fics fine, but don't like more violent depictions of rape? There are a lot of nuances to the whole topic that are really hard to distill down to a single tag.
5400647
Man XKCD, there’s a rabbit hole I haven’t been down in a while.
As someone who seriously dislikes the prevalence of certain fetish stories, I can agree we should have a better system, but I'm not sure how to do it either. I'm also not sure if the incivility problem is so much worse than it used be, as you describe.
Your proposal is a decent start, but I do think Ice Star is right.
5400638
I'm gonna agree 100% here. In a system like this, there should separate tags for stories that handle serious and heavy subjects and stories that are about extreme taboo fetishes and stuff like that.
I like this idea, but I don’t know if it’d solve the problem. People who want to hate on some specific thing(s) will just trawl through that filtered section of the site and find what they’re looking for in higher concentration than they currently do in the New column[1], and heaven help you if you want to find one thing in that section but are disgusted by everything else in it. It also makes for a soft target for another brony hit piece, with all the objectionable-sounding stuff grouped together. Hiding that content altogether unless you’re logged in might help.
Any solution to this problem is going to have to deal with the existing stories too; if a new tag or tags are added, an army of volunteers with special site powers (and strong constitutions) should add tags as appropriate with still-active authors able to contest that decision. Even given a perfect tag system, I’m skeptical this will ever happen.
Here’s another idea that I’ve had for a while that might help in a different way, but might not. It might also be too hard to implement:
If you want to comment or vote on a story, you need to have ‘read’ X percent of it. In practice it’d mean if you want to comment or vote on a story you need to have scrolled through X percent of its content.
This is solely to improve the drive-by downvote/comment problem by adding a slight bit of inertia that the target audience won’t notice anyway. It won’t stop the truly determined trolls, but practically nothing will.
[1] it’s worth noting that this happens to totally non-objectionable stories too, just because it’s an unpopular idea (or ship)
5400657
It definitely doesn't account for why certain things are taboo in the first place, and that there are severe discrepancies between breaking different ones. It's one thing if I decided to break a taboo of something like "I shook someone's hand using my left hand in a culture that sees that as rude" or "I'm considered loud and obnoxious with my communication style in different regions of the world" and decided to break that compared to if I came from a culture that thought harming people from objectively underdeveloped age groups were allowed to be handled certain ways. Two of those are rooted in cultural relativism and something that breaking would mostly result in awkward/possibly angry conversations. The other should get me to be put at the business end of someone's weapon of choice.
Plus, this doesn't account for there being readers who might want to read about certain taboos but not others. I'm down for reading someone writing a universe where ponies consider it taboo if you do not cement arranged marriages with truckloads of specifically color-coordinated jelly beans or tackles how polyamorous relationships being a norm would alter a society (something taboo in many Western countries, but not harmful). I'm not down to read a story where 'taboo' is used as a way to soften something harmful.
5400662
I would read the heck out of that AU.
5400662
I think nitpicking over what the word "taboo" means is missing the point. I don't care if it's [Taboo] or [Strong Warning] or whatever you want to call it.
Separately, I've been trying to word things very carefully to avoid people using this discussion to posture about issues of consent, which you've done in both of your posts. I understand your motivation (and please don't take this the wrong way), but please don't do this. Nopony here thinks that grooming children for sex is acceptable in any way. I didn't write this post to defend any kind of content, nor to generate arguments over which characterizations of content are "acceptable" or which sequences of words are "harmful" to a reader. That is the exact problem I was trying to avoid by doing this in the first place.
The point is simply to have a "dead dove, do not eat" category that authors can choose to put stories in when they know the content of those stories will be highly controversial. So people who read them have been thoroughly warned and have nopony to blame but themselves if they discover they're offended.
I suppose one could say the site has that already in a sense, because you can turn off ratings or comments, but I think ratings and comments can both be very valuable for controversial content. Additionally, having a story remove ratings and comments does nothing to prevent people who don't want to see disturbing content from seeing it.
5400666
Technically yes, culturally no, since disabling either is itself taboo on fimfic. Case in point, I disabled ratings but not comments for a speedwrite/exercise I did last night, since I didn't want to attract attention (good or bad, didn't want criticism, didn't want feature box). First comment -- and with my writer hat off and reader hat on, they are completely correct given site norms:
I'm not sure if this is in favour, opposed, or neither to your suggestion. But I digress.
5400666
Considering the pony community is known for this, I think it's inevitable that it would be one of the first things that came up because it's unfortunate that it isn't the extreme worst-case scenario of what people would do with the tag. Plus, there's really nothing more awkward than seeing an adult and a child being described as romance. It would be like if I called a terroristic act someone waking up on the wrong side of the bed unironically and in some kind of public sphere, no less. 'Taboo' just means it's forbidden to some level, it doesn't say why and I think that's the problem with the label because it doesn't distinguish whether a thing is bad because it brings inherent harm or not.
5400665
Same, sister.
5400660
I've actually volunteered to be a re-tagger of inactive authors' stuff and grouchy tag mod for all needed updates and the like in the past, as well as just suggesting to other staff that the position be created. Fimfic actually has a really good label system, the problem is that it's only good if people are willing to a) comply with it and b) staff are willing to enforce it. You can still find stories that refuse to tag certain characters, basic genres, or really old stuff (particularly in Rage Review archives) where rape stories are given the romance tag only seriously. The closest there is to a solution just to feed into a huge problem: you have to report the content, but the report goes to the same spread-thin and few unpaid volunteers who are expected to have universal specialization with all Fimfic's problems. The same people you'd go to for story-related issues are the same folks you go to for social conflicts and site bugs. It's not right, and knighty certainly doesn't seem to be quick to want that to change any time soon. I feel really bad for the mods because a report for 'there's like 50 mistagged stories from an inactive user' should be handled differently than 'this person evaded a block on their main account and is now harassing me' because those carry different weights.
5400666 This is a really good reply! To the point that I think it might be worth adding much of it onto the bottom of your original post.
5400662
5400666
I get that you don't want an argument about consent but Ice still has a point I believe.
The meaning of "Taboo" is relevant because otherwise we have some very dubious fetish shit and serious content like LGBT issues sorted into the same category. I really do not think they should be. I think it's clear why that might be a problem. Unfortunately, we do have to consider these things. There needs to be more than one kind of tag that authors can use.
5400699
Yeah, pretty much the point. If all those many topics are just called 'taboo' it ends up implying they're all at the same level or of the same variety of taboo and that both should be overcome just because one can. Any story with a political theme could be considered taboo, whereas a story with a character committing a serious crime is also taboo. There would no way to gauge what kind of taboo it is. It's like when Fimfic only had a 'gore' tag for a lot of darker content. You wouldn't necessarily know if it was because a character was injured in an accident or because it was a war story of some kind even though both could be tagged as 'gore' instead of one as 'gore' and the other with some of the newer red tags.
5400684 5400702
Yes. Additionally, subjects like abuse or bullying are still sensitive and wrong, but they're not remotely in the same realm as fetish content. It's a little sickening to see an adult-child "relationship" being tagged romance. Unfortunately, we have something of a problem with this kind of content, so it will have to be tackled. My optimal solution isn't going to fly, so we have to find something else to deal with these kinds of stories.
We have a few tags to deal with darker content, so we could do something like that for "taboo" content. We shouldn't make it as detailed or useful as the tag system, but anything would be better than a universal tag for everything.
I think this is a good thing to be talking about. I'm very much not in the crowd this would be aimed at, I think, but clearly some people are, so if there can be some measure put into place that helps cut down on drama then I'm all for it.
My main doubt is with how well it's going to work if it's made a voluntary choice, though. I've seen people who post stories aimed to offend people; these are the sorts who're likely going to ignore this new tagging protocol because they want people who're offended by x topic to see their story about x topic. I've also seen people who don't expect something to become controversial.
If this policy were mostly aimed at authors, that's one thing. But it seems to me that if part of the intent of this policy would be to let people shield themselves from content they know they're better off not seeing, that's going to be undermined if there's an appreciable number of people who don't follow this convention for whatever reason. Again, I'm not in the crowd that would probably be affected by this, since I prefer no filters, so I don't know how important that problem is to fix. But if, say, I'm really bothered by foalcon and am happier when I don't have to acknowledge its existence, and foalcon being generally considered controversial or taboo or whatever doesn't stop the occasional idiot or troll or what have you from shoving it onto my screen, I have to wonder how much help the policy's actually done for me.
5400713
I mean it sounds like the main issues popping up are that different kinds of sexual/relationship abuse (incest and underage) don't have tags while other taboo things (prejudice, excrement(?), and non-sex related abuse) are common to see written about but can't really be labeled. I think that just adding red tags for those could certainly serve as something of a solution. The only nitpick I might have with that is that 'abuse' is a really general one for non-sexual content. Is it emotional/domestic/etc? Okay, but how much warrants it? Is it a 'bad ending' kind of warning by proxy? Still, I think that this could be a better solution than just 'taboo' because these are what keeps popping up in the discussion and on the site.
You're way, way overthinking this. Just remove the ability to downvote. A downvote doesn't really carry that much information. The objection may be made that neither does an upvote, which is true in a limited sense, but a large number of upvotes, regardless of the number of downvotes, is still the indicator of something that's at least worth reading the opening paragraphs because a lot of people seem to have liked it.
5400719
That is an issue. It's kind of ambiguous, more than most tags. One idea I have is to have it be tagged if it's likely to be particularly upsetting or if it is a focus for at least some section of the story, whether it's physical or emotional. Maybe emotional and physical should be separate though.
Maybe have a general "taboo fetish" tag for extreme fetishes, and a few tags for other kinds of upsetting content.
5400724
Oh wait, I think violence/abuse would be a decent combo to cover physical abuse. My brain just pulled a dumb. Though, if prejudice was a separate tag, I think it would be pretty safely implied that abuse could be a barrage of verbal/emotional/psychological/physical content, whereas non-con, underage, and incest would cover all sexual abuse.
Something I'd like to highlight in response to this issue and the inevitable question of 'Why can't this site just have a tagging system like Derpibooru?' is that this site is not like Derpibooru.
An image is instantaneous. Sure, you might want to spend a few seconds looking at an image, perhaps even a few minutes if it's really special. But you take in what it is in a single glance. By the time you've assessed whether or not it's something you want to see, it's too late. Because of this, Derpibooru needs a tagging system that hides things people might not want to see, so that they can already decide that for themselves.
Fimfiction already has a really good system for giving people an idea what the content is and then letting them decide if it's something they'd like to see - the story's title card. The title, cover picture, short description, long description, rating and warnings. No one is reading you a story containing things you don't want to see; you have to make that call yourself and choose to click on the story. There are already specific rules applying to what can and can't be shown in a story's title, description and image, such as nothing NSFW.
Because of that, I don't think the comparison to Derpibooru or other art sites is valid.
5400666
"dead dove, do not eat"
I hope you're not advocating the eating of live doves.
5400726
Not to mention, we already have a writing site with a derpibooru style tagging system. It's called AO3 and it is shit largely because the tags are a novel in of themselves. Someone clearly didn't know their medium very well.
5400723
I disagree. A large number of upvotes isn't a great indicator of quality, it's a great indicator that a lot of people have upvoted, for whatever reason(s). Those reasons may have something to do with quality, or they could be very different things.
The ratio of upvotes to downvotes conveys some important information that I don't think upvotes alone can capture completely.
5400723 Removing downvotes means even more of a dominance for established writers over newcomers. It's much easier to get 100 upvotes when you have 1,000 followers than when you have 10. So the total number of upvotes (or views) doesn't mean as much as a story's upvote-to-downvote ratio, because the latter puts all stories on a level playing field (or a more level one, at least - authors with lots of followers are still much better placed in delivering new stories to exactly the right people, who are more likely to upvote them).
The simple maths of the matter are that site user levels are much lower than they were in the fandom's heyday (but significantly higher than last year, which is an unexpected but joyous step in the right direction), so eight years ago it was much easier for an author to pick up followers, because there were more people around in general. A big number of those authors, however, are still around, and their 2012-era follower counts haven't diminished. Only half their followers may still be active, sure, but that's still way more than more recent authors, because they've been a 'big name' for longer, as well as being longer on the site in general and so having had more time to pick up followers. There was an interesting/depressing blog about this a couple of years ago, about how only one of the top-100-followed authors on the site created their account later than 2014.
Downvotes are a very necessary part of the balancing system for the site, however much authors hate them.
Something else I'd add, too: downvotes give angry or displeased readers an outlet. Everything I've heard from people posting on AO3 or fanfiction.net is how rampant those sites are with abusive comments aimed at the authors. Here, people don't do that nearly as much. Firstly because if you dislike a story, you can just click the red thumb and move on. It gives you some way to stick two fingers up at the author without actually writing them hateful stuff.
The ability to downvote, and have that downvote affect a story's ratings, also provides something of a mutually assured destruction threat that keeps people in check. If you act like a horrible person to someone in the comments, there's a chance they'll go downvote all your stories. Most don't, thankfully, but the presence of the possibility is enough to make most people pause and consider restraint before firing back angry and insulting replies.
So no, I don't think removing downvotes works. And, to parrot Ice Star's comment, that fanfiction site already exists. If you want fimfiction without downvotes, go to AO3. Or fanfiction.net. Or any of the others, because we're about the only one with a downvote system. If you don't like it, there are alternatives available. If you take it away, there won't be.
5400734
Well, I didn't say that a large number of upvotes indicated quality. It does indicate that a large number of people found something to be worth reading and recommending to others. That doesn't mean that I'll like it, or that it's written to any particular standard of workmanship. It does, however, mean that it's probably worth my time to at least look over the openng paragraphs, and see for myself.
Creating more filters is not a solution...
Vote bombing: Does FimFiction not require the story to be read prior to voting?
There will never be a filter(s) that will solve the problem of weaklings being offended. I choose not to use filters where-ever possible; because I want to see new things and hear new thoughts, and that won't happen if I browse in a bubble.
Without filters, I see things that severely gross me out quite often; but I power through and move on.
...Filters only work to help users to find what they seek; filters rarely seem to help users hide what they hate.
There is no salvation; abandon hope, all ye who enter.
5400723
I agree that downvotes don't carry much information. I'd say they're just about the most innocuous form of backlash you can get. But, referencing this part of the blog:
I think it's fairly clear that the intent of Trick Question's suggestion is to try and mitigate some occurrences that are much more harmful and worrying than downvotes. All of these issues can come about from blog posts, too, which don't have a downvote button, so I think it's entirely reasonable to assume that taking away downvotes isn't going to do a thing to address the actual problem here. I don't think it's an issue that controversial stories get a lot of downvotes. They should, actually, or else they're not really all that controversial.
Yeah but this isn't a localized problem. This is bleed-over coming from the real world becoming ever more divisive. Hate and malice IRL are creeping into FimFic. TBH, that's a much bigger societal problem. So big, in fact, that there is no solution. At least, not something we humble FimFictioners can muster. The outside world has to stop being so shitty, first.
This is the entire problem with the internet today. Nobody accepts being here as an inherent risk. Back in ye olden days, the internet was a frontier. And it was exciting and enticing precisely because it was a place where anything could happen. It was dangerous. Where you might see anything, whether you wanted to or not (lemonparty?). The element of risk is what made it exciting. But now all anyone talks about is censorship. How to make "safe" spaces. Please.
If you wanted safe, you have no business being on the internet.
Yeah, there's plenty of stuff here, and in the wider world web, that I find objectionable. Well, downright disgusting, to be frank. Morally, sexually, or otherwise. But where I take exception is that it exists, not that I'm just seeing it. How short-sighted is it, really, to say: "I hate seeing [x]"? Well, me too. But hiding it from your view doesn't make it stop existing. Which, I'll bet you, is what really upsets you, deep down.
Though I must agree that making specific tags for specific things would likely only make the problem worse.
In all honesty, I feel like most of the objectionable content is 'mature' content, anyway. Honestly, if you're looking for clopping material here or elsewhere, you're gonna come across some nasty shit. If you're 'mature' enough for 'mature' content I feel like you should just grow up, and move on. I mean, bitch all you want about foalcon, but there's no need to attack creators over it.
Ultimately I think people need to remember what it means to love and tolerate.
5400747
Hard disagree. People have a right to curate their internet experiences in order to make it acceptable for themselves.
Voluntarily filtering the content that you see, while not inhibiting other people from getting the content that they want, is not something that even raises questions of censorship, because you're not silencing anyone else.
"Just grow up and take it" is not a workable solution for many (probably most) people.
Is it bad form to attack people over them creating content you don't happen to like? Yes.
But does it help significantly to give people tools (like filters) that let them curate their experiences and help themselves avoid being upset? Also yes.
5400765
I'll grant you this, that's probably true. However, burdening everyone with the failings of some people isn't a workable solution, either. In fact, it's morally reprehensible.
Also, that's not really what I meant, exactly. What I meant was that if you call yourself a mature adult, you have no business attacking creators. You make it sound as if I want you to bend over and take your daily dose of foalcon whether you like it or not. That's not what I said nor meant.
5400780
Giving a person the ability to use filters isn't burdening anyone else.
5400782 Apparently you didn't read what Trick wrote, or simply dismiss it outright. Though I don't agree much with her proposed solution, I do agree with the negative aspects of the typical solution.
5400783
I'm not sure how you figure I "didn't read what Trick wrote, or simply dismiss it outright."
Her proposed solution is a filter. I'm just pointing out that protestations that throw out words or phrases like "censorship" or "burdening everyone with the failings of some people" aren't really on-point because a filter doesn't really do those things.
I fear you may be a bit optimistic on how much this would help (people are so good at getting offended by things they probably shouldn't be... (and there are potential issues it looks like others have raised in the comments)), but I do think it would help, and quite likely significantly! A good idea, I believe, and thank you for having and sharing it; I hope it gains traction.
And it looks like it is indeed being developed further in the comments. :)
Something using general idea of 'seeing "interesting" stuff requires additional effort' may work. I'm not sure if that's enough effort.
Which can't be targeted for search? Otherwise it's a way of worst-possible-thinging with comfort.
While I agree that this idea would be for the best if implemented, it would require a lot of work and cooperation. The latter of which I would not expect from a major chunk of the community and the former I would not expect from knighty. Like, just look at how bad things had to get before the blatant neo-nazi infestation was addressed.
A better solution, in my pessimistic opinion, is to just rebuild from the ground-up with a healthy community in mind, which is what I'm supporting with Offprint. The plan is that any submitted fiction must pass moderation to be posted. So, many of these taboo topics will need to be handled with care and respect to even get through in the first place. This obviously can generate author/staff conflict, but it's better than alienating readers. On the plus side, Offprint allows for all types of fiction: original, fan, and non-prose/poetry. Which means the potential for expansion is great. I hope to see you there!
I have serious doubts. Mostly because I have no faith in the good nature of the people who hate and dox and, generally speaking, do the things you say this will resolve. On the contrary, I fully expect those people to leave this "Taboo" filter turned off because they want to find these kinds of stories and attack them. I'm not talking about trolls. I'm talking about people who genuinely hate and want to enact change to enforce their dogma. They would have zero interest in a "taboo" toggle, as it would only interfere with their overarching goal.
To be fair, maybe those people aren't as common as recent times make it seem. Maybe 95% of FIMFiction would use this feature. Maybe this is a brilliant idea and we should all petition Knighty to try it. Heck, I'm willing to give it a go just to see if I'm wrong, and fingers crossed that I am. At the very least, if a feature like this existed and someone came along to spout anger and rudeness anyway, everyone else could flag them as an intentional troublemaker. From that perspective, this could certainly work.
In recent times I've considered something similar, except my idea had been to create a "porn" filter so that people could view mature stories without having their page saturated in lewdness they're not interested in. A "taboo" filter feels like a more generalized next step.
5400866
Just to play devil's advocate: What happens when Offprint becomes super popular and has hundreds of thousands of people posting stories and it becomes impossible to personally moderate the stories in a timely fashion?
5400878
Vet more moderators.
5400879
And at what point does "vet more moderators" change the site from being a free-for-all open forum to an ad-intensive/pay site business that gets unreasonably strict in what content is allowed for fear of having "bad things" happen to the people up top? I mean, we're not talking about four of five moderators here, and eventually volunteers alone won't cut it.
I mean, would Knighty have gone to the auto-approve system if he could just call for more moderator volunteers to meet the demands?
5400881
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have ads on the sidebar than the sorts of stories Trick Question is talking about show up en masse. And that's if it even blows up. Plus, Fimfic already has both if you're not a patron, which is the worst of both worlds. Obviously Offprint won't be for everyone either way; the bigots and such are going to go elsewhere regardless.
5400684
The fact that so many people on this thread are arguing in favor of legitimizing/normalizing child sexual abuse (not going to hide behind euphemisms here, like so many people do) is a pretty sad state of affairs, and just plays into the worst stereotypes of Bronies as a bunch of paedophiles.
5400883
I'd much rather have those stories show up from time to time due to limited moderating ability and community self-policing than have some all-powerful administration tell me I'm not allowed to publish a story because it might offend someone of a specific political perspective – which is exactly the direction this kind of thing tends to go.
But you're right, this is all speculation. For all I know this "Offprint" will be sunshine and rainbows.
5400891
Honestly, the stereotype isn’t what bothers me, it’s the idea that anyone would imply pedos and their favored content and rhetoric belong anywhere.
5400892
Fair enough. You do like to wade through the muck of mediocrity to find the hidden gems for our benefit, after all. And I wouldn't still be here myself if the site didn't have some redeeming qualities, including attracting talent such as yourself.