this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Showerthoughts

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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.

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[–] TeddE 33 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Honestly, I say we ditch NSFW as a on/off switch and go with a mandatory tagging system. We can clarify NSFW into content warning tags, e.g. CW - Gore, CW - Death, CW - Breast, CW - Genitalia.

Users could then set their own preferences on which tags would cause a post to be masked or simply hidden.

But why stop there? Tags could be very useful in our federated environment to help communities mesh better with each other.

Communities could be able to specify a list of mandatory tags, i.e. the Swallow community could require posts specify African Swallow or European Swallow (or both or neither). Communities could also make some tags implied, so the AfricanSwallow community might just imply that posts are Africian Swallow unless user changes it.

Underneath the hood, all tags are just treated as part of the post text, so the backend performance impact will be minimal. However moderation tools would be able to consider tags when deciding how to handle a post.

Of course, the server/instance owner can then simply make a policy of what kinds of content warnings they require, and communities can then build other tags on that to meet their community needs.

[–] HerbalGamer 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Swallow community

..maybe keep an nsfw tag on that one. just in case

[–] TeddE 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

How would you tag your Dickcissel and your Great Tit going after an Antarctic Shag and an Invisible Rail? Do we want our Flying Steamer Duck having fun with a Fluffy-backed Tit-Babbler?

[–] HerbalGamer 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are you talking about mine specifically or like how would most people tag them?

[–] TeddE 1 points 1 year ago

Both contribute to community discussion

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Also cocks. And chicks with cocks.

[–] over_clox 2 points 1 year ago

Gotta watch them sounding people too...

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Yes but what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?

[–] _danny 5 points 1 year ago

The problem, as always, is people. People would either forget to tag their posts or intentionally abuse the system. It's hard enough for mods to tag actual NSFW as such, giving them 5 additional tags to monitor for isn't going to help them at all.

I do really wish we could get a system like this though. There were many times in my younger days I was browsing /r/all without NSFW filtered out expecting the occasional surprise boob and would see things that could cause a legitimate need for therapy.

[–] Goodie 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think this could end up too fine-grained, or perhaps some sort of heriachy system.

Maybe "nsfw/gore/minor-injury", and allowing you to block everything under "nsfw/gore"?

But you need to ensure that the top level instances use the same(ish) tags. If i block nsfw/gore, but the random small instances just tags things just gore.... then I'm gonna have a bad time.

[–] TeddE 1 points 1 year ago

I was thinking about some kind of grouping system or hierarchy, but to be blunt the post was running long as-is.

I figured it would be cool for some communities if posts could be tagged with copyright details, particularly if the community focuses on copyleft. For exampe, a community for sharing background images, could have a post from a poser who has an an anticorporate "Share and Share alike" type vibe:

  • Resolution/800x600 - tags for common resolutions
  • License/CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 - would imply that the linked content was licensed Creative Commons "Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International"
  • CW/Boobs - Implies that this might be NSFW if your workplace doesn't approve of boobs.
  • Animal/Mouse - The post contains an image of a mouse

The post could be linked to a Pixelfed, Imjur, Flicr, or other reasonable picture hosting site. The community's AutoMod could load the link in the post and scrape for licensing indicators (based on the hosting site) and either block the post, flag it for manual, or whatever if it suspects there's a mismatch. ditto for verifying that the image is the correct resolution. Maybe posts that don't please the AutoMod are delayed by some amount of time (where the mods can review them if they wish, but after an hour or so would get posted.

The mods would never have to worry about the resolution tags, the AutoMod bot would take care of that automagically (if mods can modify tags, maybe AutoMod could correct the resolution tag based on the scraped image and even if it were done wrong, it probably wouldn't be a huge issue unless it were egregiously wrong). If foul play were suspected regarding licensing (i.e. maybe that risque cartoon mouse from Steamboat Willie isn't the author's original work to republish as creative commons) it would have to be handled by regular moderation techniques, & that's no worse than what we had to begin with.

The CW/Boobs and `Animal/Mouse tags don't do anything at all with the Mods or AutoMod, but the Animal tag would show up after the post title, and based on the user's preferences, the user's app (or the main website) would blur the image by default due to the boobs.

In other words, a post to the community 'Indie Anime Wallpapers' by a patreon-funded artist could post their latest work "Sticking it to the Mouse" would look better titled as: "Sticking it to the Mouse" Mouse, 800x600, Boobs, Creative Commons than if it had the old school title "[F][Mouse]Sticking it to the Mouse[800x600][CC]"