Hi all! As promised, here is the proposed text of the newest version of the rules. The staff has gone through like eight drafts and literally thousands and thousands of matrix posts to get here, so please be kind. You can see @limeey's comment on the transparency post if you want more insight into how this sausage was made.
We are opening these rules to commentary from the community before they go into effect. To be clear, this isn't a vote, but we will take all community feedback into account and answer whatever questions we can before finalizing anything.
Please keep in mind that we are not Reddit, we do not have Reddit's resources, and safety and consent are our priorities.
I'll post the draft in two parts in two comments: The new sidebar, and the FAQ/clarifications page.
I see hentai being a hot button issue. Since the vast majority of anime girls are canonically under 18 and even ones without strict ages (for originally drawn content) often obviously look underage or have features which make them look underage. (smooth faces with big eyes, flat chests, short stature.) And let's not forget the large portion of anime characters which are basically designed to look as underaged as possible, but with unrealistically large breasts glued on to say "oh look they're clearly over 18.". How will this sort of content be handled? I know you say "you'll know it when you see it." but what about cases like these?
It's this exact question that made us seriously consider just banning hentai altogether. That would have been the safer move, for sure, but we were worried it would cut off too many people from a safe, accessible place to do porn things.
So context matters, right? Like we're going to have to trust that the mods of hentai communities are good at hentai, so they know better than a clueless layperson what's actually supposed to be underage and what isn't. For me, looking at hentai as a guy that watched Ninja Scroll a bunch when he was 15 and then never really went back to that well, there's stuff that's obviously forbidden, stuff that obviously isn't forbidden, and stuff that falls in the middle where I have to be like "Well, I don't know who that is, if their show is aimed at kids, if they're supposed to be a kid, if within the context of hentai that outfit and those visual cues indicate underage or not, so I guess I have to trust someone that is more of an expert". Because if you force me to make that choice, I'm going to err on the side of caution and nuke everything that's more questionable than not, which is probably like 75% of all hentai.
But with a knowledgeable mod team, if they tell me that something isn't underage and isn't meant to be underage, I'm likely to trust their judgement even if I myself as an ignorant not-a-fan-of-big-eyes-small-mouth-tentacle-sex-cartoons would have made a different call. Unless they start making blatantly bad calls, in which case then we consider taking more drastic action, we are going to defer to the experts.
There are also issues of cultural imperalism and racial bias involved, right? Like studies show that Americans of different races consistently rate depictions of black people as older than they really are and asian people as younger than they really are, and on top of that trying to overlay Western artistic values on top of Japanese cultural constructions can be kind of fraught (and I used to live in Japan, where at 15 I was 6' and 180 lbs. I was much larger than like 99% of the the native population and they all thought I was a grown-ass man, so I know how that kind of thing works albeit in reverse).
I definitely think banning hentai alltogether would've been the safer bet! But I understand your current choices/decisions. Even though I feel that eventually that call will end up being made anyway due to the baggage that comes with the vast majority of hentai content. I trust this instance to moderate things properly, unlike other instances like Burggit.
I will definitely report content I find that seems to be infringing on the rules and help the efforts as best I can! Thank you for all you do!