Ask Lemmy

Look, this whole thing is absurd like a Monty Python sketch, but much less funny.

Is this picture not safe for work..?

How about this one..?

And what about this photograph of an actual naked beaver I posted the other day..?

For me, all three could get me in trouble at work (because they clearly have nothing to do with the work I should be doing), and none of them would get me in trouble at the bus (though there's plenty of other pictures in Lemmy I wouldn't want to be caught watching in the bus to avoid embarrassing myself or others), but that's me, and that's why I don't use lemmy at work and if I use it on the bus I use a different account and only on communities I'm subscribed to.

But deciding whether to watch these pictures or risk watching others like them at work or the bus is my responsibility, not lemmy's, or the community moderators', or their posters'.

If I'm worried about “not suitable for work” I should be old enough to work, which means I should have a minimum of self control and be responsible for my own actions.

If I'm caught at work or on the bus with an “unsuitable” image on my phone because I was browsing some site that might contain images of that kind I'm not going to blame that site, or whoever posted that image, and I'm not going to demand of them to adapt to my particular circumstances and mark, censor, or remove any content I might find unsuitable.

That's my job, not theirs. They're not my fucking nanny, and I shouldn't need one.

Attempting to shift the blame for my own actions to the people providing me with this content (and for free, no less!) would be childish, petty, and disingenuous, to say the least.

NSFW has become code for porn, effectively. My friend and I use NSFO for 'not porn, maybe not even nudity, but not necessarily appropriate for the office'. Maybe that's what we need. A second filter.

I am of the opinion that there should be more granularity to NSFW than a simple binary.

I'm a fan of how e621 does things:

rating:s (safe)

rating:q (questionable)

rating:e (explicit,)

But I would add another:

rating:t (traumatic, known elsewhere as Not Safe For Life)

Call it "purity" and allow users to filter posts to allow or block any arbitrary combination of purity levels (wallhalla, formerly wallbase, does this if you want to see how it could work).

I think this is a good conversion to have. I enjoy images of women, but everyone doesn't. I also don't feel it's fair to compare these images to porn and play morality police.

It makes sense to break NSFW into a handful of tags and allow more granular control. The problem historically was that the number of tags kept growing and became hard to classify.

The number of tags wouldn't be much of an issue, but then it comes down to the OP to tag appropriately. Even with generic NSFW filter turned on, I still occasionally see genitals in my feed.

We could allow users to tag, but I see brigading and other abuses possible here. Appointing power users also might work, but that has its own list of issues. That also would mean that all this information would need to synch with the post.

Yes

Of course it should. NSFW doesn’t mean too hot to handle. It means, I don’t want coworkers or customers seeing this on my screen, as a matter of professionalism.

My solution is to have multiple profiles. Block that stuff on your SFW profile and not on your NSFW profile.

As maybe the main culprit behind such content, I can comment.

I'd love to err on the side of caution. Unfortunately that isn't how the NSFW toggle is used, and erring on the side of caution any more than necessary comes with drawbacks in terms of post visibility and community growth.

Posts like the one you linked perform orders of magnitude better when not marked NSFW, which means they reach more people who want to see them when un-tagged, than didn't want to see them.

And tagging them, in fact achieves the opposite.

This is because people scroll past content marked NSFW regardless of what it is. Because they can't see what it is. Except when they are looking for porn.

So while I didn't stop using the NSFW tag, I pushed the needle a bit and stopped marking everything even slightly revealing as NSFW "just in case" because it was literally hiding it from the people who wanted to see it, and leaving just the porn enthusiasts to check the actual images, who'd then down-vote it because it wasn't actually porn.

I am myself completely uninterested in actual pornographic content on Lemmy, yet as someone who doesn't mind it, I actually do not hide NSFW content, and even disable blurring it by default.

Because the binary tagging of NSFW is utterly useless as a tool for curating away content I do not want to see, as a SHIT-TON of content I DO want to see would go with it.

Instead I use the list view in Thunder with its small thumbnails, making the occasional porn very difficult to spot over my shoulder, but allowing me to much more properly vet what posts I open and view in full size.

I am fairly certain that a lot of the people who engage with my many "moe" communities, are, like me, quite uninterested in actual explicit content. As such they do not engage with posts marked NSFW, or perhaps even disable it entirely on their accounts.

The NSFW toggle isn't enough, and its purpose and exact threshold varies wildly depending on your sensibilities.

This content isn't porn, yet if I run my communities as if it is, they don't get traction.

If I run my communities like they're for porn, they'll mostly be frequented by people who post and look for exactly that. But they won't fit in because I don't allow nudity, and the stuff I do allow isn't the kind anyone settles down to actually get off to, despite some of it being arousing. So, my communities don't belong on that side of the fediverse, but at the same time they don't entirely belong on the SFW side of a lot of people's feeds either.

Yet, to reach the people like myself, but who unlike me don't make the insane effort of checking every NSFW post to see if it's not porn, that's where they have to exist.

Half naked? Shes literally wearing a top and bottoms. Yall need to relax

I think if you wouldn't use it as your wallpaper at work because it is inappropriate for work, that's NSFW. So yeah at my job that would be NSFW.