The personal/frontpage distinction is basically meaningless unless those pages start looking more different than they do now.
Why is the NSFW tag opt out instead of in? This is not how basically any website works! It’s a really really really small thing that could potentially burn me when I send a cool link[1] to a buddy, they try to find the rest of the series, and end up with a description of someone’s sex habits!
To clarify, I really don’t care about having these things on LW, and personally support having them here vs elsewhere (though I’ve not put a lot of thought into this yet). But please let me send posts to kids I know without the sex stuff being visible by default in a way that makes it look totally normal. (To those of you who are going to say “Sex doesn’t hurt anyone, let them see it!”: sure, maybe sex hurts no one, but it’s your job to convince the sexually conservative parents of the bright kid I sent a link to, not to convince me.)
Concrete policy item #1: Make personal blogs and frontpages actually look different if more sensitive stuff is going to be moved onto personal blogs. This says something like “Hey, that thing you’ve heard of, ‘The Sequences’, is a wholly different thing from this, even though the URL looks similar”
Note: the NSFW tag literally did not exist until I made the relevant post; it is not that the LW team “solved this problem wrong” so much as that they haven’t yet attempted to solve it at all, because it hadn’t come up.
I figured that’s likely true, given that it seems to be the only item in the tag. I should have mentioned that I’m raising these points because I think
It’s probably going to be raised anyways, and I trust myself (given relatively low stake in this) to not blow up about it
Subpoint: Probably not that many people have weighed in, given that I saw no discussion on the post and none here
Subpoint: I (personally) found the post to be non-harmful on the object level, so it’s easier to raise the point rather than later if it gets more argument-friendly
Now is the easiest time to change this, given that we don’t have 100s of posts to sort through if we need to fix something manually
The “”harm”″ isn’t yet done, so we can avert basically all of it
[I’m forgetting one of the points I intended to type and will add it somewhere if I remember it]
I don’t currently have a strongly endorsed position here, but one of my background thoughts is that I think most people/society put sex into a weird taboo bucket for reasons that don’t make sense, and I don’t know that I want LW to play into.
If I’m sending an impressionable kid here, I’m much more worried about them reading frank discussions about maybe the world will end, than a discussion of sex, and the former is much more common on LW at the moment. (And while some parents might be more freaked out about sex, I actually expect a fair number of parents to also be worried about the world-ending stuff. MY parents were fairly worried about me getting into LW back in the day)
I think there are times LW has to make tradeoffs between “just talking about things sensibly” and “caving to broader societal demands”. But I think the default expectation should be “just talk about things sensibly”, and if there’s something particularly wrong with one particular topic (sex, or politics, or whatnot), it’s the job of the people arguing we shouldn’t have a discussion (or should hide it), that it’s concretely important to hide.
I have heard several people mention that the recent sex post was offputting to them, and I think it’s worth tracking that cost. But right now there’s been… maybe two posts about sex in 5 years? The previous one I can recall offhand was actually making some important epistemic points.
It’s expensive to build new features so I don’t think it makes sense to prioritize this that much until it’s become a more common phenomenon.
I’ll note that I had no issue with the post you linked, or this one, both of which use an example which is just sex-flavored and therefore (in my opinion) absolutely harmless. The opposition to those 2 posts actually confused me quite a bit and showed me a lot of people are modeling vulgarity differently than I am!
Again, I totally agree that there shouldn’t be anything harmful with any of these posts, but I do think there is some kind of line to draw between “we said the word ‘dildo’ to make a point” and “the post is literally just data about someone’s sex life”, and I think this is kind of the easiest time to draw that line, instead of later. However, I get what you’re going for.
I don’t think it’s super productive to do much more arguing my case here other than making sure I reword it once so it’s clear, so I’ll do that and then leave it alone unless someone else cares.
I think it’s an error to say “society has an issue with being overly sensitive, and besides, we have stuff that’s way more harmful”, both because 1, we actually still can be affected by society, or succeed in our goals worse by not conforming in areas that are well established, and 2, because that’s just an argument the end-of-the-world stuff also being behind an opt-in (which would probably actually make a ton of people happy?). (I’m gesturing at something similar to “proving too much” here)
Concrete policy item #2: Make the darned NSFW tag opt-in, and make even make it a scary color (or have a very noticeable indicator), so I[1] can see at a glance “This article is not for you, kid, unless you’re safe from repercussions of reading it, so don’t do it until then”.
I’ve got 2 thoughts inspired by What’s it like to have sex with Duncan?, which I’m portal-ing over from a comment over there.
The personal/frontpage distinction is basically meaningless unless those pages start looking more different than they do now.
Why is the NSFW tag opt out instead of in? This is not how basically any website works! It’s a really really really small thing that could potentially burn me when I send a cool link[1] to a buddy, they try to find the rest of the series, and end up with a description of someone’s sex habits!
To clarify, I really don’t care about having these things on LW, and personally support having them here vs elsewhere (though I’ve not put a lot of thought into this yet). But please let me send posts to kids I know without the sex stuff being visible by default in a way that makes it look totally normal. (To those of you who are going to say “Sex doesn’t hurt anyone, let them see it!”: sure, maybe sex hurts no one, but it’s your job to convince the sexually conservative parents of the bright kid I sent a link to, not to convince me.)
of which Duncan, for example, has no shortage
Concrete policy item #1: Make personal blogs and frontpages actually look different if more sensitive stuff is going to be moved onto personal blogs. This says something like “Hey, that thing you’ve heard of, ‘The Sequences’, is a wholly different thing from this, even though the URL looks similar”
Note: the NSFW tag literally did not exist until I made the relevant post; it is not that the LW team “solved this problem wrong” so much as that they haven’t yet attempted to solve it at all, because it hadn’t come up.
I figured that’s likely true, given that it seems to be the only item in the tag. I should have mentioned that I’m raising these points because I think
It’s probably going to be raised anyways, and I trust myself (given relatively low stake in this) to not blow up about it
Subpoint: Probably not that many people have weighed in, given that I saw no discussion on the post and none here
Subpoint: I (personally) found the post to be non-harmful on the object level, so it’s easier to raise the point rather than later if it gets more argument-friendly
Now is the easiest time to change this, given that we don’t have 100s of posts to sort through if we need to fix something manually
The “”harm”″ isn’t yet done, so we can avert basically all of it
[I’m forgetting one of the points I intended to type and will add it somewhere if I remember it]
I don’t currently have a strongly endorsed position here, but one of my background thoughts is that I think most people/society put sex into a weird taboo bucket for reasons that don’t make sense, and I don’t know that I want LW to play into.
If I’m sending an impressionable kid here, I’m much more worried about them reading frank discussions about maybe the world will end, than a discussion of sex, and the former is much more common on LW at the moment. (And while some parents might be more freaked out about sex, I actually expect a fair number of parents to also be worried about the world-ending stuff. MY parents were fairly worried about me getting into LW back in the day)
I think there are times LW has to make tradeoffs between “just talking about things sensibly” and “caving to broader societal demands”. But I think the default expectation should be “just talk about things sensibly”, and if there’s something particularly wrong with one particular topic (sex, or politics, or whatnot), it’s the job of the people arguing we shouldn’t have a discussion (or should hide it), that it’s concretely important to hide.
I have heard several people mention that the recent sex post was offputting to them, and I think it’s worth tracking that cost. But right now there’s been… maybe two posts about sex in 5 years? The previous one I can recall offhand was actually making some important epistemic points.
It’s expensive to build new features so I don’t think it makes sense to prioritize this that much until it’s become a more common phenomenon.
I’ll note that I had no issue with the post you linked, or this one, both of which use an example which is just sex-flavored and therefore (in my opinion) absolutely harmless. The opposition to those 2 posts actually confused me quite a bit and showed me a lot of people are modeling vulgarity differently than I am!
Again, I totally agree that there shouldn’t be anything harmful with any of these posts, but I do think there is some kind of line to draw between “we said the word ‘dildo’ to make a point” and “the post is literally just data about someone’s sex life”, and I think this is kind of the easiest time to draw that line, instead of later. However, I get what you’re going for.
I don’t think it’s super productive to do much more arguing my case here other than making sure I reword it once so it’s clear, so I’ll do that and then leave it alone unless someone else cares. I think it’s an error to say “society has an issue with being overly sensitive, and besides, we have stuff that’s way more harmful”, both because 1, we actually still can be affected by society, or succeed in our goals worse by not conforming in areas that are well established, and 2, because that’s just an argument the end-of-the-world stuff also being behind an opt-in (which would probably actually make a ton of people happy?). (I’m gesturing at something similar to “proving too much” here)
Concrete policy item #2: Make the darned NSFW tag opt-in, and make even make it a scary color (or have a very noticeable indicator), so I[1] can see at a glance “This article is not for you, kid, unless you’re safe from repercussions of reading it, so don’t do it until then”.
A hypothetical kid who has been sent a link to a LW article by their cool relative Alex