Content, Clarity, and Consent

I think the plan is mostly reasonable, does not unduly disrupt or shame writers engaging in kink, and will serve to improve the average community member’s comfort.

I have only one concern, and that is that the first rule will prove prohibitively difficult as written for those writers who are affected by it, that it does create a sense of having to closet oneself, and that those writers will simply remove details from their descriptions that would be inappropriate in Sinder. It is not reasonable to ask writers to be constantly on high alert for changes to the rules as they explore the world, and to expect them to repeatedly alter their description.

I believe this fixation on people accidentally stumbling across content they do not like is in excess of reason. We are all adults here, and we are perfectly capable of not looking at things we do not like. If our eyes should glance across a kink that makes us uncomfortable, the correct response is to step back and look at something else, not expect the subject to censor themself.

Looking at a writer’s profile is an explicit choice one has to make, and one can stop looking at it at any time. We should expect readers to be exercising this liberty, and if they do not, it is on them to rectify that.

That said, I believe a reasonable compromise would be to allow otherwise disallowed content in collapsible fields, if they provide adequate specificity about what kind of content exists within. If a reasonable reader can read the heading and think, “Ah, this is not my thing!” then that should be good enough for our purposes.

This addresses the chilling effect I alluded to before, and puts the responsibility on the reader, not the writer, to curate what content they consume; the writer has done their duty by simply providing a content warning. This is not censorship or closeting, this is just good practice in general; writers involved with kink will be the first to tell you so.

Writers generally already use alternate profile images for play scenes as opposed to public scenes if they have them, so I do not think it is unreasonable to ask them to do this as a rule. Images are much more effective at inducing genuine discomfort in others that is not addressed simply by looking away, and there is no way to apply an adequate content warning with our present UI. Further, in some cases, hosting those images poses a legitimate legal risk that Wolfery is not obliged to take, thus it does not seem unfair to restrict them more firmly.

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