Consensus
Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:11PM

handling content warnings, tagging, and other things of this nature

AB Alyaza Birze Public Seen by 28

i think most of us have at least one issue with how the Fediverse technically or culturally tends to handle content warnings, tagging, etc.; unfortunately, as of right now we'll inheriting most or all of those issues while we have to rely on frontends that we aren't developing ourselves. so, let's talk over those issues.

i am, for the most part, a content warning/tagging/read more/etc. purist. if a thing says it is for content warnings, my expectation is that it should be for content warnings alone―only in a handful of weird circumstances should these any of these really meet. this was how Cohost did things: content warnings were separate from tagging, and tagging and content warnings were separate from read mores, and so on. this allowed for lots of granularity as the situation demanded: you could hide things with any combination of tagging, content warning, and read mores and it was fairly intuitive all around as a system (even if there were some downstream issues like cultural tag collisions).

unfortunately, most Fediverse software and frontends blend all of these to one degree or another; for most intents and purposes the "content warning" field is closer to a `<details>` tag which handles (or is expected to handle) all of these things and more. i consider this exceedingly bad for users and exceedingly bad for the software itself, and i think it's going to cause us nothing but headaches if we don't have an ability to disambiguate them.

in short, as i put it in short earlier on Discord:

content warnings, readmores, summaries, and failsafes for "long post display weird" or "thing that does not display well" etc. are all discrete use-cases to me and simply put: probably should not all rely on the same field as load-bearing infrastructure

if it is at all possible for us to change that, my feeling is that we should do it ASAP.

N

nora Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:13PM

It seems to me that the quickest solution we can have is to add support for actual details/summary tags, and provide more options for tag filtering and CW auto opening. I wrote some on that here: https://wl.home.nora.codes/@nora/statuses/01J97D51BBMVFP3HYW0X9B7NCY

V

viviridian Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:22PM

One thing I've been thinking about is that we probably need a league-level document that says how to use and not use content warnings in WL. I was originally thinking of that being in the CoC but maybe it should be a separate, focused document that is easier to reference quickly and might be quicker to make amendments to.

I left this comment in the CoC gdoc:

I think we probably need some mention of situations that don't warrant content warnings; maybe we need to make a decision on Consensus about this, for context see https://soc.lizard.tools/@shel/statuses/01J953QX9YR9V8EF6338E3NPJF and https://beam.phosphor.buzz/@viv/statuses/01J95B2JRVSMV3RF5RS1Y95M90 (paste the links into a client to get the full thread, there are several branches)

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Jessica Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:32PM

@viviridian something like a "when to tag, when to CW" guide would be wonderful

K

Katja Sat 5 Oct 2024 3:43AM

@Jessica Seconding this — and I'd almost want to work backward from something like that as part of the basis for future League Code changes re.: content warnings and tagging?

But yeah, absolutely.

N

nora Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:25PM

Do we intend to enforce that? If so, what exactly would our mode of enforcement be? I think we should be very explicit about this.

A

adam Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:26PM

imo we definitely want better tagging and tag filtering, having that would mean that users don't have to use CWs for everything. other than that, yeah, details/summary tags are a good idea, there was also some talk on the discord about configurable read more buttons (probably going to be somewhat useful imo, I do like the idea), and we might want separate CW tags too

J

Jessica Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:29PM

@adam I would love all of that! I hope we can make it happen

N

nora Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:29PM

What would we want separate CW tags to add?

S

Shel Wed 2 Oct 2024 9:38PM

I am composing a longform essay on this subject. Rosh Hashanah starts in 30 minutes so it won't be ready until this weekend.

S

sirocyl Thu 3 Oct 2024 3:42AM

I think we should take advantage of our capability to extend the ActivityPub protocols with less fear of "infederable content" or other bugs, by adding explicit support for:

  • Separate array of tags for CW's, or a specific format for CW tags that software will support

  • Copying some or all of those tags into the main tag selection, for compatibility with clients

  • Disabling search on CW tags, so that people cannot hunt down tags they feel strongly against as a potential abuse vector.

I think the way we can do this best as a "quick and dirty hack", is to use the regular tags field - and any tag beginning with "#CW:", "#cw:", or "#CW: " "#cw: " (note the space) will be treated as a CW subject, one per tag - no combining. Then the search models can filter/deny any tag searches with those slugs on them.

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