I thought about it a bit since yesterday and I figure that it's better for me to express my thoughts in more than just a knee-jerk, twitter style post about it. I'm not sure how many people will bother to comment on this but I honestly would like to hear some responses here.


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To start out with, as I have been thinking I realized that I'm still harboring quite a lot of long-held resentment and frustration towards this site for being such a terribly run shithole. It's basically coasted off inertia for the longest time, with the main attempt at change in probably the last half a decade being the mod who went AWOL and decided to unilaterally ban a variety of kink art their puritan sensibilities thought should count as bad (at least, if you take the damage control excuse at face value). Thankfully this was walked back, and I'm not particularly into any of the art that was affected so I didn't personally experience any of the impact, but I can sure sympathize with the furries who were and did. But at any rate, for the longest time FA has lacked basic quality-of-life type functions such as a tag blacklist and suggestion feature. I mentioned back at the time that a large part of the reason I stopped posting here was because IB did have those features and I much preferred to patronize a site that valued its users... well, I also disagreed heavily with the inactive moderation here too (there may or may not still be nazi-sympathetic furs on staff, who the fuck knows at this point), and I doubt that'll change much anytime soon. I actually have been trying to search out posts where this new update is being discussed because I kind of want to read all the comments from fellow frustrated furries because I think this sensible indignation and bitterness is something a lot of people share... at least, if what I'm anecdotally hearing from friends is any indication. But in the end, we can all agree that an actual tag blacklist is a positive small step in the right direction.

So anyway, when I toggled the button to auto-hide submissions that lacked any tags whatsoever, which is to me a logical and obvious choice, almost immediately 40% or so of my submission feed vanished. This is on top of the tags I'd already auto-disabled using a third-party plugin to block hard fetishes that gross me out. I looked, and a decent amount of what was blocked were YCH/adoptable/auction reminders and stream notifications, which is fair enough, but there were plenty of normal art posts that got caught up as well and I realized that having such nonexistent moderation and tag enforcement for so long has created a culture of lax self-curation. You can obviously see this in the way that uploaders will post hyperscat, gore, and hard vore images with no spoiler thumbnails whatsoever, filing them under submission categories meant for much less hardcore content such as "hyper". Browsing those submission category pages by themselves without a tag blacklist is pretty much like walking through a field of landmines. You're going to be blasted in the face with several per page. It's basically guaranteed.

And I think, like, it's perfectly understandable for a typical user to not want to be flashbanged by literal shit pics when browsing their kink pages for new content?

However, seeing so many submissions vanish was an immediate wake-up call that this site still has a fucking long way to go to be more user-friendly. Let's be clear: the tag blacklist is a good start, but it's only a tiny first step and a band-aid solution that will not do much to solve the problem when currently the culture of FA tends toward nonexistent self-moderation and tagging to begin with. And on top of that, even if people did tag their art, not only are tags not unified or consistent (unlike IB, whose enforced tagging and auto-suggestions create a top-down effect that results in said unification for easy browsing, searching or blacklisting), FA's search system is actual garbage and not only gets broken by hyphens (which are often part of artist names) but multiword searches are less than useless too if one of the words is less than three letters long. This problem is compounded at just about every step of the way and resists both top-down and ground-up change since it has issues at both administrative- and user-level.


Someone I know described Furaffinity as "lawless" for moderation. I couldn't help but agree with the sentiment. It really is pretty damn lawless... and at this point, with how old and entrenched this site is, and because the typical murry purry furry only wants to consoom porn without giving any thought or care to it, I'm not sure there's any fixing that at all. But it needs to happen.


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Despite all this... I still kind of want to resume posting here, for some reason. There was a tiny speck of me that was glad to have an excuse to do it. Even I have to admit that with twitter overrun by nazis this site has returned to being the default best place for furry exposure. And... at some point in the time I'd been inactive, I ended up passing 2000 followers, lmao. I don't doubt a number of those are inactive, but even then it's certainly more than I have on bluesky... and it would be nice to imagine people posting comments to my more (relatively) recent commissions. I know it's still unlikely to happen, since in the fifteen years since FA got started the culture of commenting and artist-follower interactions has largely been smothered to death outside of the 1% of the most mega-popular accounts. But the feeling of resentment that I noticed still lingers and it's making me hesitate. I don't know if I feel fully comfortable with coming back to the site as if nothing ever happened unless the changes are more major an improvement than this. Yet... I struggle with posting old commissions myself, letting inertia, laziness, and often perfectionist tendencies get the better of me, so who am I to criticize? If I continue to be bitter and let the perfect be the enemy of "just okay," then I'm probably just going to be waiting forever (especially with the glacial pace of FA updates anyway).

I dunno.

Maybe I can just be a tool and say, "I'll start posting again if I get enough comments on this journal" or something, haha. After all, a big incentive for me isn't attention or numbers going up, it's the possibility of actual interactions in the comment section, mutual horniness and bonding with like-minded folks. So that basis for judging interest would be exactly what I need.

What do you guys think? If I came back, I'd probably even be inclined to completely redo my profile page from the ground up as well, because lord knows that thing is ancient and outdated. Should I bother? Do you want to see me come back and start posting here again?




(also, why is the tag blacklist under PROFILE INFO and not... "site settings?" What weird and non-intuitive placement...)