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The Week the Brothers Grimm Became Corruptors of Youth
2 years ago
đâżđ Things have gone downhill, and continued snowballing, pretty much since updates in how FA's content policy would be enforced going forward were announced on May 19. Understandably, a lot of people are upset. Some are hurt by the implication that their art is something they have strong feelings against. Some have been accused of pedophilia for protesting the changes. In an ideal world, what would have happened would have been some variation of "users voice their legitimate concerns about the collateral damage and fallout of this change, and whether or not the changes are canceled there's productive discussion." The announcement or one of the subsequent clarification newsposts should have explicitly acknowledged that many or most of these artists probably didn't intend their art to be minor coded, and these changes are being enacted out of... whatever reasoning. That changes in 2015 were "well-received" isn't exactly compelling as an argument to support making changes with such wide repercussions.
Were there people exploiting the special status of Pokémon and Digimon to post artwork that wouldn't otherwise be permitted under AUP 2.7? Probably. Because people gonna people. Does that change the fact that this rule is a bad rule? No.
So what do I mean by "a bad rule?"
Both this update and the update to AUP 2.7 from January 3 are what I would consider bad rules. It's not about the intent of the rule; it's about other qualities. Namely, good rules must be straightforward to evaluate ("does the submission check these boxes?") and should have minimal impact on content outside of what it is intended to govern. These updates fail on both points, and that puts both users and staff in an unfair position.
An example of a good rule would be AUP 2.12. There could probably be some tweaks, but overall, it's good because it's very black and white. There's a swaztika in your image? Box is checked; your image has to go. No ifs or buts.
So onto the current situation with AUP 2.7:
I know (well, I think it's a pretty safe assumption that wouldn't have changed since 2017) that the aim of every moderation team on Fur Affinity is to have consistent and fair enforcement. The best way to achieve consistency is to minimize the need for interpretation and moderator discretion. (Sometimes those will still be necessary for exceptional cases, but I strongly believe the need for them should be avoided as much as possible.) So it's not fair on staff by means of making their jobs much harder than they should need to be.
I should hope that the aim of most users is to follow the rules to the best of their abilities. I don't think anyone wants to get their submissions removed and action taken against their account. Good rules should be clearly stated and let users figure out for themselves what is/isn't permitted before posting. Rules relying on interpretation of artistic intent ("may not be fetishized" as in the January update) inherently put that at risk - I may upload something that I don't consider fetishistic, might not even reflect over the possibility of it, but if someone else thinks it is, and they report it, my intent doesn't matter anymore, only the intent moderation staff thinks I had does. This obviously makes it difficult to impossible to judge whether a piece is acceptable under the posted ruleset or not. The more recent update requiring young-looking Pokémon to be "aged up" rather than drawn on model makes this even more treacherous, as it adds art style to the list of factors that might determine the fate of a submission. It's not fair on users by means of drastically reducing their ability to make informed decisions about what they can/cannot upload.
The one recourse users have (if they realize that their art might be a problem, which is not guaranteed) is to file tickets to ask about their submissions before uploading. That's... not exactly fair on staff, either, by means of creating a situation where they have to handle those extra tickets. I'm assuming it's a pretty significant number, even before the calls I've seen for mass reporting random submissions out of spite towards site administration at large. (Don't do that; it's petty, wastes everybody's time, and violates Code of Conduct.)
As for the collateral damage...
Babyfurs were, from what I gather, hit pretty hard by the January update. Chances are this recent update will hit that community again. In my limited understanding, ABDLs and babyfurs find comfort in many of the trappings of early childhood, which I can pretty easily see leading to things like exaggeratedly plush pampers. I don't think that the intent there is inherently fetishistic. I don't know for certain, since it's been a long time since I regularly socialized with babyfurs (and the finer details of that side of them didn't really come up), but I suspect there are non-fetishistic reasons for depicting things like soiling in babyfur-focused art, as well. To the people reporting their content it will probably always look like fetish material, but I feel like they're probably biased and maybe not always acting in good faith. (The reason I say they might be acting in bad faith is because several of the people I've seen most vocally outraged about this content are also people who feel that babyfurs and ABDLs are inherently pedophiles, which is definitely not the case.)
For the May 19 update, Pokémon artists who stay reasonably faithful to the original art style(s) are the obvious collateral damage; I assume the same would be true on the Digimon side. Specifically, the artists who had no intent for the characters to be interpreted as minors; they were simply depicted as designed. This is a decently large segment of the artist userbase; I wouldn't know what percentage or anything, but I've been around the block. I know I've seen a lot of artists draw this stuff. Hell, I've got a ticket pending requesting feedback on some old-ass art of mine with mostly-on-model Pokémon that I was certainly not thinking of as children/cubs/minors/foo.(If I get told it needs to go, can I reupload it in five years when the art itself reaches age of majority?) Artists who draw Pokémon in diapers get the double whammy, here, as there's the risk that the diapers themselves will influence moderators in determining whether the characters are child-coded.
So yeah. Bad rules, rolled out less than ideally, including representation of the history of the rule that I find to be... questionable. But then comes the community's reaction. And... wow. Just wow.
As I said in my opening, it's quite understandable that people are upset. I'm not putting any blame on anyone for being upset alone. The problem lies in where they let these feelings take them.
There's been the people protesting that Dragoneer has/had Digimon and Pokémon porn in his gallery. And then being just as angry when he took one(?) of those pieces down. The change regarding Pokémon/Digimon in adult content isn't slated to go into effect until July 1, so it doesn't fucking matter. It's not, at this moment, disallowed. If it does violate the rules as they will be enforced at that time, taking it down is what he's supposed to do, so these people are angry because he... acted the same way any user should in preparation for the change? Regardless, there's no law that says he can't set rules that don't 100% follow what he himself is interested in, or whatever. I can't bring a dog into the pharmacy. Are you going to go yelling at dog-owning pharmacists that they're hypocrites, now? Because, uh... that's kinda ridiculous.
Then there were the people who decided that if they couldn't have nice things, they needed to go scorched earth and take everyone and their art supplies down with them. Post-pubescent minors (what I assume was the basic intent behind the arbitrary age of 13) have been allowed to be shown pregnant since 2020, as per the most recent (at time of writing) newspost. Three years, give or take, during which there was no significant blow-up over it, or at least none that I ever saw. That it has now been banned, closing the door for people with experience to share their stories (as well as people who just have characters who got pregnant in their teens because that's a thing that happens, but the lived-experience people are the biggest victims here), is something I place the blame for squarely on the shoulders of people trying to use that carve-out as a gotcha in order to try to get the Pokémon/Digimon exception back. It's not as though the "minors may not be fetishized" clause in the rule wasn't already there. Fetishistic depictions of teen pregnancy weren't on the menu.
They just had to drag others down with them.
(On a tangential note, I understand the "18 years old" thing isn't really at FA's discretion, but HOLY FUCK it would be so nice if we as a society stopped pretending like teens don't have sex. Like, I'm not saying allow minors in live-action porn or anything, but, like... it feels utterly unnatural that fiction gets forced into a weird corner where characters practically have tamper-proof seals on their genitals until they hit 18. I'm sure this is gonna get misconstrued, but really all I mean is that it would be nice if high school dramas were allowed to include actual high school drama. All of it. It's a storytelling thing to me.)
Anyway, those people also were mighty upset with the explicit carve-out for non-sexual transformation and vore themes as permissible. And, like... the language for that part of the rule was a little iffy ("themes" would have been so much better than "interests"), but it's something so obvious it shouldn't even need to be said. "Vore" is colloquially used within fandom for, well, eating, particularly of live prey. That doesn't mean every instance of "vore" is actually paraphilic/sexual. But that's how the protestations went, right along with arguments saying that anyone wanting to create art with minors in these contexts is obviously a pedophile. Which... uh. I guess you just accused the Brothers Grimm of wanting to diddle kids, seeing as their retelling of the Red Riding Hood story is one of the most influential/common ones. Great job, you guys. You sure showed them. I believe there's some vore themes in Aesop's Fables, as well, so we're looking at centuries of "fetishes" being peddled to minors. If that's the hill you want to die on.
Transformation is even more ridiculous of a claim, given how common a theme it is in children's media. Off the top of my head, in no particular order... Ben 10 (titular character), The Twelve Swans (main character's 12 brothers), The Frog Prince (titular character), Pinocchio (titular character), Snow White (evil witch/queen), Sleeping Beauty (evil witch/fairy), Shrek (titular character, Princess Fiona, misc side characters including Donkey), The Little Mermaid (titular character), Beauty and the Beast (Beast), DO WE FUCKING GET THE POINT? Hell, we've got Greek mythology (Zeus being the most frequent offender), Norse mythology (especially but not exclusively Loki), and I believe possibly even the fucking Bible, but who am I to get in the way of your juvenile outrage?
Of course they can be depicted in a fetishistic context/manner. So can fucking high-heeled shoes. But neither is inherently and necessarily so, and acting like they are just sounds like sour grapes at this point.
I don't like the changes that have been made to AUP 2.7 this year. I'm not saying I do. I think they're bad changes and I've clearly stated why. I also think that it's utterly childish to attack, badmouth and harass staff over it, to try to deflect onto other subjects that are supposedly JUST AS BAD, or to call anyone protesting a pedophile or groomer. It's ridiculous to pass around screenshots of staff making completely reasonable statements and make out like they just spoke out in favor of enacting the suggestions in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. :/
Were there people exploiting the special status of Pokémon and Digimon to post artwork that wouldn't otherwise be permitted under AUP 2.7? Probably. Because people gonna people. Does that change the fact that this rule is a bad rule? No.
So what do I mean by "a bad rule?"
Both this update and the update to AUP 2.7 from January 3 are what I would consider bad rules. It's not about the intent of the rule; it's about other qualities. Namely, good rules must be straightforward to evaluate ("does the submission check these boxes?") and should have minimal impact on content outside of what it is intended to govern. These updates fail on both points, and that puts both users and staff in an unfair position.
An example of a good rule would be AUP 2.12. There could probably be some tweaks, but overall, it's good because it's very black and white. There's a swaztika in your image? Box is checked; your image has to go. No ifs or buts.
So onto the current situation with AUP 2.7:
I know (well, I think it's a pretty safe assumption that wouldn't have changed since 2017) that the aim of every moderation team on Fur Affinity is to have consistent and fair enforcement. The best way to achieve consistency is to minimize the need for interpretation and moderator discretion. (Sometimes those will still be necessary for exceptional cases, but I strongly believe the need for them should be avoided as much as possible.) So it's not fair on staff by means of making their jobs much harder than they should need to be.
I should hope that the aim of most users is to follow the rules to the best of their abilities. I don't think anyone wants to get their submissions removed and action taken against their account. Good rules should be clearly stated and let users figure out for themselves what is/isn't permitted before posting. Rules relying on interpretation of artistic intent ("may not be fetishized" as in the January update) inherently put that at risk - I may upload something that I don't consider fetishistic, might not even reflect over the possibility of it, but if someone else thinks it is, and they report it, my intent doesn't matter anymore, only the intent moderation staff thinks I had does. This obviously makes it difficult to impossible to judge whether a piece is acceptable under the posted ruleset or not. The more recent update requiring young-looking Pokémon to be "aged up" rather than drawn on model makes this even more treacherous, as it adds art style to the list of factors that might determine the fate of a submission. It's not fair on users by means of drastically reducing their ability to make informed decisions about what they can/cannot upload.
The one recourse users have (if they realize that their art might be a problem, which is not guaranteed) is to file tickets to ask about their submissions before uploading. That's... not exactly fair on staff, either, by means of creating a situation where they have to handle those extra tickets. I'm assuming it's a pretty significant number, even before the calls I've seen for mass reporting random submissions out of spite towards site administration at large. (Don't do that; it's petty, wastes everybody's time, and violates Code of Conduct.)
As for the collateral damage...
Babyfurs were, from what I gather, hit pretty hard by the January update. Chances are this recent update will hit that community again. In my limited understanding, ABDLs and babyfurs find comfort in many of the trappings of early childhood, which I can pretty easily see leading to things like exaggeratedly plush pampers. I don't think that the intent there is inherently fetishistic. I don't know for certain, since it's been a long time since I regularly socialized with babyfurs (and the finer details of that side of them didn't really come up), but I suspect there are non-fetishistic reasons for depicting things like soiling in babyfur-focused art, as well. To the people reporting their content it will probably always look like fetish material, but I feel like they're probably biased and maybe not always acting in good faith. (The reason I say they might be acting in bad faith is because several of the people I've seen most vocally outraged about this content are also people who feel that babyfurs and ABDLs are inherently pedophiles, which is definitely not the case.)
For the May 19 update, Pokémon artists who stay reasonably faithful to the original art style(s) are the obvious collateral damage; I assume the same would be true on the Digimon side. Specifically, the artists who had no intent for the characters to be interpreted as minors; they were simply depicted as designed. This is a decently large segment of the artist userbase; I wouldn't know what percentage or anything, but I've been around the block. I know I've seen a lot of artists draw this stuff. Hell, I've got a ticket pending requesting feedback on some old-ass art of mine with mostly-on-model Pokémon that I was certainly not thinking of as children/cubs/minors/foo.
So yeah. Bad rules, rolled out less than ideally, including representation of the history of the rule that I find to be... questionable. But then comes the community's reaction. And... wow. Just wow.
As I said in my opening, it's quite understandable that people are upset. I'm not putting any blame on anyone for being upset alone. The problem lies in where they let these feelings take them.
There's been the people protesting that Dragoneer has/had Digimon and Pokémon porn in his gallery. And then being just as angry when he took one(?) of those pieces down. The change regarding Pokémon/Digimon in adult content isn't slated to go into effect until July 1, so it doesn't fucking matter. It's not, at this moment, disallowed. If it does violate the rules as they will be enforced at that time, taking it down is what he's supposed to do, so these people are angry because he... acted the same way any user should in preparation for the change? Regardless, there's no law that says he can't set rules that don't 100% follow what he himself is interested in, or whatever. I can't bring a dog into the pharmacy. Are you going to go yelling at dog-owning pharmacists that they're hypocrites, now? Because, uh... that's kinda ridiculous.
Then there were the people who decided that if they couldn't have nice things, they needed to go scorched earth and take everyone and their art supplies down with them. Post-pubescent minors (what I assume was the basic intent behind the arbitrary age of 13) have been allowed to be shown pregnant since 2020, as per the most recent (at time of writing) newspost. Three years, give or take, during which there was no significant blow-up over it, or at least none that I ever saw. That it has now been banned, closing the door for people with experience to share their stories (as well as people who just have characters who got pregnant in their teens because that's a thing that happens, but the lived-experience people are the biggest victims here), is something I place the blame for squarely on the shoulders of people trying to use that carve-out as a gotcha in order to try to get the Pokémon/Digimon exception back. It's not as though the "minors may not be fetishized" clause in the rule wasn't already there. Fetishistic depictions of teen pregnancy weren't on the menu.
They just had to drag others down with them.
(On a tangential note, I understand the "18 years old" thing isn't really at FA's discretion, but HOLY FUCK it would be so nice if we as a society stopped pretending like teens don't have sex. Like, I'm not saying allow minors in live-action porn or anything, but, like... it feels utterly unnatural that fiction gets forced into a weird corner where characters practically have tamper-proof seals on their genitals until they hit 18. I'm sure this is gonna get misconstrued, but really all I mean is that it would be nice if high school dramas were allowed to include actual high school drama. All of it. It's a storytelling thing to me.)
Anyway, those people also were mighty upset with the explicit carve-out for non-sexual transformation and vore themes as permissible. And, like... the language for that part of the rule was a little iffy ("themes" would have been so much better than "interests"), but it's something so obvious it shouldn't even need to be said. "Vore" is colloquially used within fandom for, well, eating, particularly of live prey. That doesn't mean every instance of "vore" is actually paraphilic/sexual. But that's how the protestations went, right along with arguments saying that anyone wanting to create art with minors in these contexts is obviously a pedophile. Which... uh. I guess you just accused the Brothers Grimm of wanting to diddle kids, seeing as their retelling of the Red Riding Hood story is one of the most influential/common ones. Great job, you guys. You sure showed them. I believe there's some vore themes in Aesop's Fables, as well, so we're looking at centuries of "fetishes" being peddled to minors. If that's the hill you want to die on.
Transformation is even more ridiculous of a claim, given how common a theme it is in children's media. Off the top of my head, in no particular order... Ben 10 (titular character), The Twelve Swans (main character's 12 brothers), The Frog Prince (titular character), Pinocchio (titular character), Snow White (evil witch/queen), Sleeping Beauty (evil witch/fairy), Shrek (titular character, Princess Fiona, misc side characters including Donkey), The Little Mermaid (titular character), Beauty and the Beast (Beast), DO WE FUCKING GET THE POINT? Hell, we've got Greek mythology (Zeus being the most frequent offender), Norse mythology (especially but not exclusively Loki), and I believe possibly even the fucking Bible, but who am I to get in the way of your juvenile outrage?
Of course they can be depicted in a fetishistic context/manner. So can fucking high-heeled shoes. But neither is inherently and necessarily so, and acting like they are just sounds like sour grapes at this point.
I don't like the changes that have been made to AUP 2.7 this year. I'm not saying I do. I think they're bad changes and I've clearly stated why. I also think that it's utterly childish to attack, badmouth and harass staff over it, to try to deflect onto other subjects that are supposedly JUST AS BAD, or to call anyone protesting a pedophile or groomer. It's ridiculous to pass around screenshots of staff making completely reasonable statements and make out like they just spoke out in favor of enacting the suggestions in Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal.
But I guess I shouldn't be surprised. :/
PoÀngen Àr inte lÀngre ens att fÄ som man vill - poÀngen har (för vissa, uppenbarligen, inte alla) blivit att Ästadkomma maximal skada pÄ FA och Dragoneer. SÄg nÄgon föreslÄ att försöka fÄ honom avskedad frÄn sitt jobb sÄ att han stÄr utan inkomst. Yikes.
För mig Àr Àtande sexuellt nÀr det _görs_ och _avbildas_ sexuellt. Och det Àr rÀtt lÀtt att se skillnaden, tycker Ätminstone jag.
Och att skada en person som gjort rÀtt mycket för hobbyn/fetishen/vadsom Àr ju inte lite kontraproduktivt...
Det Àr ju nÄgra Är sedan jag var admin, sÄ det Àr inte sÄ att jag kÀnner hela teamet nu för tiden, men jag har inte mycket till övers för folk som trakasserar frivilliga moderatorer, och Ànnu mindre ork för de som trakasserar folk som jag jobbade med innan jag slutade, som jag 100% vet inte Àr vad de anklagas för att vara.
Vuxna mÀnniskor behöver inte pjoskas med nÀr de fÄtt svansen pÄ knut över ingenting - de fÄr allt plÄstra om sina egna egon. (DÀrmed inte sagt att folk som faktiskt behandlats fel inte förtjÀnar ursÀkter, men den bron gÄr Ät bÄda hÄllen.)
That's the hypocrisy people are pointing out and him taking the art down doesn't change that.
So no, whatever art he has in his gallery (or favorites, or commission history, or anything else) doesnât make him a hypocrite. It makes him the owner of a site that said that âthis is not the place for sexual content with what looks like minors.â Nothing more, nothing less.
There's this idea that "prohibited under AUP 2.7" is automatically synonymous with "this is drawn child porn" which is... a take (even ignoring the fact that the phrase "drawn child porn" is a load of bull - the only artwork that could even remotely be likened to CSEM would be art documenting real abuse). Like, I've drawn utterly non-sexual shit that wouldn't be allowed under that rule. And that's fine - I can recognize that the parts of the rule that are clear-cut in nature ("children can't be shown in the presence of X, Y, or Z") mean it's not welcome, without that implying anything more about the art or me as an artist.
I do agree to a degree that rules that come with interpretation by their nature create this kind of friction. If someone points at my (lewd) art and says "that character is a minor," I'm not going to be happy about it, because that's not what I drew. If someone points at art I did as a stupid joke and says it's fetishistic, I'm not going to be happy about it, because, again, that's not what I drew. But unless they say "the artist clearly gets off to children" or something equivalent, it's not accusing me of anything. It's just them being wrong about my art. Which sucks, but it is what it is.
FA hasn't handled everything correctly, but a very vocal portion of the userbase has been acting utterly childish and vindictive, and if they hadn't it's likely the additional restrictions wouldn't have been introduced. People have been harassing staff and spreading rumors about them.
That's almost word for word exactly what the mod Luffy said on the Discord the second day of all of this. :P
I assume you haven't been following the interactions with mods on the Discord and trouble tickets over the past week. The mods have been saying a lot of inflammatory and accusatory stuff about various artists and anyone who has been criticizing the policy change.
I just got my ticket checking on a couple of submissions back earlier tonight and it was perfectly civil.
(Either that or I'd guess PayPal's giving the site a shake-down; but then I'd be surprised if staff had until July 1 to address it. Or maybe prepping for another sale? đ€·ââïž)
The original change around the start of the year seems like it was a bad idea that got doubled down on because it exposed aspects inconsistent with the original position. The trouble was this meant even more users who were basically told that after fifteen years of happily posting art, a large proportion of their gallery equated to child porn. That they were now the outgroup and "not welcome".
It's predictable that some of those excluded might seek to reverse this change through any means possible - although it's probably not smart to go after staff. Effectively banning more artists for which 'mons are their main focus and who have impacted "species" as characters only mobilises more fans.
I don't remember, as it was before I was even an FA user (I mostly caught the drama secondhand through LiveJournal friends who were a lot more invested than I was), why human-like children were originally banned; legal concerns or community pressure or something else? I do know that it was explicitly stated when it was expanded that AlertPay dropping FA (I've heard rumors because someone linked them to some NSFW cub art that was very far from vanilla, but I can't confirm that) that access to payment processors was the reason the scope of the rule was expanded then. That was certainly not done with any kind of air of painting users who drew the content as Bad People. So, like... I guess my point is that it can be done?
I have no issue with a site saying "we don't want X on here" regardless of what X is (I mean, I can lament it, but I'm not about to eat anyone's head); the issue I have with this is that it's not very clear what exactly X is, and maybe a little bit that the preamble to the initial announcement felt like it wasn't entirely honest about the history of AUP 2.7.
Overall, I've seen a significant uptick in purity discourse lately elsewhere. It wouldn't surprise me if the hostility stirred up on social media against artists for creating this or that art is mirrored in hostile responses to staff saying "the art is fine" when someone reports Pokémon/Digimon NSFW as cub art. I'm not going to say that's why this change is being made, but I will say that it's quite plausible it would have created the impression that the policy change was more universally desired than turned out to be the fact. I've got a couple of hunches that are based on previous events I can't share, but there's no way for me to know whether those are correct. Best any of us can do is educated guesses.
I'd believe a move to a new colo/hosting situation long before I'd believe in a sale, but honestly I don't think either is a factor. I think it's a misguided attempt to "unify" enforcement of AUP 2.7. I can understand the desire to eliminate loopholes, but unless there's a legal (or security) risk I personally think it's something that should be approached with caution - I'd rather have a small number of pieces exploiting loopholes present if that means a larger number of pieces that they incidentally share characteristics with are safe. I don't think it's about going after people on any large scale - there could be a small handful of known offenders that just barely slipped under the line before, and getting to nab them would be a perk, but it's not the kind of thing that would warrant a major policy decision.
I'm doubtful that it's the hosting provider; they're unlikely to be liable for what FA is doing, especially if they're just providing rackspace, power and networking. They might be concerned about actual CSEM, but cartoon animals ain't it. Maybe more if they were cloud-based, but I think Dragoneer likes racking his own hardware.
My theory is they're getting pressure from PayPal (critical for FA+/Shinies), a major publisher like Nintendo (seems unlikely; why stop at Baby Pokémon?) or prepping for a sale (if fundraising and ads aren't enough)
It's true I don't have much direct experience with colocation, but even leasing the only thing that happened once was that we got told by Leaseweb that we had to be one of those sites that used the NL police database to check uploads for actual CSEM (which it never triggered on). And that only happened because a) politicians got involved with the hosting sector in general, and b) someone filed an abuse report with them about cub (which didn't itself go anywhere, but triggered our inclusion in the plan).
I guess I can agree with the idea that it's an attempt to provide a more coherent implementation. The trouble is that the original rule was overbroad and the "loopholes" were seemingly attempts to remedy its incompatibility with what FA's userbase would actually tolerate.
FA just zapped several "problem" users, but it did that before the policy was set to take effect, so it feels like a general cleaning house moment. Or perhaps "release the hounds"? New staff often want to make big changes. And yes, when you get a bunch of tickets there's pressure to do something about them.
I think part of the problem with the "no stigma" thing is that FA is so big that "what it allows" has become seen as the max that should be allowed in furry society, rather than what it really was: a payment provider's diktat. There's also a UN group trying to enforce this kind of thing in legislation - though being on jury duty right now, I can see the courts have more than enough of a backlog of crime - and I guess the "virtue signalling on social media" aspect doesn't help either. It isn't clear that it makes anyone safer.
With my IB hat on I can't exactly complain about more uploads and visitors (though we'll need to bring our server upgrade forward a few months), but asking users to delete stuff they think may be infringing under the threat of losing your account is a recipe for needless loss of art and comments. And that makes me sad.
Honestly pressure from an increasingly puritan online climate is probably more likely than either of those, particularly if it gets down to people threatening to file complaints with key service providers. But all we can do is guess. I'm fairly confident there's been some levels of Karen-ing from people offended at Pokémon getting down and dirty, just knowing how toxic the community can be, but it's a far ways between being confident those reactions exist in the system and being confident in how much of a role they might (or might not) have played.
General legal climate in the US (and worldwide) could also play a role, I suppose - a lot of anti-porn bills in the name of "protect the children" have come up, some have passed, and fuck knows how much else is in the works that I haven't happened to hear of. And NCOSE and their ilk have been stepping up to make as much noise as they can.
I think one of the most helpful things FA could have done, with respect to the treatment of artists from other members of the community, would have been to explicitly state that them choosing not to host the content is not a moral statement about the content or artists. Maybe it would make little difference, maybe a lot, but pre-emptively condemning witchhunts seems like it would have been a good idea. Again, I've seen a pattern going back months of people going out of their way to "expose" artists of non-anthro and childlike NSFW on social media, to a degree that I wasn't seeing before. I would have liked for FA to explicitly take a stance against that kind of treatment of artists.
IIRC CSEM investigation orgs have come out and said in so many words that reporting artwork to them wastes their resources, which... At the very least should give people who want to strictly draw connections between drawing/viewing this art and actual child abuse, some pause.
But yeah, I feel bad for having to delete the one submission in my gallery deemed a problem, precisely because it has comments. It makes me uncomfortable to erase other people's words like that.
a rule that's defined mostly as "ill know it when i see it" is dumb and even more dumb when you can like. still draw nonsexual overt fetishism with it.
but the internet's getter kinda more puritanical by necessity of banks/advertisers being increasingly more reluctant to be anywhere near Bad Content
im mostly worried we're going to increasingly see places for artistic expression be lost on the internet out of the necessity of it becoming impossible to actually have them at all
the tumblr staff had a big effort post about how they CAN'T bring porn back because they'd have to be able to verify the age of everyone at all times
in another 10 years we might be back to the late 90s era of internet where every furry has their own personal art gallery website they host privately
Tumblr's full of shit tbfh. Like, sure, you'd MAYBE need to geoblock like 2 states or something? But they won't even fix the blatant BROKENNESS of their "view mature content on dash only" system (I can't always check my reblogs, because it'll be like "this blog is mature plz clickthrough" and then take me to the top of the blog, not the actual post. Which is... not really helpful, yanno?), so it's blatantly obvious they don't WANT to bring it back or make life more convenient for people who post other types of mature content. But then, they've been making excuses since the beginning of the Great Purge so I'm not surprised.
Though I'm more mad they've added a Pinterest-esque "you've now scrolled a few screens down, PLZ TO MAKE ACCOUNT/LOG IN to see more" to everything. That's just asinine. It's not like they can't show me just as many ads logged out.
But yeah. I can accept (though I don't have to like it) sites rolling over for banks/card processors. When FA banned non-human minors in sexual situations that was clearly stated to be due to payment processors having a stick up their ass, and like... that's understandable, the site managing to sort of pay for itself is more important. I'm more annoyed by the recent surge of puriteen "you draw dog dick therefore zoophile"/"you draw vaguely loli-like art therefore pedophile" nonsense. Because THAT'S what I see as more likely to break communities - both through in-fandom pressure and through joining forces with Karens appealing to legislature.
Mostly I needed to get the utter frustration I feel at the behavior of toxic community members who keep making things worse as though that's going to fix anything, and who are quite fine with causing harm to site staff in the process. This is the same energy as the people who wished death on me for being a "nazi" in 2017. So I've got like NO fucks to give about their tender little butts as long as they keep acting like that.
That's what I meant to type. Got distracted by frustration. Durr.