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FA Policy Update - Actual Discussion
10 months ago
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.
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.
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...)
-ˋˏ ༻❁༺ ˎˊ-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.
-ˋˏ ༻❁༺ ˎˊ-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...)
It sucks that's how it is but it's the kind of thing that would have been needed to be softly enforced from the very get-go to have any effect. At this point the horse isn't just out of the barn it's dead and buried way on past the horizon lol
Tags are a bit more reasonable and easy to add after the fact, but even then they'd probably need to create a suggestion mechanic like IB has. I've got half a mind it would need to be mandatory by default to cover dead and inactive accounts but even then that would probably create way more problems than it would solve. There's no good answer, but not doing anything is even worse.
The tag blocking system is, imo, too little, too late. As you've said, this should've been introduced a decade ago. It makes FA feel like it's desperately trying to play catch-up and stay relevant in the wake of Dragoneer's passing. Speaking of which, the stickied "honoring Dragoneer's legacy" fundraising link that's still begging for money more than six months after he's passed is tacky as hell. Now it's just grifting.
My personal experience is that engagement has started to fall and posting has declined somewhat. That might partly be my own self-fulfilling prophecy because I posted a journal about my own ban and how I wasn't going to be posting the comic here anymore. But even with the regular pics that I do post, there just isn't as much engagement as there used to be. I'm not seeing quite as many submissions as usual either. I used to go through 100+ per day and lately it's been 20 or 30, and it only gets close to 100 if someone posts a backlog of stuff.
There's also an entirely new generation of younger furries that just aren't bothering with FA. They're more active on Telegram or Discord, Bluesky, and even Reddit. But don't have interest in a half-broken legacy site that doesn't work right on mobile and that other people seem to be leaving anyway.
I don't think FA is going to die any time soon. It'll lumber along for as long as they want to keep pumping money into it. I'm pretty sure it still has the most traffic of all the dedicated furry gallery sites. It's just that those sites, collectively, aren't quite the necessity that they used to be. I'm definitely less interested in using it and I know several other artists who've been moving away from it too.
I had no idea artists as big as you were being that badly affected by a demographic decline. It was always in the back of my mind, and I'd met so many Discord/Telegram-only artists (that happened to begin branching out to Bluesky when the limitations of those platforms became extremely apparent) that just didn't like dealing with Fur Affinity being a mess to deal with. Let alone dealing with the other sites either lacking the userbase, or having perceived cultural issues.
I admit I bemoan the gallery format of website dying - searching for art on Discord, Telegram, and Bluesky is an absolute nightmare. But I don't think this is a failure of the gallery site format itself, but, well, a result of everything we've seen happen, and Bluesky ending up with the best networking effects for artists of our type.
I'll have to get the AD account set up after I actually eat food for the day hahaha.
A lot of the problems with FA haven't really affected me that much. I don't bother doing a lot of browsing random pictures, I just look at my notifications most of the time. The varied policy changes from the past year or so though were...concerning. I'm lucky that I was never hit by anything of the sort but I've known plenty who were. Compounding with anxieties I've had about how people perceive my content it gets me really worried about the possibility that I might get banned at a moment's notice with no ability to combat it. FA has been coasting along on complacency, and now that people are finally getting fed up enough to want to do anything about it it's probably already too late, not helped in the slightest by Dragoneer's death.
I never thought that there were people who might have set up extensions to block no-tag images, and that got me wondering if people weren't seeing my stream announcements because I don't bother with putting tags on those. With tag blacklisting now on the table, though, I might just be facing a completely different roadblock.
It's rough. I just want to be able to express myself and make an impact on other people. Often I just feel like I'm shouting into the void, bleeding myself dry.
[quietly presses +Watch]