Forums / Maintenance / Suggest Ideas

I would estimate that over 98% of all the NSFW-tagged images on KYM are flagged as such for sexually suggestive or explicit content. While hiding sexy things isn't the only use of NSFW banners, it's what people come to expect. On KYM, "not safe work work" is basically synonymous with "pornographic," and there's not really much use in treating it as anything else.

While it's not an ideal system, it does it's job: users know and understand that the NSFW banner is hiding images in the grey zone between NC ("not cool") content, and regular images. There exists an understanding that the hidden content is not suitable for public viewing, but still follows site guidelines as listed in the NSFW guidelines.

The reason we can get away with this is because of how frequent the censoring of sexual material occurs. From the NSFW guidelines:

Images are OK as long as it’s something that can be seen on a Major Network Daytime TV or in PG-16 / Mature Games.

Our NSFW guidelines are just adapted from common television. It's easy enough to say "if the nipples/genitals are showing, it's NC, if they're doing sexy things it's NSFW". It's a lot more difficult to judge how much blood, dismemberment, or death is "too much" for the site. Adding to this issue, users that are expecting sexual content that would not offend them are instead finding other "triggering" content – most often gore (the RWBY gallery being a perfectly good example of this, judging by the complaints we received). Some users call for all gore to be NSFW'd, or removed entirely, while others would claim that illustrated or drawn blood and gore shouldn't be worthy of censorship.

When we use the same NSFW banners for "trigger tagging", we don't have the same easy out. Although we haven't had to face much of it (yet), scatalogical content, extreme fetishism, "snuff", vore, and extreme abuse, to name a few, are all considered worthy of being tagged for the express purpose of allowing people to avoid it. This is often where you'll here the phrase "not safe for life" thrown around, in reference to content that is shocking for reasons that AREN'T notably sexual. This is the crux of the issue: KYM currently has no way of separating content that is NSFW for sexual reasons from content that is NSFW for other, usually much more disturbing ones. The Stephen Universe example mentioned above illustrates this issue really well. How can a user differentiate between an NSFW image that will be sexy and an NSFW image that is literally designed to shock and horrify viewers?

While I'm not necessarily proposing any one system, I think there are a few ways we can take this:

• Certain (read: hentai & doujin) websites simply mark certain genres of content as "triggering". Attempting to view this content brings the user to a landing page, warning that the following content is considered disturbing or unsettling by many. While not specific as to the content itself, it's effective in preventing users from running into images or videos they wouldn't wish to see.
• Many of the safer Booru image hosts, use an almost identical system to ours, but with more options for filtering images. Filter tags with thumbnails exist for things like "suggestive", "18+", "spoilers", "seizure warning", and "questionable" all fit in here. It enables people to be very specific about the content they view and upload – provided it is tagged properly.
• By and large the easiest solution, adding a third filter (maybe with another little KYM-tan thumbnail) for content which is considered worthy of being hidden, but not expressly for being lewd. Admittedly, it would require a bit of backtracking to re-tag some old images, but as a quick fix this would probably be enough to avoid users stumbling upon gore/shock imagery. Given the existence of shock content, such as goatse [NSFW] and meatspin [NSFW] it would be a useful thing to have. [1]
  
  

"But Doeoeod! What if I A user is okay with one filtered fetish, but not another? How will they find what they're looking for?"

Good question IRC hypothetical strawman! At the end of the day, KYM is not a fanart-hosting website, nor a fetish/pornography catalog. There's a reason "booru tagging" is considered a bad thing among media mods: KYM isn't made for people to find exactly the kind of fanart/softcore porn they want. The warning is just that: a warning. Actively seeking out that kind of content is better done on sites like the booru sites I keep mentioning, or places like Tumblr. [2]

Please note that this issue doesn't apply to real-life bloody or gory images. If those kinds of images are necessary for documentation, they are often placed behind specific spoiler tags or filters. The only instance of real-life blood or gore being acceptable on KnowYourMeme is for the documentation of events that specifically involve those deaths, such as disasters and (unfortunately quite common) attacks of terror. As far as I can tell, the issue of unmarked/ambiguous gore images on KYM only occurs with fanart/illustrated uploads.

While we're on the topic of KYM filtering system, the ability to control or enable/disable these at will would be pretty much a godsend to the entire site. I know for a fact most of the avid gallery-browsers click on every NSFW link they see. For users like these, as well as anyone trying to search a gallery via thumbnail, the NSFW filter is nothing but an obstruction. They also provide a challenge in cleaning galleries, as thumbnails are usually the easiest way to identify a reposted image, or image that needs to be removed. In the same manner as the "hide ponies" button, it would be pretty damn beneficial to enable users to toggle the appearance of NSFW, spoiler, and whatever hypothetical "shock" filter the site has.

This is possible the largest ongoing discussion about KYM's organization and tagging policy. While we're against "Booru tagging" in favour of KYM's primary role of documentation, nobody is going to deny that it gets the most use as a repository for fanart, especially of the sexy kind. While it's clean, simple, and easy to follow, it also makes sorting between images pretty much impossible. Two images of the same character, uploaded to the same gallery, would literally only require the tags "name, fanart, artist:name" to be in line with KYM's standards. As much as some of the mods dislike it, Boorus and similar hosts have much more detailed tagging systems than us.