Late last night, I started noticing a couple posts in the “new” feed with pornographic images right in the thumbnail.  Hive account@erotic was the first one whose posts I browsed.  I noticed that they have been doing this for quite some time with little flagging from the community, and I started to wonder where I stood on this.

It’s clear to me that, as an investor, user, and believer in the platform, I need to do all I can to keep Steemit amazing.  There are many various niches throughout the Internet that Steemit alone can’t possibly address, and pornography may just be the biggest one of these.  Whether we like it or not, pornography is a huge part of all Internet activity.

Can you imagine what would happen here if porn users on other sites found out they have a financially incentivized way to share porn?  What if a few major porn sites decided to acquire an ungodly amount of Steem Power to try to push their content and similar content to the top of trending?

Personally, I don’t want to see porn on Steemit.  I believe we need a separate platform that is specifically used for pornographic material, that requires users to be 18+ to sign in, in order to comply with the law.  Having users post that content here, when users can and do sign up at any age, is likely a potential legal risk for our company.

I now strongly believe that I need to flag blatant pornographic content for the sake of this platform.  I have already started doing this right before posting, and I am starting to regret not getting this all going before bed last night.

I also would like to add, that although I will take this stance on porn posts, this is in no way a condemnation of the industry.  People can do what they would like, but I am just going to keep doing what I feel is right for Steemit.

I previously made a post outlining how I would be voting on this platform and I view blatant pornographic material to be a “net negative to our investment, Steemit”.  If you disagree with my strategy on how to handle this, please let me know.  I am open to changing my perspective, but I just don’t see how it benefits the platform.

Hive account@derekareith

Edit to add:

Hive account@tombstone pointed something out to me that I was completely unaware of:

When tagged as NSFW, posts will by design not show up in any of the feeds. One would have to explicitly go into the NSFW tag to see such posts. So it's not necessary to flag them if they are tagged properly. 

I will now no longer be flagging properly tagged NSFW posts.

Improperly tagged NSFW posts can still fek off though :)