Like many other people on Steemit, I came to the community unsure of what I'd find. Expecting to find cryptocurrency enthusiasts and tech nerds, I prepared myself to write posts on futurism, technology insights, and the blockchain.
(And cats, occasionally, but that's beside the point.)
While all of that kind of thoughtful content certainly exists here, I quickly became impressed--and involved with--the art community. Artwork and creative writing easily make up 75% of the posts I've published here in the last three weeks, and they've made up 98% of my commissions on Steemit. Cha-ching!
Yet, I've quickly discovered a major problem with how Steemit categorizes NSFW posts.
I recently did a series of drawings about sexuality. The final product--and header image--were not at all NSFW, but the process of building it certainly was.
The header image was as follows:
Knowing that some of the content inside the post would likely be inappropriate for a work setting, I decided to title the piece, "Sex in Layers: Original Psychedelic Abstract Content (NSFW Images in Post)." I figured that that would give enough of a "heads up" to folks scrolling through that the content included some explicit images, but that it was fundamentally art, and not designed to be included alongside 10 Things I'd Lick About You.
I naively thought that the content would be tagged like Reddit does with its NSFW content; users can still see the title, but there's a tiny warning tag that explicit content is ahead.
You can see it on your feed:
And you even get a warning before you click it:
With both of those posts, for example, it's clear that there may be some material I don't want my boss to see me looking at, but I'm still given the opportunity to distribute karma and look at the content if I so see fit.
Steemit's NSFW posting policies are very different.
When I throw a piece up on Steemit without the NSFW tag, it'll show up on my followers' feeds looking something like this:
And yet, when I post something that could be NSFW, it shows up like this:
The onus is then on the reader to see if they want to risk clicking to reveal what the post is. Whether the piece is primarily categorized as art, drawing, life, photography, or any other Steemit category outside of the likes of "sex" or "NSFW," readers have painfully few context clues to know the risk involved in clicking the link. It's no surprise that these posts don't do well.
This system forces an association between explicit artwork and pornography.
As a social media site, Steemit is going to have pornography and explicit content. I'm not against that either--I think that people should be creating whatever it is they want to create. But because of the feed-style nature of Steemit's user experience, all differentiators between explicit content disappear. Porn can be categorized as photography, smut as fiction, hentai as anime.
Censorship, of course, isn't the answer, but more information for the end user is. I'd love to see NSFW titles become available to readers. And as a content producer, I'd be perfectly happy specifying what kind of NSFW content the viewer would end up seeing.
Steemit would flag Titian, Matisse, and Degas. That's not the social network we're trying to create.
Art aims to unveil truths about the human experience. Sex, nudity, and lust are all a part of it--and will thus be the subject of many posts within the art community.
Some of the most famous artwork--written and auditory work included--features breasts, penises, anuses, and vaginas. I'd love Steemit to be host to some of that kind of content someday.
To be sure, some graphic may sneak through. I can certainly see pornographers going hard after high-paying categories in the hopes of getting their work found. But I also trust in the community to downvote irrelevant content. And as I mentioned a short bit earlier, I'd also love for content creators to specify what kind of NSFW content the user would see should they click the link.
Am I totally off base?
I realize that there has been a ton of discussion for what to do with NSFW content. What do you think about this proposal? Do you think it'd improve the user and content-creator experience?
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
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