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rabidsamfanhttp://caras-galadhon.livejournal.com/348782.html has some good points about the whole flag/content marking system. #3 had escaped me, but I like it I do. Should cut down on the basic trolls. And you appear to need to be an LJ user to set flags flying from that too.
Some background -- I'm a children's librarian in a public library, and I know from that experience just how ballistic people can get about kids and internet porn. (We once had a local paper put a screaming headline on the front page "KIDS FIND PORN AT THE LIBRARY" and it would have warmed the cockles of your heart to discover how many children really *do* pay attention to the news and do what their elders tell them to do.) The compromise we reached, after a great deal of fuss, was to filter the children's computers and leave the adults computers unfiltered. This changed, gradually, to giving adults the option to turn off the filter, and is about to change again to limiting the number of unfiltered computers in the adult areas of the branches to a single machine. Our filter supposedly only blocks pornographic images, but it has flaws, and we need an unfiltered machine for the problem pages (where breast cancer information gets blocked because of pictures of breasts, for example.) But the drive to limit the number of machines came from librarians and patrons, who got tired of walking past the masturbators when all they really wanted to do was work on a resume or find a reference source.
The filter, of course, is imperfect. Filters always are. And the kids find porn anyway. And lie about their ages. And do all the things teens always do to make adults roll their eyes and shake their heads. And there are times when a page with a warning comes up anyway, because the filter's somehow missed it.
But not every kid clicks on through.
For the kids who really aren't interested yet, or are quietly principled, warnings of adult content really do provide a way to skip the stuff which is more mature than they want to deal with at the moment. And the younger kids, believe it or not, don't usually lie about their ages.
For parents whose concerns are very real, the warnings and filters help make it possible to allow a computer in the house at all.
What the warnings also do is cover the service provider's ass. Like "the coffee is hot" warnings on McDonald's cups, a little bit of legal blurb can go a long way when it comes to a court case. Since LJ has made the whole "self-labelling" thing entirely optional, and will only intervene when they really get nudged to do so, and then only to put up a content warning... well... that's not that unreasonable.
There are categories they still have to deal with legally, but lets face it, if you've already labelled your content as "adult" oriented, it's not gonna do a troll a bit of good to throw up a flag saying you should label it.
(I'm also amused by the "no adult content" category designation, but then again I work in a building where half the collection is "adult fiction" or "adult nonfiction" and its more fun to be amused by the stupidity of using "adult" to mean "sexy"...)
But reading through all of the things I'm seeing, I think what I'm getting is a sense of relief. Like any compromise, this is imperfect -- no one is entirely happy, but we're all unhappy for different reasons. There are kinks that will probably be addressed. But on the whole, this is a win for the users.
You see, it could be a lot worse. LJ/SixApart could have decided that adult content was just too much hassle to deal with on their servers and banned it entirely.
I'm just as happy that they didn't.
Some background -- I'm a children's librarian in a public library, and I know from that experience just how ballistic people can get about kids and internet porn. (We once had a local paper put a screaming headline on the front page "KIDS FIND PORN AT THE LIBRARY" and it would have warmed the cockles of your heart to discover how many children really *do* pay attention to the news and do what their elders tell them to do.) The compromise we reached, after a great deal of fuss, was to filter the children's computers and leave the adults computers unfiltered. This changed, gradually, to giving adults the option to turn off the filter, and is about to change again to limiting the number of unfiltered computers in the adult areas of the branches to a single machine. Our filter supposedly only blocks pornographic images, but it has flaws, and we need an unfiltered machine for the problem pages (where breast cancer information gets blocked because of pictures of breasts, for example.) But the drive to limit the number of machines came from librarians and patrons, who got tired of walking past the masturbators when all they really wanted to do was work on a resume or find a reference source.
The filter, of course, is imperfect. Filters always are. And the kids find porn anyway. And lie about their ages. And do all the things teens always do to make adults roll their eyes and shake their heads. And there are times when a page with a warning comes up anyway, because the filter's somehow missed it.
But not every kid clicks on through.
For the kids who really aren't interested yet, or are quietly principled, warnings of adult content really do provide a way to skip the stuff which is more mature than they want to deal with at the moment. And the younger kids, believe it or not, don't usually lie about their ages.
For parents whose concerns are very real, the warnings and filters help make it possible to allow a computer in the house at all.
What the warnings also do is cover the service provider's ass. Like "the coffee is hot" warnings on McDonald's cups, a little bit of legal blurb can go a long way when it comes to a court case. Since LJ has made the whole "self-labelling" thing entirely optional, and will only intervene when they really get nudged to do so, and then only to put up a content warning... well... that's not that unreasonable.
There are categories they still have to deal with legally, but lets face it, if you've already labelled your content as "adult" oriented, it's not gonna do a troll a bit of good to throw up a flag saying you should label it.
(I'm also amused by the "no adult content" category designation, but then again I work in a building where half the collection is "adult fiction" or "adult nonfiction" and its more fun to be amused by the stupidity of using "adult" to mean "sexy"...)
But reading through all of the things I'm seeing, I think what I'm getting is a sense of relief. Like any compromise, this is imperfect -- no one is entirely happy, but we're all unhappy for different reasons. There are kinks that will probably be addressed. But on the whole, this is a win for the users.
You see, it could be a lot worse. LJ/SixApart could have decided that adult content was just too much hassle to deal with on their servers and banned it entirely.
I'm just as happy that they didn't.
