Submitted by sudo in meta

There was a recent discussion in /f/AskRaddle, and Raddle's no-pornography rule came up. Several people indicated that they were opposed to the rule, and it was also discovered that the original voting thread that led to the rule being implemented, if there was one, was deleted. For these reasons, I'd like to re-open discussion on this rule, and possibly later call for a re-vote. This thread will be for discussion.

Do you think pornography should be banned from Raddle? Why or why not?

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

I don't think it should be prohibited - I don't think that anything should be prohibited on raddle unless its inherently oppressive. That said, if porn stuff took off here, it would quickly move beyond what the current administrative workforce could handle. Realistically, I'm tentatively preferring to having it, but also think that if porn becomes a significant part of the site, there needs to be at least two things: (1) political sex workers who maintain the NSFW spaces. As things stand, neither of the admins are qualified for the job, afaik. (2) there needs to be more coded-in functionality for the site. For example, the ability to have NSFW forums, and the ability to exclude NSFW forums from your raddle experience in your user settings. I'm not sure why sex workers would want to use raddle now anyway since we don't embed images or video.

Beyond that, for me the only really interesting question is what kinds of pornography we would not want to have here.

Finally, I just want to note that this is likely to be mostly a garbage conversation for as long as sex workers are not participating.

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Fossidarity wrote

I fully agree with all your points. I personally wouldn't know how to admin this, I have no experience with neither porn nor sex work so I wouldn't know when something is oppressive, exploitative, etc. I'm all up for sharing anything that helps sex workers but I don't think I'm qualified to help with this at this stage, I would love to learn more about it.

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ziq wrote

The no porn rule was made by the users at a time when voat / 8chan were spamming the site with porn non stop. That's no longer happening so the rule is no longer serving a purpose. I vote do away with it.

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An_Old_Big_Tree wrote

Realistically, we could limit the problems that any porn trolls bring by having dedicated spaces and tags for pornographic content. I'm not sure how actually desirable that is, but it seems it would resolve the problem.

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happysmash27 wrote (edited )

No, because I like freedom of information, at least to a reasonable extent, and I think the rule against it is unnecesary. More rules just make things more complicated, although a rule against non-consensual porn would probably be extremely reasonable.

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sudo OP wrote

Personally, I do not see any good reason for it to be banned, and I see one reason for it not to be banned: because some people want it.

If I recall correctly, the two arguments previously given against hosting porn on Raddle were:

  • Some people don't want to see it

  • It could be difficult to tell if the person(s) in the porn consent to it being shared online

The first one is pretty easy to solve. People who don't want to see porn shouldn't subscribe to any porn forums. For those who browse /all who don't want to see porn, this would be easily remedied with the addition of a NSFW setting to Postmill (which it should really have, anyway). Any post involving nudity, or really anything that would not be suitable to look at at work, would be marked as NSFW. Then, any users who don't want to see that kind of stuff could go to their user settings, and specify that they do not want to be shown any NSFW posts. I have been learning PHP, and I will soon start learning Symfony, so I will try to contribute a NSFW option to the Postmill source code soon. If we had this feature, it would solve the problem of "I don't want to see any porn".

The second one is a bit trickier. If we're talking about drawn pornography, then as long as all of the characters in it seem to be consenting, it should be fine. But if there are real humans involved, then it could be difficult to tell if the picture or video was posted with the consent of the person(s) in it. I think it's safe to say that all professional porn was posted with the consent of everyone in it. For amateur stuff, one easy case is if it only shows one person, and it was posted to reddit or wherever by that person. That should be a green light. Otherwise, I would say to allow it only if the person(s) in it can't be easily identified. If their face(s) are visible, blur them, or crop them out of the picture/video. If they have any unique tattoos, blur them, crop them out (if possible), use GIMP's resynthesizer to make them disappear (if possible), or just don't post it. And of course, if someone messages the mods/admins claiming to be one of the people in the image/video and asks for it to be removed, do so without question. That should solve the second problem.

Thoughts?

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libre_dev wrote

There's plenty of other places on the 'net for porn. But on the other hand I don't really see a reason to disallow say amateur porn or the kind of commissioned porn I know the kink scene indulges in

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