Cw: discussion of common cw tags and subjects, including violence, sexual violence, animal products, and others.
Bluesky's trust and safety (betrayal and bullshit) team is engaged in high fuckery and we're likely going to get some new folks coming in from bksy.
Now's probably a good time to revisit content warnings and when and how to use them.
Content warnings are just that; a warning about the content of a post or submission. They grew out of the older notion of "trigger warnings" as an acknowledgement that no one could reasonably guess what might be triggering to other people. Instead content warnings are a more general heads up that a discussion contains material that may be upsetting or unwanted by some people.
It's a friendly warning so folks can decide whether or not they'd like to engage with the discussion.
Note on "nsfw". When assessing if something is not safe for work ask yourself if a corporate HR rep who hated you would use it as evidence to get you fired.
Animal products - posts discussion animal products like meat or leather should have cw: animal products or cw: meat in the post title or header. Posts should usually be labelled nsfw and it's courteous to put discussions inside a spoiler tag so people can choose if they want to open it or not.
Sexual violence or sexual assault - posts discussion sexual violence, sexual assault, intimate partner violencen, or sexual violence against kids, all need to be labelled with a cw. Sv is commomly used for sexual violence, sa for sexual assault, csa or csam for violence against children. Posts should always have a nsfw tag or be placed in a spoiler tag.
Violence - posts discussing violence, torture, and related topics should have a cw as such and use spoiler tags and nsfw tags as appropriate.
Graphic images - graphic images of violence, combat footage, severe injusry or death, should be labelled as such and should always have an appropriate cw and be placed in spoiler tags and marked with the nsfw.
Bigotry - sexism, racism, tranphobia, misogyny, ethnic bigotry, ableism, and really any structural violence generally merits a cw. If it's graphic or upsetting putting the material in a spoiler tag is polite.
Some other things that may merit a cw
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common phobias liek spiders and clowns
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particularly awful politics
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notorious or hated political figures
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Hexbear pop culture enemies - for instance superhero movies are often semi-seriously marked with a "capeshit" warning
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topics discussing religious trauma
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sexual topics and general horniness as a courtesy to our ace and otherwise not-interested comrades
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medical trauma and topics that are frequent sites of medical violence.
If there was a "rule" it'd be; if you think someoen might find your post upsetting it's usually wroth writing a one or two word cw and sticking it at the top of the post. It's a courteous way to give people a heads up on what the discussion is about so if it's content they don't want to engage with they can skip it and keep browsing.
When it comes to content warnings I try to be specific about the content and to give a estimation of how in depth the content is because I think it's helpful for people to make an informed decision. I also try to remember to bold my content warnings and to put them on a separate line, often I will put them halfway into a comment right before the CW content appears as that way a person can still read part of a response while choosing to skip over a detailed example that may be triggering.
I'm going to give some examples of what I think are better and worse content warnings to illustrate my point in quoted comments:
So in this one the CW isn't as visually distinct so it's easier to skip over if you're skimming and it also excludes a person from reading a response before the potentially triggering content. Also "violence" isn't really descriptive - is it shouting? Is it a gunshot? Is it something really gruelling like you'd expect from a gory horror movie? This makes informed consent much trickier and it unintentionally excludes people.
Another example:
In this example, if a person decides to skip the comment because of the content warning they can still participate in the discussion to a large extent, even if they opt out of the last part so it's less exclusionary by its structure.
The content warning is also visually distinct and it's descriptive - it provides a good example of what to expect in the next part and who the language will be addressing. If it wasn't an abstract discussion I might say something like "Detailed personal experience of psychological abuse as a child who went through it" or "Description of fictional animal abuse in a film" because these can be very different experiences for someone to read about and they can have very different impacts.
When it comes to really intense stuff often I'll just put a CW at the top saying something like "Really in-depth discussions of transphobia, SH, suicide - if this stuff can be too much for you just skip the comment because you won't get anything out positive of reading this comment." such as in a case where maybe I'm really getting into the weeds and educating someone on a topic and encouraging them to shift their opinions. Or I might say "Blanket CW for very detail discussion of most/all forms of child abuse" rather than attempting to make a laundry list of each type of abuse. That sort of thing.
Anyway I'm not saying that this is how everyone must do their CWs but I feel like this is a good way to go about doing better, more helpful CWs.