Open & Welcome Thread - June 2022

MondSemmel

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The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

If it’s worth saying, but not worth its own post, here's a place to put it.

The Open Thread tag is here. The Open Thread sequence is here.

I've got 2 thoughts inspired by What's it like to have sex with Duncan?, which I'm portal-ing over from a comment over there.

The personal/frontpage distinction is basically meaningless unless those pages start looking more different than they do now.
Why is the NSFW tag opt out instead of in? This is not how basically any website works! It's a really really really small thing that could potentially burn me when I send a cool link^[1] to a buddy, they try to find the rest of the series, and end up with a description of someone's sex habits!

To clarify, I really don't care about having these things on LW, and personally support having them here vs elsewhere (though I've not put a lot of thought into this yet). But please let me send posts to kids I know without the sex stuff being visible by default in a way that makes it look totally normal. (To those of you who are going to say "Sex doesn't hurt anyone, let them see it!": sure, maybe sex hurts no one, but it's your job to convince the sexually conservative parents of the bright kid I sent a link to, not to convince me.)

of which Duncan, for example, has no shortage ↩︎

5Raemon4y

I don't currently have a strongly endorsed position here, but one of my background thoughts is that I think most people/society put sex into a weird taboo bucket for reasons that don't make sense, and I don't know that I want LW to play into. If I'm sending an impressionable kid here, I'm much more worried about them reading frank discussions about maybe the world will end, than a discussion of sex, and the former is much more common on LW at the moment. (And while some parents might be more freaked out about sex, I actually expect a fair number of parents to also be worried about the world-ending stuff. MY parents were fairly worried about me getting into LW back in the day) I think there are times LW has to make tradeoffs between "just talking about things sensibly" and "caving to broader societal demands". But I think the default expectation should be "just talk about things sensibly", and if there's something particularly wrong with one particular topic (sex, or politics, or whatnot), it's the job of the people arguing we shouldn't have a discussion (or should hide it), that it's concretely important to hide. I have heard several people mention that the recent sex post was offputting to them, and I think it's worth tracking that cost. But right now there's been... maybe two posts about sex in 5 years? The previous one I can recall offhand was actually making some important epistemic points. It's expensive to build new features so I don't think it makes sense to prioritize this that much until it's become a more common phenomenon.

I'll note that I had no issue with the post you linked, or this one, both of which use an example which is just sex-flavored and therefore (in my opinion) absolutely harmless. The opposition to those 2 posts actually confused me quite a bit and showed me a lot of people are modeling vulgarity differently than I am!

Again, I totally agree that there shouldn't be anything harmful with any of these posts, but I do think there is some kind of line to draw between "we said the word 'dildo' to make a point" and "the post is literally just data about someone's sex... (read more)

6Alex Vermillion4y

I figured that's likely true, given that it seems to be the only item in the tag. I should have mentioned that I'm raising these points because I think * It's probably going to be raised anyways, and I trust myself (given relatively low stake in this) to not blow up about it * Subpoint: Probably not that many people have weighed in, given that I saw no discussion on the post and none here * Subpoint: I (personally) found the post to be non-harmful on the object level, so it's easier to raise the point rather than later if it gets more argument-friendly * Now is the easiest time to change this, given that we don't have 100s of posts to sort through if we need to fix something manually * The ""harm"" isn't yet done, so we can avert basically all of it * [I'm forgetting one of the points I intended to type and will add it somewhere if I remember it]

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Open & Welcome Thread - June 2022

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