Interesting Links for 08-01-2023

[andrewducker]

1. The Power of Indulging Your Weird, Offbeat Obsessions

(tags:obsession science research advice viaPatrickHadfield )

2. Trigger warnings for innate parts of people's lives are not a good idea

(tags:triggerwarnings minorities )

Comments

[poshmerchant]

I have a very bland example of why CWs are better than filtering. My anti-sports filter on Mastodon is now up to 48 keywords and I expect that I will continue to grow indefinitely. People who like sports keep finding new ways of describing sports. I'm a glutton for punishment because I browse the federated timeline (i.e. firehose of everything) to discover new people to follow, so I keep seeing sports

Now, I don't have PTSD around sports. I just loathe them. I have other filters (e.g anti-orange guy filter, anti-bird site owner filter) where my tolerance level for the subject matter is a lot lower. For those, I wish people were much more eager about CWing their own posts

A CW is just a subject line

[mellowtigger]

I do the same with all things Trump, Musk, Twitter, or new Star Trek. I enjoy seeing those miniscule messages that something on that topic is currently hidden from me. The author still gets to enjoy their exposition, and I still get to enjoy my continued ignorance. :) Filtering (and its opposite, hashtag subscription) is very effective.

The content warning method leads to faster permutation explosion, though, since it requires every author to anticipate every possible reader's every possible reaction. When everything is content warned, then there's no longer any such thing as actual text exposition. I've seen at least once site that wanted all posts unrelated to that site's reason-for-existing to be content warned, so they wouldn't normally show up in full height on the local feed. It leads to everything being gated eventually. Which makes simple tagging of topics much more effective, since it can be done automatically without even the author's effort (but it's better with the intentional work). Leaving control over it to the recipient is what provides self-agency and psychological relief, not gating words... or so I'm arguing, at least.