Forem Creators and Builders 🌱

Discussion on: Add dedicated trigger and content warning tags

Collapse
 
michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

I totally agree with @lisasy that this is a great idea and am excited to think about how this might best work when the time comes to offer something like this.

For instance, I've spoken with fellow teammates (@ioscasey & @ellativity ) here about the potential for allowing authors the ability to customize a warning label to place on their work + perhaps us providing a preset of labels for moderators to use. For instance, I could see us providing a label for mods to pop on articles that use affiliate links as we require people to disclose affiliate links in our terms.

Anyway, there could definitely be some overlap with that idea and filtering like you're describing. I really like the idea of empowering users to better filter out content that they don't want to see!

Collapse
 
ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Chiming in here to suggest that we add in 2 (maybe more) check boxes before the row of Save/Publish buttons that ask

Does this post contain affiliate links?
Does this post contain potentially triggering content?

checking the boxes could either prompt specific verbiage. such as

Ensure that the following phrase appears at the start of this article: β€œThis post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.”

I'm fully aware that this is not the highest technical priority at the moment, but just wanted to submit this suggestion so we either can reject it outright as nonsense, or I can find it for future discussions πŸ˜…

Collapse
 
abenerd profile image
Abenet

I like this idea for the affiliate links, one could provide a forem instance wide default message, that can be overridden by the user for example. But having thought about this for the trigger warnings, I'm not sure this is the right approach, at least not just this. I would like to give the user the ability to completely filter out posts that contain their triggers, this way they won't even have to see or check the post.
A message can maybe still be put on top of the post automatically generated by the trigger warnings that have been set, in case one gets sent a link.

Thread Thread
 
ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle) • Edited

If I understand fully, the purpose of a solution like this would be to completely remove any potentially triggering content from a user's feed without them even knowing it existed. Am I correct in thinking this would have to be implemented flawlessly, where triggers won't slip through the net due to erroneous self-reporting? Do you have any examples in mind of a community that manages to get this right?

I would be hesitant to over-promise and under-deliver, so would love to speak to someone who has figured out how to do this in a way that doesn't overly depend on the author self-reporting.

Other than having a TW and a tag automatically applied if the author checks the box, we would need to have a reliable way to mute tags. As of now, we don't have that, so I would advocate for that being the first step to any of this.

Thread Thread
 
abenerd profile image
Abenet

The purpose of the solution would be for the user to know exactly what kind of trigger the post contains, only saying that a post contains a trigger is not really helpful to them as the user does not know whether they are impacted by this trigger or not, so they would either have to abandon the post entirely or read it to find out, risking to be triggered.
A consequence of knowing what kinds of triggers a post contains would be the ability to filter those posts out or marking them in someway so that the user is forewarned.

I think self-reporting should be part of any system that is being implemented, the author can then be aided by other systems, whatever they may be, although I am not sure how useful a fully or even semi fully automated system would be, as triggers come in so many shapes and ways.
The easiest of those semi automated systems would probably be a keyword based search that would recommend triggers based on certain words and phrases found, but this can also easily lead to false positives.
Another way would be to basically crowd source the trigger detection, letting users add trigger warnings to posts, but here we have the problem of abuse that must be addressed.
No system will catch everything we want, and we should of course state that, but having even just a self reporting system would help users avoiding things they do not want to see.

Thread Thread
 
ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Thank you so much for exploring this idea further with me.

In terms of implementation, I keep coming back to the tag mute conversation. I know it's not perfect at this point, but I would love us to look at how we can find ways to improve on what we have to release the functionality faster for communities where it would be game-changing, with a view to refining or re-imagining it down the line. Also, we've already started discussing tag mute in a broader context, since we see value for in other applications, so it has momentum on its side.

It also ties in with giving Trusted Users and Tag Moderators more scope as well, which is another adjustment we'd like to promote. Crowd sourcing is effective as long as we can trust the crowd we're sourcing from, and that's where giving tag editing privileges to a small group of proven trusted users can be a powerful tool for both rewarding trust and generating crowd-sourced data.

Thread Thread
 
abenerd profile image
Abenet

You're welcome, and thank you for the conversation, I'm enjoying it very much.
The most trivial approach to tag muting I think would be using the existing system, so that instead of following a tag it is being muted and removed from the feed. People are using tags to indicate the language of their posts so one could filter out posts in languages that they do not understand.
But the question here is also, what does muting mean, to what extend do we mute this post, does it only not appear in the users feed or do we also hide it from search results, do we warn the user when they're visiting a post having a tag that they have muted, is the user allowed to set which, if any, of these scenarios should happen.
Some platforms allow users to mute certain keywords for a certain amount of time, is this something we want, or even useful for us?
Also I like the idea of using moderators and trusted users to add certain tags, I have not thought of them!

Thread Thread
 
ellativity profile image
Ella (she/her/elle)

Hey @abenettt I wanted to touch base again to let you know that I've not abandoned our conversation! My attention got pulled in another direction, but I am still here! Let me think about this for a second and get back to you soon?

Thread Thread
 
abenerd profile image
Abenet

Of course! There are many demands of your time! Thank you for coming back at me!

Collapse
 
abenerd profile image
Abenet

Hey, thanks for the comment!
I like the idea of automagically slapping labels on the posts, but I'm not sure how well this would work for triggers and content warning, for some a keyword search might be sufficient but for others it might be more complicated and could lead to false positives and / or false negatives. To be honest, I'm not sure myself what the best approach here is, the idea of using tags was just the first one that came to my mind, I'm sure there is a more elegant solution for this also. I just find this is an important issue and hope to start a conversation to deal with this.

Collapse
 
michaeltharrington profile image
Michael Tharrington

Absolutely!

I'm not sure yet what the best solution is either. Tags? Labels? Maybe some 3rd idea that we've yet to think of?

I really appreciate ya starting this conversation! I do think it's important and if we get it right it could really help folks to find what they're looking and avoid what they aren't.