Saturday, April 15, 2023

Sensitive Content!

 I honestly don't know whether to be horrified or excited at getting a "sensitive warning" notification on one of my posts. The post has been online for over a decade, and is a short bit describing the fable of the Endreti Trolls of the World of Lingusia....a fairytale, if you will, of a D&D campaign world. The original post is here if you're curious, and I believe that same story was previously shared back on rpgnet, so its likely a dead thread over there, too. 

The blogger content moderation guidelines are perfectly clear and make sense to me, but I am utterly uncertain as to what the strike is for. There was, long ago, an illustration I linked to the post but that link has been broken for ages so I removed it. The content does describe a rather unhealthy transmogrification of an elf and deals with another famous fictional entity: Tsthagghua, who is not a creation of mine but gets co-opted in fantasy worlds frequently (and is a veritable mascot for Frog God Games). Nothing in the text struck me as weird in a way that might mark a violation. I am just kind of floored, to be honest. I mean....I've written weirder stuff! 

The key takeaway from this is that after close to 14 years posting here someone, somewhere, apparently took umbrage with the post. I assume they read it and did not understand the context? If so, my bad....many of my posts intrinsically assume the reader is here because they are in to RPGs, but I'd imagine someone arriving without context might be confused, I suppose. But offended? I am genuinely weirded out. 

Either way, I removed the dead link, added a line of clarification that this is related to D&D, and shall await a follow up response on the moderation. Curious if someone is able and willing to clarify what in the post is wrong....I really don't know. Indeed, after reviewing the content guidelines, I am even more confused as frankly just reading the content guidelines was more distressing to me than that post could or ever should be. There's a lot of restrictions that make sense, but those all strike me as relevant to genuinely concerning stuff, not mild fairytales that are at best describing fictional mythology suitable for Lord of the Rings. So....yeah. Weird.



EDIT: the resubmitted post was approved, so either what I did made a difference, or a pair of live eyes reviewed it and realized there was no offensive content. Yay!

2 comments:

  1. That was done to one of my posts that was completely inoffensive. I think it was probably just someone screwing with me for comments I'd made on a Youtube channel that they took offense to. (There'd be a wide-ranging number of those.)

    People are getting paid to do this, or they're insane activists, or it's an AI programmed to go after certain opinions. Maybe all three. Some powerful people really don't like free speech.

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    1. I was just thinking that: maybe an AI algorithm is being used now, and some word I used auto-flagged it. As it turns out, the post has been reinstated as OK now after a resubmission.

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