like sewing with safety pins

[flambeau]

Am fairly baffled, in a sleepy Friday morning sort of way, by lj's new cunning plan to protect the children. For one thing, any under-18 person with two brain cells to rub together can get to read entries marked as inappropriate for minors by either lying about their birth date, or logging out of lj. And implementing this system seems to mean that

Comments

[ratcreature]

I also had to change my profile settings because I actually signed up way back before you had to give an actual birthdate, so I was logged in an saw half my flist only as generic collapsed cut-tags, because people set their journal to "adult concepts" or something.

I mean what is that anyway? How am I supposed to divine what LJ thinks children need to be protected from? Here nobody has a problem with children seeing penises or nipples for example. Obviously the US has a nudity neurosis, so I can could guess that I'd need to flag picture content with sex organs visible, but how does it even work for texts? And it's not like sex would make things "adult" automatically if I go by their tv ratings practice. I know some fans tag their fic NC-17 as soon as there's some naked cuddling, but you get tv series with on screen sex and just a conveniently draped blanket and it's still rated okay for teenagers.

Perhaps I should try reading goat entrails to divine the ratings for my posts. Now I just have to slaughter Frank...

[flambeau]

try reading goat entrails to divine the ratings for my posts

*snicker* I like that idea. Let me know if you get anything useful. I've no idea what "adult concepts" are, either, in this brave new world.

[frogspace]

I've no idea what "adult concepts" are, either, in this brave new world.

Maybe it means that they can spam you with porn ads if you aren't a paid user. Hey, the journal is adult anyway! :/

[flambeau]

Livejournal: making customers cynical since... well, this year, mostly.

[ratcreature]

Huh. That would at least explain what they are getting out of adding these "content flags" except more work for their "abuse team" or whoever has to check all the things users will flag as "offensive or adult". I also wonder whether you will be notified if others flag your content, or whether it just gets screened if some abuse volunteer agrees that it's "adult".

[neery]

Well, I guess what they're hoping to get out of it is legal cover for their asses. I suspect the abuse team is cursing the management team to the deepest levels of hell right now.

[ratcreature]

But legal cover against what? Book stores and libraries don't need content flags ans unsupervised children can look at explicit text and pictures of naked people there any time. Or books that mention drugs. Or violent books. I mean, a kid only had to go to the art section. Or the romance section. How could LJ be possibly sued for legal content, that to be within their TOS has to be non-obscene after all (and I think they have regulation against hate speech and some other stuff too). And they don't even define anything.

[flambeau]

I can feel a headache coming on. And the cheerful "we all want to protect the children, don't we! right! hey we're talking to you! SAY YES!" tone of the post grates on me, rather.