A literal “won’t someone think of the children?” appeal.
So, okay, IFDB is to become a youth-oriented curator of titles. Understood.
I really don’t understand what the fuss is about. It’s not like any titles will be inaccessible, they just won’t be proactively suggested to logged out users. Logged out users will still be able to search for any title and only need to click on a show all button.
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I actually was tempted to write that at the bottom of my post but decided against it, so thank you for doing it for me. 
But yeah, that sums it up. I won’t deny that it’s annoying, but I think the benefits outweigh the annoyance. Otherwise, I wonder what the future of IF will be if the single largest resource can’t be recommended to players at the stage of their life in which they’re most easily introduced to new topics. As it is, reading has drastically declined, and I only expect it to get worse with future generations. That’s what I’m concerned about, anyway.
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Good point. I think it is a good idea to initially hide games with pornographic or very violent content.
There will no doubt be some games, which are difficult to rate, e.g. how much violence is acceptable? A lot of fantasy games have a lot of killings, but it might not be worse than cartoon violence. Killing orcs is probably not so bad, but killing humans are worse etc.
I guess a very simple system is better than nothing (it might be difficult to agree on more advanced censoring). So to begin with, we could require that people are 18 or older if they are to see pornographic games and extreme violence. Some might wish for more categories but that could be quite difficult to define.
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This is the way it works on itch: If you directly search for my game robotsexpartymurder and aren’t logged in, or are logged into an account that isn’t set to automatically show mature-flagged content, you first see a screen saying (something like) “This game contains adult material… are you sure you want to proceed?” and makes you opt-in. It doesn’t censor, it just prevents the game from coming up automatically in searches and gives an “are you sure?” gate to access it.
I have no problem with this, because otherwise they probably wouldn’t be able to allow this sort of content to be available at all.
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I’m not actually sure what you think is best here. (Please try to make specific, constructive proposals instead of just saying what you don’t want, even if you’d just prefer the status quo.)
Do you think the home page should have a direct link to Sexual Service Act if someone happens to have posted a recent review of it? Or would you prefer we add a “some results hidden” banner on the home page?
Currently the home page has a short list of six new events on IFDB (reviews and game listings, mostly), with a “See full list…” link, taking you to the New on IFDB page. I didn’t explicitly say, but I was imagining the “click here to see all” banner to show up at the top of that page, too. (It is basically a search result.)
I don’t think the home page itself needs a “some results hidden” banner, though I could imagine mentioning it next to the “See full list…” link if other folks agree that this is important.
Regardless of what we do with the home page, I’m imagining that links to content-warning games would likely be two clicks away from the home page, without requiring login, e.g. “Browse Games” → “show all results”
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I understand you’re asking me to present a rival bill to the committee and I fall a little short of that mark, sorry about that: I constructively advocate for an awareness and hopefully acknowledgement of the fact that a service’s default experience is that service’s experience.
Those who disbelieve, please see the titanic Netscape vs. Internet Explorer legal battles. Please see the walled-garden app stores. Please see the preinstalled apps you cannot uninstall from phones. Please see the shady deals that arrange for apps to be sideloaded in the middle of the night while you’re not looking.* Please see the difference between obtaining various once-classified products over the counter vs. having to obtain a doctor’s prescription for said remedy, and the sometimes decades-long struggles to obtain such access. And on and on. These are all high-stakes and frequently big-money struggles over a default experience, because the default experience is what matters most. And “It’s no big deal to have to do x in order to obtain unfiltered information” is a distinctly different experience than the one on offer today.
If the goal is to show “Latest review activity” on the main page then yes, any timely (non-griefer/non-bot/etc. etc.) review should show up in that feed. If the goal is only to show reviews of certain approved storytelling products, that’s a different service than what I thought IFDB was meant to be.
However! I do understand that there could a strong incentive for some to shift IFDB into an SEO-friendly organic marketing portal to direct youth/edu buyers to certain approved storytelling products. That’s a graspable, rational goal. I meant it when I said okay, old mission over, new mission youth-friendly curation, understood.
But, again, if those rails are the default experience, then that is what defines the site going forward.
* - yes I am aware that this is more likely to happen in some jurisdictions than others but it does happen.
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I wonder if maybe we could make both parties happy by having a kids.ifdb.org site where all non-child friendly content would be unlisted and inaccessible (literal censoring, in this case), similar to how there’s a kids section for Netflix and other services.
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Just curious, who will be deciding the difference between sexual content and pornographic 18+ only material?
(Or the same for violence, thematic elements or whatever.)
We’re unlikely to reach consensus on a single overarching goal for the home page of IFDB. We’d kinda like the home page to show new stuff, good stuff, newbie-friendly stuff, and we’d like users who see it to like it and come back later.
But we haven’t, as a community, decided for ourselves what should happen when those goals come into conflict. What if the new stuff isn’t good? What if the new stuff isn’t newbie-friendly? What if the good stuff is porny? (There are a lot of high-quality Twine games of historical interest, including award-winning ones, that are porny.)
We certainly haven’t collectively decided that the IFDB home page will be nothing but marketing pablum.
It does seem like we don’t really want Sexual Service Act to receive top billing on IFDB, but I’m not ever sure we all agree on why.
So, uh, sure, the default is the experience. But that doesn’t answer any of our hard questions.
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If this is really about thinking of the children, this should shield everyone’s conscience. The children will be safe from exposure to harmful words as long as they don’t lie about their age, interact with friends, or seek out any other part of the internet or form of entertainment without direct parental approval. A simple solution for everyone.
No one is claiming that this solution makes it completely impossible to find “offensive material.” Multiple people in this thread have been quite clear that the whole point is to prevent accidental exposure.
Here is one post where the main point of the post is exactly that. Here is another post that says so explicitly. Here is another.
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I was thinking more about parents and teachers that restrict access to all but specific sites. By having a specific URL targeted towards children, teachers can let them access that sub domain while blocking the main site. Otherwise I doubt they could safely suggest the site at all.
That sounds like a reasonable set of goals overall! (It does seem like a “promote quality” policy creates additional disincentives to submit lower-star reviews, though, since those would be inherently less notable and therefore less likely to get front-page exposure. Intentionally perverse proposal to compensate for that shortcoming: pay out more points for negative reviews! And of course, it doesn’t get to the issue of “What about reviews from people who absolutely fuggin’ love Sexual Service Act?”)
Tabling “don’t show Offensive content (to guests/by default)” for the time being, I think it’s perfectly reasonable for a landing page to have both a constantly-updated “New activity” feed which operates more-or-less just like New on IFDB does today, and a few boxes that have (let’s say) a top-three list that maps to some of those categories you mention:
Good games for D&D fans
Dork II
Chance of Longswords
Slothimius Slothmalice
Good games for new players
Teenage Phoenix
To Open a Can Of Beans
Mopequest
etc.
(Actual algos for populating those boxes beyond the scope of the current discussion)
There could be more databases of genre categories than boxes, and the box categories partially chosen at random. (Maybe “Good games published in the last 12 months” and “Good games for new players” are evergreen?)
The categories for any spare boxes displayed could be totally random. You could try to customize them based on incoming click data if you want to get real fancy about it (subject to privacy regs blah blah) if you really want to try very hard to make a solid first impression.
And I think part of the reason for that disconnect is the difference between “People who believe it should never receive top billing on IFDB” and “People who believe it shouldn’t always receive top billing on IFDB.”
The latter group can self-soothe through community action/free-market operation: “if you don’t like that the conversation is dominated by Sexual Service Act, change the conversation.”
The former group can only be satisfied by censorship/assertive curation/whatever you want to call it.
If the goal is to ensure that a well-meaning fifth-grade teacher can never accidentally browse in a live tab being shown in real-time to students to IFDB and end up with a hot-and-heavy SSA review excerpt… well, even the hypothetical second tier of kids.ifdb.org doesn’t actually solve that problem for you, because it’s hard to make sure that’s the top search result for our teacher that morning.
And for the “reduce accidental offense” advocates: how many artist origin stories begin with some variation on “And when I stumbled upon This Thing, the thing that Authority had tried to keep me from even knowing existed? Whooooaaaa did it blow my mind and make me want to be an artist!” (answer: many)
…so to try to wrap back to some kind of Point:
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I think it’s entirely possible to make better use of layout and on-screen elements to create a front page that preserves a discovery-driven experience while introducing a heavier, more intentional quality-driven experience. (It is notable, now that I’m looking at it specifically, that the only guaranteed one-click access to a specific “top” list on the current home page is the Reviewer Trophy Room. Every other one-click best-of depends on whatever happens to be in the poll rotation and whether someone’s Recommendation list happens to be in the new activity feed.)
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I think that it’s much less possible to prevent accidental offense without significantly altering the discovery experience.
So I would propose introducing compelling quality-driven elements and trying not to disrupt or distort or otherwise cloak the discovery-driven elements.
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In my point of view, IFDB has never truly been a stream-of-consciousness output of everything. There has frequently been, at some point, somebody deliberately manipulating what appears on the page.
I’ve been one of those people. I wrote about 60-80 reviews in a couple of weeks once, and I didn’t want to flood the main page, so I timed them to show up 2 a day for a couple months. Then later I used the embargo to hide some reviews of my own I didn’t want to show up on the front page.
There have been several times over the past few years when trolls have put hateful comments up over several days so that the front page was basically ‘USERsuchandsuch SUCKS!’
So the question isn’t, ‘Should someone control the front page?’ It’s, ‘Should we stop letting random people (including me in the past) dictate what we see on the page?’
I think giving people some kind of control over what they want to see on the front page is the best solution. For me personally, I’d like to see less sexual games. Maybe you’d like to see less of a certain group of games, maybe feature old-school or parser games more. Shouldn’t we have a way to tune what we see?
And then the only question is, what should the default experience be? Back to just letting anybody hijack the page whenever they want?
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That’s the very essence of the argument in favor of walled gardens:
“If we only put a wall around the garden, then it would never look like garbage!”
That argument is right as in factual.
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I again find that I read your post, smile at how witty it is, and then scratch my head. “What… does that… mean? Is this even an expression of disagreement??”
In light of your own values, should every IFDB user get to post their reviews on the home page, as they currently do? Or nah?
Hard to believe everyone is still so shaken over Sexual Service Act. How often has this sort of thing happened in normal circumstances over the years?
It was this very thread that gave the game exposure and led to people reviewing it. It’s just really odd and circular seeing everyone in the thread so hotly debating a problem literally only caused by this thread.
Yes, sorry, I thought I was clear about that even while mashing too many other words.
I think that the most-lightly-moderated-as-possible activity feed is a Good and Right thing to have prominently featured in a default experience.
I have latched onto your drive for quality and have recently pointed out constructive, relatively low-hanging (says me) ways to add quality that have nothing to do with content masking/blocking/filtering/censoring:
- Put some “best of genre” boxes on the home page
- Populate those recommendations with games written in languages my browser tells you I comprehend
- Stop returning Cragne Manor in every author search. (Seriously, I know it’s a crowning community jewel everybody’s very proud of but it’s a leading cause of lousy author search results.)
I’m also acknowledging that walled gardens exist for valid, defensible reasons and noticed last night that you’re even anti-randomized-recommendations and that there might be a pretty big gulf between what I think is a good set of values and what you’re going to end up implementing.
As a rough analog, I think of the design of theatrical credits database About the Artists, which features a scrolling Recent Updates feed (throwback to a Facebook concept from a few generations ago). The default experience includes that scroll upper-right on every (sufficiently wide, probably won’t show up in your mobile portrait screen) page. I assert that if you’re there to find out who played That Guy In That Play That One Time, and a credit pops up in that updates feed that reminds you that you’re really mad that Taming of the Shrew or Merchant of Venice or Equus or The Motherfucker With the Hat exist, you can still conduct your business without being turned off of the whole idea of theater and theatrical credits.
And if you can’t, well, I still don’t think that makes a discovery-oriented activity feed The Wrong Thing.
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I am sure that’s the point. I don’t think anyone is for complete content censorship. We’re talking about essentially a beaded curtain - remember independent video rental stores? Anyone old enough for that? The porn was never in front, but in a special room behind a beaded curtain or a set of batwing saloon doors with a sign so people didn’t wander in there and see something they’d be offended by on accident.
We are for content moderation. We don’t want a new user’s first look at IFDB to show up with my review of Monster Fucker One: Vampire displayed on the front page - at least until a user creates an account and selects that they are all right with showing entries including mature content.
Ideally, you’d like a new user to see potentially curated “endcaps” on their first visit: “Hey, here’s Zork, a seminal work; here’s Counterfeit Monkey one of the most successful independent modern IF parser games; here’s 80 Days and Hollywood Visionary, two examples of contemporary commercial choice-narrative - look 80 Days was featured in Time magazine! …”
I’d even suggest that the home-page for a user that isn’t logged in ought to first show a landing page that omits potentially unvetted comments or reviews for exactly this purpose.
(@jcompton basically suggested this)
Maybe an educational “Overview of IF - Here’s what you’ll find here…” page with seminal works and pre-created search links for parser/choice-narrative/VNs/hybrids and explanations of game type - perhaps a “family friendly” tag search etc… then a non-registered user could click through to see the normal current feeds. Anyone who is logged in with a registered account would skip this and see the normal feeds.
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