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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12473 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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Yeah. And a lot of the metrics that would be naively useful, like whether there's a bunch of splintering or a quickly growing competitor subreddit, are bad to make actual measures because Goodhart.

Worth noting that Goodhart is relatively easy to avoid if you just don't mention what the metrics are. The Motte has always had thresholds for new users to stop getting their messages filtered. Nobody but the mods have ever known the details of those and we've never had trouble with people gaming them.

Yeah, the boorus have definitely made it work. That said, they've also typically had to do so with a very heavy hand and a lot of cruft: you probably don't have to worry about a four hundred line analysis to translate "pussy" to "vagina" (a literal two-year on-going process at e621, still incomplete), but I'd still plan early around a situation where a big fandom coalesced around thirty or so completely unrelated tags, some of which overlap with other intended uses of those same tags.

I'm honestly fine with a heavy hand for some of the larger and more popular tags, and the smaller ones aren't as important.

. . . that said how does it take that long to change one word? Shouldn't that just be a mildly fancy SQL query?

I guess I'm more motioning around the non-porn variants being a problem that will arise, if not one as immediately likely to result in legal threat.

Yeah, this is fair.

I think my answer here is to follow the letter of the law, because I mean, it is the law, but also to make the rationale as public as possible.

"We have removed this due to a legal note from this party."

I'm honestly fine with a heavy hand for some of the larger and more popular tags, and the smaller ones aren't as important.

Fair solution.

that said how does it take that long to change one word? Shouldn't that just be a mildly fancy SQL query?

You'd think, but there's a lot of uses where the slang term is the actual word and it shouldn't be changed (generally forms of outercourse), where it's used for an entirely different reason (there are four characters and three artists with the word in their name, mostly as cat references), and an absolute nightmare of spaces where sometimes it'd mean vagina exclusively and sometimes it means vulva exclusively.

Which is funny for a sex booru debating whether the vibrator is going in or going on for each of 4k posts, but might be more tedious when dealing with 100 indie games that may or may not have been mods at some point.

Still, "generate a list of terms where it shows up, sit down and solve all the tags with a hundred uses or more, ask an AI to do a first-pass judgement on the rest and report on any with a very clear answer, put the rest into a quick crowdsourced list".

This feels solvable.

Ah well.

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