Beta development is iterative.
Pillowfort is in closed beta development.
Some of y’all are expecting a fully baked cake while the icing is still being mixed up.
Beta development is where a wide variety of platform things get worked out, it’s not just UI and databases. It includes minutia like ToS and content moderation. Being a beta user is a collaborative process—not as involved as a beta tester—please provide respectful, polite, constructive criticism and feedback before going on a crusade against a small fandom-lead crowd-sourced project.
Any kind of development process is one of constant iteration. UIs, ToS, features can come and go and evolve from week-to-week, or month-to-month, as resources allow. User feedback is a part of this, and yes, sometimes that feedback is angry (rightfully or not is irrelevant).
Think of how many times a month we get updates from our various mobile, application, credit card, or other life-services with 100 page long updates to ToS. ToS is always evolving, especially in beta development.
Storytime:
Years ago, when I was actively developing for a video-based social media platform, I told my fellow co-founders that someone was going to attempt to post C//P, or at the very least p/o/r/n via the platform eventually, that we would need a moderation system that couldn’t be abused, and we needed to decide on whether or not we would allow adult content on the platform. I also said that this would be a problem with our “let’s show new videos immediately on the main desktop landing page.” But we had a shoe-string budget, less than a handful of people, and bigger things to deal with than fully working those details out.
Within a few weeks after this conversation, one of our developers noticed C//P, posted via our platform. He just happened to be developing late at night (yay global distributed development across time zones) and saw it right away. He immediately quarantined the files, called our CEO in the wee hours of the morning, and went through the process of alerting the FBI (which from out of country isn’t as easy as one may think) AND contacting authorities in Germany from where the C//P, originated. It was graphic and disturbing and traumatic for those who had to “moderate” that situation. In this process we had to change the way new videos appear on the main page. That’s active development.
With respect to fanart, this gets awfully complicated due to different body types and perception of “adulthood” vs “childhood” across cultures. That’s a detail that gets lost in the knee-jerk process of “Oh shit, we need to deal with this now before we get sued, or investigated by authorities, or bad-PR’ed into oblivion.” So you quarantine the content until you can sort it out later. Full stop. Unfortunately that has unintended consequences.
It sucks to have your posts taken down. It sucks that moderation will nearly always be at the risk of user abuse. It sucks that nations and monopolies continuously squeeze the vise on freedom of speech—imposing onerous measures that can wreck a small business or a startup—under the guise of IP protection or targeting C//P and crime.
It sucks for everyone, except of course for antis and purity police who abuse flagging and moderation systems. Have a better idea? Then please engage those ideas without fanning flames or making it appear as if those who are working hard to bring this thing to life don’t care about solving the problem and doing right by their users and in line with the spirit of their intentions.
I’ve got ideas of my own of how to deal with this kind of content moderation, but that’s a write-up for another time after I’ve used PF some more.