On 05/02/2008, Charlotte Webb <charlottethewebb(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 2/5/08, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
By "opt-in", I assume you mean that
someone can opt in to the
hiding mechanism, meaning that they have to explicitly opt *out*
of seeing the potentially-offending content. And vice versa.
(But although this sort of thing seems like an obvious and
reasonable compromise to me, I'm not so sure we could just
"ram one through", because plenty of people do seem to equate
such things with unacceptable censorship. See e.g. Chris Howie's
comments elsethread: "We do not censor ourselves. This includes
opt-in/out mechanisms that are censorship bearing the form of a
reasonable compromise.")
Not to mention the lack of an objective way to determine whether an
image (or anything else) is "potentially-offending" enough that an
otherwise reasonable person somewhere might want to opt out of it.
It's not our place to make that decision for this or any other
content.
That's pretty much my position. I have no real problem with making it
easy for people to not see things that would offend them, but I do
have a problem with doing it in some cases and not others (it's
discrimination), and I don't think it's practical to do it in all
cases. Therefore, we are left with no choice other than not to do it
at all.