[Foundation-l] Letter to the community on Controversial Content

[MZMcBride]

Risker wrote: 
> Given the number of people who insist that any categorization system seems
> to be vulnerable, I'd like to hear the reasons why the current system, which
> is obviously necessary in order for people to find types of images, does not
> have the same effect.  I'm not trying to be provocative here, but I am
> rather concerned that this does not seem to have been discussed.

Personally, from the technical side, I don't think there's any way to make
per-category filtering work. What happens when a category is deleted? Or a
category is renamed (which is effectively deleting the old category name
currently)? And are we really expecting individual users to go through
millions of categories and find the ones that may be offensive to them?
Surely users don't want to do that. The whole point is that they want to
limit their exposure to such images, not dig into the millions of categories
that may exist looking for ones that largely contain content they find
objectionable. Surely.

So that leaves you with much broader categorization, I guess? "Violence",
"Gore", etc. And then that leaves you with people debating which images
belong to which broad category?

Not trying to be provocative, I've just never understood how the
category-based system is supposed to work in practice. In (abstract) theory,
it seems magical.

MZMcBride