What an absolute shitshow this was.

I have a lot I want to say about this now that the smoke has settled a little bit. This entire situation has been a complete shitshow. I think we can all agree on that, regardless of our personal opinions on the matter. I do think that there are certain things people have overlooked/missed in the heat of the moment that, if anything, I would like a further explanation of.

First of all, this was an absolute PR disaster. Everyone in the dev and mod team should have known this would be controversial. It was extremely shortsighted and foolish to release such an update without at least forewarning the fucking Reddit mods first (I can't believe that happened, tbh). The TOS change using vague wording like "suggestive content is fine within reason," "detailed anatomical content," etc. Did nothing except spur on the flames of controversy. Using demeaning corporate jargon like "We here at Janitor have heard your voice" and "This is about protecting our users" Was also incredibly tone-deaf and is antithetical to the honesty and open communication the community has come to expect from Shep and the team.

The fact that Shep genuinely seemed surprised at the controversy in his follow-up messages was shocking to me. Then posting stuff like, "Are people taking this as controversial?" and "I'm browsing Reddit, and the reaction is odd; these changes only make things better." Is so bad from a PR perspective it might as well be bait. At least they did eventually make it more clear what would be censored and what was okay, but that should NEVER need to be done after the fact. People are passionate about the bots they create, so not giving them clear and obvious guidelines from the get-go was a huge oversight, and I'm not surprised in the slightest that people got mad.

The big thing that really makes me wonder is that the stated objective here was to eliminate CSAM on the site, and in order to do that they decided to ban all explicit character cards and images in the bio's. However, Shep later stated, "To clarify, this doesn't run on pics uploaded to descriptions of chars or profile pages.". Most people seem to think that this will somehow get rid of the problem of CSAM on the site but in truth, this does absolutely nothing to stop its spread. Nothing at all. Sure, you can't post explicit CSAM images as character cards (not like it was allowed before anyway). CSAM was obviously always banned, but you're still free to do so in the bot descriptions. This isn't a solution to the problem; it's just brushing it under the rug and making it harder to spot. The mods still need to find the material, manually review it, and delete it. This update will do nothing except make it harder to find, as it will now be hidden in the bot descriptions. Essentially, all this did was censor people who made bots in good faith while at the same time not really addressing the actual problem.

I'm also frankly disappointed in the way the community handled this. I get not wanting to see people bitch and moan about something you don't care about, but it's disheartening to see so many people dismiss other users real concerns about this shitshow and call them sex addicts/gooners/minors or even insinuate that they're pedophiles simply because you disagree with them. No one here wants CSAM on the platform. And we all agree that it's a problem that should be addressed. But is this really the best way to address it?

I've seen other users refer to this as taking a sledgehammer's approach instead of using a scalpel, but honestly it's worse, because at least with that comparison you're inferring that the blunt solution is in fact a solution. But here, all it does is hurt the people who make bots in good faith, without stopping the problem.