Hi all! As promised, here is the proposed text of the newest version of the rules. The staff has gone through like eight drafts and literally thousands and thousands of matrix posts to get here, so please be kind. You can see @limeey's comment on the transparency post if you want more insight into how this sausage was made.
We are opening these rules to commentary from the community before they go into effect. To be clear, this isn't a vote, but we will take all community feedback into account and answer whatever questions we can before finalizing anything.
Please keep in mind that we are not Reddit, we do not have Reddit's resources, and safety and consent are our priorities.
I'll post the draft in two parts in two comments: The new sidebar, and the FAQ/clarifications page.
It's this exact question that made us seriously consider just banning hentai altogether. That would have been the safer move, for sure, but we were worried it would cut off too many people from a safe, accessible place to do porn things.
So context matters, right? Like we're going to have to trust that the mods of hentai communities are good at hentai, so they know better than a clueless layperson what's actually supposed to be underage and what isn't. For me, looking at hentai as a guy that watched Ninja Scroll a bunch when he was 15 and then never really went back to that well, there's stuff that's obviously forbidden, stuff that obviously isn't forbidden, and stuff that falls in the middle where I have to be like "Well, I don't know who that is, if their show is aimed at kids, if they're supposed to be a kid, if within the context of hentai that outfit and those visual cues indicate underage or not, so I guess I have to trust someone that is more of an expert". Because if you force me to make that choice, I'm going to err on the side of caution and nuke everything that's more questionable than not, which is probably like 75% of all hentai.
But with a knowledgeable mod team, if they tell me that something isn't underage and isn't meant to be underage, I'm likely to trust their judgement even if I myself as an ignorant not-a-fan-of-big-eyes-small-mouth-tentacle-sex-cartoons would have made a different call. Unless they start making blatantly bad calls, in which case then we consider taking more drastic action, we are going to defer to the experts.
There are also issues of cultural imperalism and racial bias involved, right? Like studies show that Americans of different races consistently rate depictions of black people as older than they really are and asian people as younger than they really are, and on top of that trying to overlay Western artistic values on top of Japanese cultural constructions can be kind of fraught (and I used to live in Japan, where at 15 I was 6' and 180 lbs. I was much larger than like 99% of the the native population and they all thought I was a grown-ass man, so I know how that kind of thing works albeit in reverse).
While I understand the logic wrt the concerns about the content of hentai, I do find it interesting that it's so prominent in the discussion of safety issues.
To me, it's always felt "safer" than real-life content because a lot of the big risks go away. I don't have to consider whether the actors were coerced, or whether they would have been able to stop a scene if uncomfortable, or whether they regret putting that content out there and so on.
As a consumer of hentai or similar, it becomes a lot more reasonable to say, "I don't know what the imaginary background of this character is, but I'm interpretive them as an adult, so I'm all good", or "Did they really give their consent to dick-cthulhu? Of course they did! Who wouldn't!?" because I can't really be meaningfully wrong about a imaginary character.
Whatever the morality of, I guess let's say, fictional immorality, the potential harm from "real" porn just seems so much larger than the potential harm from drawings and writing. However much I enjoy seeing real human beings doing delightful things to each other, if the only porn on the internet was hentai and dirty stories, I'm inclined to think it'd probably be an overall win in terms of harm reduction, just because it doesn't require real people to be doing the stunts. So it's interesting that the fictional stuff seems to be so top of mind when we talk about safety.
Although, I imagine that's likely because in the discussions of rule-setting the issues around "real" porn are talked about far less, because who's really going to make a good-faith argument that's pro sharing images of abuse of real people.
(Also found your point about cultural imperialism interesting! An angle on the topic I'd not considered before)
Listen, if you're asking for my personal, non-admin opinion? IDGAF if a fictional character with a fictional age in their fictional teens gets fictionally gangbanged without fictional consent by fictional pack of giant mutant beavers. None of it is real, nobody's rights are actually getting violated, and while I understand that it may turn a lot of people off, whether or not a kink is popular shouldn't be the basis on which we judge it.
BUT that isn't the environment we're in here. That type of content is distasteful enough that we a) risk defederation, and b) risk alienating a large proportion of our other users, and c) risk attracting the kind of users that we don't want if we allow that kind of content in. There are places on the fediverse where that kind of content is not only allowed but encouraged, and that's where people who are into that stuff can go.
I really wish we could be all things for all people, and if this were just MikeyMongolNSFW.com the rules would look a lot different -- but we aren't, and we aren't, and they don't.
I definitely think banning hentai alltogether would've been the safer bet! But I understand your current choices/decisions. Even though I feel that eventually that call will end up being made anyway due to the baggage that comes with the vast majority of hentai content. I trust this instance to moderate things properly, unlike other instances like Burggit.
I will definitely report content I find that seems to be infringing on the rules and help the efforts as best I can! Thank you for all you do!