Pre-emptively Blocking People Is Good For Everyone.

Pre-emptively blocking people is good for everyone.

Seriously. The amount of times I see people whining or laughing about being blocked when they 'haven't even done anything' just tells me that not many of you know its actually a really good way to properly curate your online space, and its not something to be offended over.

Blocking is a form of protection. Its also a form of mutual protection.

Especially on websites that don't offer more extensive or usable filtering, tagging and avoidance options. Twitter, for example.

Blocking isn't some personal insult. Its a method of saying; hey, we clearly shouldn't interact, so I'm gonna build this soundproof wall between us to make sure we can't.

To use The Salmon Analogy, if I run a restaurant based on salmon as the main ingredient, and you're allergic or or severely dislike salmon, me refusing to serve you isn't a personal sleight. Its me recognising that you can't or really don't want to eat salmon, and its me protecting you from an unpleasant experience and myself from you inevitably screaming at me for serving salmon.

If you are someone who enjoys 'objectionable' content, such as gore, and you stumble across an extremely anti-gore blog, its absolutely a viable option to pre-emptively block them. Maybe your paths never would've crossed, but its better to ensure they don't than potentially wind up the victim or hate or harassment.

Blocking is an absolute sure-fire way to ensure that you do not see something you do not want to. It should be used as liberally as you want to.

I wish I had a place to post my fucked up arts without being cancelled 😭

Honestly I think the drawn arts have suffered perhaps the most out of modern censorship. Especially the communities, too, because when sites ban things to please advertisers, investors and the handful of people squawking about protecting the children, it creates this mentality of; 'if its been banned its bad, so whoever makes it or enjoys it is bad too.'

There will literally always be at least one person who comes after you for what you create. Lord knows I enough enough angry anons in my inbox on a daily basis and all I do is rant about antis and occasionally knock my braincells together with enough force to say something vaguely helpful.

My best advice for avoiding being 'cancelled' is to heavily, heavily curate your online space and the people you aim to include within it. This could be by:

Following specifically other blogs who post similar content or express interest in similar content to what you produce or your interests.

Pre-emptively blocking blogs who express disgust or hatred for the content you produce or like, blogs who express moral stances conflicting to yours, ect. This is expressly helpful on sites like Twitter where options to limit engagement are limited.

Tagging properly, and including trigger and warnings tags whom others are likely to have blocked. This prevents people from seeing something they don't want to, and also gives you coverage if they try to accuse you of 'spreading it around.'

In cases of art that may have more extreme content, try using spoiler flags or any filtration option that requires viewers to actively consent to viewing it. Relevant to above, nobody can cry wolf about 'being exposed' because they would've had to physically reveal the work to themselves.

DeviantArt unfortunately recently changed its policies to a frankly ridiculously constrictive degree, so while I previously would've recommended that as a place to host your artwork and find a safer community, I can no longer. Hopefully someone is successful in pushing for the site to reform to its previous rules soon.

ArtStation is an option. The site is not eligible to anyone under 18 and sexual, gore, fetish, and 'mature' content is allowed provided the usual stipulation that you aren't using it in order to cause, infer or threaten harm against someone. A lot of the site is geared toward marketing artwork, though, so you might be hard pressed to find more of a community aspect to it.

Rule 34.com is... Objectively one of the best places you can host your artwork if you create content that is based on sexual themes. The protective rights aren't the greatest, but anyone who uses Rule 34 has no leg to stand on regarding morality and censorship.

Reddit has a lot of subreddits for sharing art, and a bonus is you can find subreddits specifically geared toward artwork based on things like gore, violence, sexual content, ect. Filtering options and monitoring are basically non-existent, however. Also, Reddit sometimes spontaneously decides a specific post is against its TOS and yeets it.

There's also the option of building a Discord server based around sharing artwork of certain themes, which is objectively the format that allows you the most control over who views it, but it also means your art has a limited presence. (Can't be reblogged, ect.)

If you do check out any of the websites, always be thorough in reading the Terms of Service and the Community Guidelines.

Have you tried litphoria? It looks amazing

I have not, I did try to check it out but the site was slower than me solving a calculus equation, so I gave up after watching it struggling to load for 10 minutes and put it out of its misery.

Could've absolutely been a me issue, so I'll try to check it out again another time.

i do not at all mean this in a perjorative manner, but i do think it’s important to be able to consume a piece of media and go, “i’m not the audience for this” and be able to just walk away 

there doesn’t have to be something wrong or “problematic” about something for a person to not like it. personal taste is personal taste. but something not doing it for you doesn’t mean it automatically has to be wrong or bad. it’s just not for you. 

How exactly do you plan on stopping people reblogging it?

"Here's a cutesy gifset about a psychotic serial killer who murdered kids but also if you write dead dove you're not allowed to reblog it!"

TikTok girlies will be like 'omg this poorly written book about a psychotic misogynistic werewolf alpha claiming his mate in this toxic poly-triangle is sooooo hot but if you read about incest you should die actually'