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Comment by all2well | Hacker News Reader

What about stuff like movie and game ratings? What about things like restricting sexually explicit material to minors? Seems like a weird point to make. What I like about content warnings is that I can choose whether I want to engage with something that might upset me in a more granular fashion than “entire profile.” It’s not like I’d stop avoiding content if there were no CWs anywhere.

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I remember as a 14 year old boy with HBO I specifically looking for the “Nudity” warning on late night TV Shows. Teenage me was very disappointed by the TV Show “Oz” (which is about life in men’s prison).

This is a fascinating concept to me. How granular should we get? Say.. in original Star Wars, should we add "Contains scenes of hand mutilation" or "Character may discover he is not, in fact, a child of a loving parental unit"?

I get what you are getting at, but I am curious how much of that profile should be fleshed out in your view?

I challenge the premise that Darth Vader didn't love his son.

Hah! Good point. I think I phrased my example poorly.

"Main character may discover a secret about their true ancestry"?

Good question, I'm not sure there's necessarily one answer to that. That same sort of question arises in many places, though. Some people avoid watching trailers for movies or shows because they don't want to get spoiled by them, but obviously most people like trailers because they can get a sense for whether they'll like that movie or show before they watch the whole thing.

So, interestingly IMDb has a pretty detailed parents guide. For example for Shrek: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126029/parentalguide

Ok. I had no idea IMDb keeps notes like this. I dutifully checked Star Wars and hand is indeed mentioned[1]. Thank you!

[1]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086190/parentalguide?ref_=tt_s...

Yeah, it's something I heard about someone checking before taking their kids to a movies. I think it's great, since the age rating doesn't tell you enough to be able to choose what your young children should be exposed to.

well i'm not OP but here are some of my views:

- one important dimension of the "should" in this question is how much choice the viewer of the media has in viewing the media. this is part of why schools are such a big part of the conversation about content warnings, because the students can't just choose to opt out of readings without consequences

- another important dimension is the delivery platform and audience size. sometimes you can just ask the person who made or is showing you the thing about some very specific content you'd like to avoid or be prepared for, so specifying everything isn't as important there. otoh, if you're a giant media property with millions of viewers, maybe the cost/benefit of listing exactly when/where particular things happen looks a little better

- depending on platform, lots of detail could be more or less practical. e.g. if you're making a web page it's easy to say "content warnings: click for details > detailsdetailsdetails click for more details > detaileddetailsdetaileddetails", which easily allows the viewer to choose how much detail they want rather than picking for them, but that can be harder to pull off in other formats

- if you find this topic interesting, consider looking for literature on topics like accessibility and disability justice (not sure i could recommend a particular one since i've formed my views on this sort of thing piecemeal and through community). there is a lot of interesting moral thought on the subject of "ok so this thing is helpful to some people sometimes, sooo how much should we actually do it?"

Each piece of content's full semantic structure (think https://xkcd.com/657/ but 10x-1000x more elaborate) should be published in a machine-readable format; then in your personal content blocker you can define as elaborate a filter as needed.

I actually admit I kinda like the idea ( and having just discovered IMDb' tags, it may not be as a herculean a task as I initially thought ) and I almost wonder if Youtube does not have everything of note categorized already.

It suddenly does not seem as impossible as it did a moment ago and it would actually benefit people, who are concerned about triggers ( and alleviate concerns of people like me, who don't want flags on everything ).

Yeah this is where I was always confused, I think "trigger warning" has become one of those ill-defined concepts, especially in american political discourse, that mean so many things that they don't really mean anything anymore. Other examples: "liberal," which I've heard mean everything from anarchism through communism and all the way to its actual definition, "communism" which seems to mean fascism, "fascism" which seems to mean literally anything, "grooming" which seems to mean not being heteronormative or heterosexual, etc.

I always thought a true trigger warning, the kind that I really like, are for example movies warning when there'd be things like gore and etc that I don't like to watch. I like it because I get a physically ill reaction that will ruin my night if i see fictionalized gore. I wish I didn't, but I do, so it goes. But as you've said I've seen "trigger warning" mean literally putting the words "trigger warning" on the top of a text post which seems pointless, or, saying it before telling a story, which also seems pointless.

> "fascism" which seems to mean literally anything

No, no, that one's simple: "fascism" means anything that isn't anarchism. And "anarchism" means anything that isn't fascism. This is definitely a coherent and useful set of terminology.

I haven’t seen “grooming” used in a homophobic way? Instead it has been extended to mean “any relationship whatsoever with a vaguely unusual age gap.”

fivethirtyeight does a decent enough breakdown with receipts wherein american politicians are directly connecting the idea of "grooming" with queer people in general: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-so-many-conservativ...

The term "grooming" is being used in a homophobic way in the USA by american politicians and media. This isn't a new homophobic stereotype, btw.

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