My Rating Tags Problem.

@Princess Luna  
But back to the topic.
 
What is that “easily-crossed unclear border between Safe and Quostionable” you’re talking about? From that example things looked pretty clear.
 
And also what is “gradual stepping of ratings”? Is it even relevant to this discussion? I’ll hold my curiosity if it isn’t.

@Background Pony #2FF6  
There are varying degrees of anthroness. See the “semi-anthro” tag for a very pony-like example. The border is created in this by having anthro nudity Questionable and pony nudity Safe.

@Princess Luna  
Well, in the given example you were talking about a specific anthro, not about an array of them. And since you haven’t specified, I assume you ment a regular, not semi- version. So, I still don’t know what this should’ve explained to me. If you want, I can even give my take on where semi-anthro would go in this example. And if we’re talking about a regular featureless semi-anthro, then it will also be Safe.
 
I still don’t understand what it should’ve taught me and how is it related to the changes.

@Background Pony #2FF6  
At a certain point, things instantly switch from Safe to Questionable. It’s generally desirable to have slightly different content only one rating higher, not multiple, so that differences between raters aren’t hugely different and so that there’s a stronger sense of what level of content each rating encompasses.

@Princess Luna  
You specifically told me to not use Suggestive, and now you’re saying that I should have? What? This is aggravating.

@Background Pony #2FF6  
Would you use Suggestive for a nude semi-anthro? And the point is that the nudity here doesn’t have the sort of emphasis that can lead to Suggestive, and therefore under your ratings ideas, the anthro nudity must be Questionable instead of the current Suggestive.

@Princess Luna  
It makes sense to me that featureless nudity in most cases can be Safe (it can go as low as Safe, if there are no other factors). And it also makes sense to me that nudity with human features would be considered Questionable in most cases (since nudity of a human body in most cases is erotic).
 
“…so that there’s a stronger sense of what level of content each rating encompasses”. You’re also making this argument an absolutely in vacuum. Like nudity is the only deciding factor and nothing else decides the rating.
 
“It’s generally desirable to have slightly different content only one rating higher, not multiple”. I don’t get it. What is “slightly different”? Featureless nudity and human nudity are completely different things.
 
And how any of that explains why the changes were made? How any of that explains why nudity is now widely acceptable somewhere it didn’t used to be?

I’m getting a little angry here, not gonna lie. I just want to understand, but none of this helps. It feels like you want to proove something to me right away, proove that I’m wrong, but I haven’t even gotten to the point where I’m going to argue with you about the situation. I just want to understand the situation first, I want to get what’s happening, and then I’ll make my arguments. But what is this conversation we’re having?

@Background Pony #2FF6  
Some artists put featureless nudity on humans or anthros.

@Princess Luna  
Yes. And if we’ll look hard enough we will find a borderline case for anything.
 
There’s a lot I don’t understand:  
Old guidelines were vague, no one is going to argue about that, but they still were splitting the content in some, specific to them, way (how easy they were to enforce is another question entirely), and in regards to the nudity it was mostly questionable, some suggestive. Were people unhappy with that? Or they just weren’t thinking about the nudity when the rewrite was taking place, and the shift was accidental? Or people specifically wanted nudity to be suggestive because of their preference? Or was it too hard to implement in a more detailed fashion? Or was it something else that I can’t even guess?  
Things have happened, and I just want to know why they did to begin with.

@Princess Luna  
Or you don’t know. I’ll take that answer as well. (it would be a bit weird for you to not know this, being in your position, but weirder things have happened)

@Background Pony #2FF6  
It wasn’t a fully intentional change, but it was the natural result of going towards greater consistency in the guidelines (and keeping nudity Questionable wasn’t a priority, very few people care about it’s placement).

@Princess Luna  
Okay. Thanks for that info. Now a lot of things actually make sense.
 
“…and keeping nudity Questionable wasn’t a priority, very few people care about it’s placement” - yeah, I did got that general impression from you, that you probably just don’t really care about nudity as it’s own thing. And it would make sense that guidelines would end up the way they did if most people on the team also didn’t care. But what I find a little weird about it is that, all these ratings (safe/suggestive/questionable/explicit) are a way to, sort of, compartmentalize sexual content into different groups, and yet nudity itself isn’t viewed as something sexual (which to me is like “wat?”), only specific attributes of it (nips and gents). I don’t know. Maybe I’m too much of a normie when it comes to porn, but I think nudity is an important factor in and of itself.
 
And I understand that it’s an easy way to gate content “by the nipple” and police what goes where. I’m not going to argue that it’s not great, because it is great, and this kind of “ease of decision making” is something I myself was trying to create in my rewrite. But with the current guidelines we have a situation where you can get butt-naked and it won’t be counted as anything too sexual until you have a nipple showing. It creates a weird situation where this is Safe, this is Suggestive, and this is Questionable. It’s a bit… unbalanced, I would call. We have Suggestive tag going from zero nudity all the way up to max nudity, and Questionable tag going from just a bit of a nipple up to max nipple. It’s like Suggestive now is a nudity showing tag and Questionable is a nipple showing tag, cause, when it comes to nudity, that’s what they are now gating. And it’s weird to me (as a porn normie. as I decided to call myself from now on).

@Background Pony #2FF6  
That Octavia image was actually misrated. I guess your approach cleaves somewhere along nudity and somewhere along nipples instead of between nudity and nipples; that approach could work, but ultimately it’s a harder thing to set objective limits on (how much is too much?) and it’s not in line with society’s rules (boobs tend to be okayish if not completely SFW until the nipples arrive).

@Princess Luna  
Yeah, I never was approaching this with society’s rules in mind. Because society’s rules keep changing. Advertisement people are always trying to push for more nudity to the point that we now have some adds with nipples. Having full nudity on books covers is a long tradition, because it’s art or something. Also the art itself, with naked statues and “artistic nudity”, can go pretty much all the way without anyone being against it. But being in public topless with just pasties or bottomless with a c-string will raise a lot of eyebrows. Except if you’re in Brazil. So yeah, society’s rules are also kind of merky, in my opinion.
 
My approach would probably be to move everything we can tag “nudity” or “partial nudity” to Questionalbe. We already have tags for it, and people are doing generally okay job at identifying what counts and what doesn’t. It does raise some questions: about pony nudity vs humanoid nudity, female nudity vs male nudity, and requires exceptions (people are tagging regular pictures of Smolder as nudity sometimes). It is a messier and more complicated process, but it’s possible to do it, and I’m sure it’s possible to formulate guidelines for it, but… but I guess the part where it hits a brick wall is that putting all this extra work requires extra care, and you guys don’t care about nudity to an extent that is required to do it this way. And that’s something I can’t really change. So… I guess, that’s it. This is where it ends. Sadly for me.

@Princess Luna  
I guess the part that goes beyond my personal preferences and slightly worries me is, what kind of impression this nudity situation (and also safe/suggestive situation from earlier) leaves on other people. With nudity showing up in Suggestive due to discussed changes and some previously suggestive contect showing up in Safe due to show’s direction (and it’s “safeness” not being negotiable), it did left me with an impression that Derpibooru is loosing it’s focus and just “letting lewds to flood”. Now I know that it a conscious and somewhat controlled change (even if it’s still not the one I can get behind), but I do wonder if it leaves other people with the same impression and they are just silent users who aren’t going to try to figure it out (it took a mod asking me to stop changing ratings to make me try to figure out what’s happening). And also there’s still a big portion of the fandom that isn’t engaged with lewds or even actively avoiding it (graph #10), and I would like them to not get upset with derpibooru because of this (if they weren’t already even before the change). I also wonder, since Suggestive is a part of default filter, what kind of impression this will leave on people outside the fandom, who are just getting a look at what’s going on here. I would like us to not get the same stigma furries have (that we’re all sex animals) or perpetuate even further pedophilia/zoophilia allegations that we already get.
 
I’m not trying to make an argument in my favour here or “scare you into doing something about it”. It just genuinely worries me sometimes. I hope it doesn’t matter and everything will be alright, and none of this happens, but, you know.

@Background Pony #2FF6  
Once upon a time, Tara Strong put sexy saddle-wearing Twi pics on her twitter and it’s not like prudes everywhere rose up in anger.  
Additionally, we have had people rise up in anger on moral grounds in a massive shitstorm with many bans and probably people getting some impression bronies are largely horrible sexual deviants…because we featured a gay cheek kiss image last week.
 
I think we’ll be fine if a few images of ponies in playboy bunny outfits or something are Safe-rated. We’d have to really screw up ratings hard to actually do anything to affect how people see bronies in that way and upset them.

@Princess Luna  
Well, it is comforting to hear and I do hope you’re right.
 
“…because we featured a gay cheek kiss image last week”. Oh yeah. I caught a glimps of that shitstorm. It was quite ridiculous.