@TheLoneLampman
“It takes very little time for an established user to change a filter.
It can take an equal amount for a new user to abandon the site.”
If I were a new user who just came to a site that was professing to be a major MLP:FiM image archive, and I couldn’t find something as basic to the fandom’s image output as Human Studies 101 or Conspiracy Lyra, I’d probably abandon it and search for somewhere that took being a thorough archive seriously. If someone put up a link to a funny Conspiracy Lyra on Derpibooru, but when I clicked it I was told there was no such image, I’d be pissed at Derpibooru and abandon it.
If I were a new user who just came to a site where every page was covered with spoiler tags (that you have to click through twice to see the image), I’d be deeply annoyed. As admins you maybe don’t see what it looks like. But a page full of spoiler tag images is worse than a page full of Chickun. At least Chickun has some variety to it. So trying to spoiler it is worse than leaving it alone, and in most respects worse than even hiding it. But let’s say you do. If I stick it out that far, click through a bunch of them, and find nothing but Chickun
after all my clicking through spoiler tags, I abandon the site. If I click through and happen to find a few good ones, but your censors can’t tell the difference between Chickun and Conspiracy Lyra, at that point I’d abandon it in frustration at all the clicking through.
Basic kindergarten-level rule of first impressions: make an honest one. This is what we have here; if you register an account this is what you will see (plus porn and gore that we don’t want to show you until we know you’re not an eight-year-old girl). There are
tons of good images that we don’t mind an eight-year-old girl landing on. And it’s worth ignoring those five Chickun images on this page to get to that good one of Cloudchaser and Flitter kissing, Lyra laughably misunderstanding human life, or Fluttershy looking adorably moe, as your tastes dictate. Derpibooru already censors the ability of newbies to see the really hardcore stuff, for obvious and understandable reasons. Censoring memes (and making no distinction between the good ones and the spammed shit) is not only a whole different thing, not only annoying, not only a bad precedent. It’s also a bald-faced lie. If you register here and want to see My Parents Are Dead, and Wet Mane, you’ll be right back to wading through Chickun and Screaming Armor. Because this “solution” also
doesn’t even address the actual problem, which is not memes, but assholes shit-spamming the front page.