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I've been going a few rounds on whether or not to comment on this, and been discussing it with a friend. I'll do the easy route and just copy & paste what I said to this friend (removing any potentially identifying stuff).

[quote]I've been debating whether I'm gonna bother replying to that thread or not.

I'm torn about it. In theory it is a good idea and a feature many sites already employ with success. But it does have its potential pitfalls, and with the state SW is in I think it will multiply these bad sides.

And once again I find myself just disappointed seeing some of the admin response. Again, it's a good feature in theory, but people made legitimate arguments on how it can be abused. The admin response was that such abuse is against TOS and that it will reduce exposure. As if it being against TOS is gonna stop people abusing it, pigs can fly, money literally grows on trees and I can sing opera.

It'll be easier for people to mass-share pedophilic and similarly awful and outlawed content without being caught. Part of the reason people get caught here at all IS the fact that they have to expose their views/contents to the public to expand their group. This makes it much easier to just keep it within a limited group while operating on this site, without anyone reporting them.

And then there is the matter of people who post crap about others here, especially after blocking them. On one side this content has less exposure to the public so that is in a way a good thing, but on the other the moderation of this site is - like with pedophilic content - reliant on people spotting and reporting it en masse. Now it'll be allowed to slowly grow and fester within groups of people. If someone is already a friend of the person posting such content, they are much more likely to pretend they didn't see it rather than report it, so it ends up staying.

Of course, these potential pitfalls are present in every social site that has such a feature, but at the same time SW seems to be a site that is a lot more loaded with these kinds of issues already (compared to most other sites I've been on), hence why - while I like the idea in itself - I think it is a bad idea for SW.

There's also a fairly low activity level already in the public areas, and this will lower it further. This will further reduce interactivity between users, increase the cliquishness that is already rampant, and make it even harder for people to connect through coincidence (which seems to be the common way to get to know people here).[/quote]

[quote]And stealing pictures from one user and using an alt to share it with another group. Just all the bad things. Technically you can still do equivalent things now too, but it requires going through hoops and extra steps that might not always make it worth it; like getting to know people here then relegating to another site, or just sending it manually as private messages to everyone on your friends list one-by-one. They just made it tons easier to just do it right here.

[REDACTED]

I still think it's a good feature in concept, but that it will end up making things much worse so long as they haven't made a bigger push towards solving the other, huge problems this site is facing.[/quote]

EDIT: Oh, and another thing. Making it easier to create anti-person circles. The "hey, we don't like that user, let's all of us mass report them now!"