Content Warnings In Your Writing: How Could That Work?
I didn't grow up on the old, OLD internet, but I did grow up on the internet of nearly 15 years ago (god I feel old), which was far different than it is now... But some things have stayed the same, which for this post is the frustrating throughline of lacking sufficient systems to offer users informed consent.
It's been a thing in online spaces to make fun of those who get "triggered," and while I do believe there's a limit as to how much you should self-censor for others' comfort, there's merit to having a certain level of disclosure.
Contrary to the war stories people have told about the web of that time, I don't recall unwanted content being much of an issue as it is now. There were far more niche spaces one could occupy, and as a result, subject matter revolving around sensitive topics would be relegated to spaces dedicated to those topics. You didn't like something? There'd be a place that also didn't and you'd stay there. It certainly wasn't perfect and cross-pollination WAS a thing, but I was able to avoid seeing horrible stuff (mostly) by never going to LiveLeak and its ilk.
Things are different now in that everyone has been jammed into the same handful of social medias, which includes the freaks and weirdos who would've been quarantined in a niche forum if it were 20 years ago. If we're going to have these massive mega-platforms, we'll need to have greater specificity of disclosure to make up for it which hasn't happened.
As far as big social media companies go, they just... don't do that. They either act like sensitive content doesn't exist when it does (such as YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram) or have an all-or-nothing approach of tagging it as NSFW or not (Twitter/X, Tumblr, Bluesky, Reddit).
For short-form content, an all-or-nothing toggle is generally fine, but for extensive writings and video? It's lacking. There are sites like Archive of Our Own that do offer a detailed tagging system and DO have a healthy tagging culture in support of it, but I even have problems with that, because AO3's tags apply to the WHOLE story. There's no way to distinguish the ones where only one chapter or even one paragraph have these content warnings as opposed to the whole thing.
I'm sure everyone has liked—loved, even—media with elements that they were objectively supposed to hate on paper. One innocuous example is how I really enjoy the Yakuza games even though I dislike fighting gameplay, a prominent aspect of the series. Art is one of those things greater than the sum of its parts.
To top it all off, this platform isn't AO3, obviously, this is Bear. While NSFW content of artistic merit appears to be allowed, there's no real way to politely conceal it in addition to turning off discoverability.
I looked around, and I eventually found a native HTML method of doing it that I ended up being satisfied with:
⚠️ CW: This is a Test
It's inspired by callouts in Obsidian, and uses the <details> and <summary> elements within HTML to make it possible.
You can see how to do it yourself here.
I consider it a simple, elegant solution that I hope I can make good use of to make this blog something everyone can enjoy.
I did experiment with Reddit-style inline spoilers, however I found it too complex for casual use, even at its simplest. Hopefully someday we can get some spoilers natively built into Bear, but what I have here will be plenty for my purposes!
My vision for the Internet is not viable in many ways, as it's gone a certain direction and developed a culture based on algorithms instead of manual curation. It doesn't, however, hurt to dream about sites like AO3 allowing greater specificity with how and where tags can be applied.
I just understand that I won't be able to do that as a single person on a platform I don't control (nor would I want to lol). You just have to make do with what you can handle, and these callouts are a small step in doing something I wish I could see as a reader.