On Friday, I saw some pictures on the home page that really disturbed me. It wasn't the usual stuff I find distasteful, I've already filtered those tags out. Instead, it was something more real and likely illegal. I don't know for sure, but the subject of those photos clearly did not want to be there and looked very young. That reminded me of another incident a few years ago where a bunch of sock-puppet accounts spammed gore images for hours.

These incidents show a major flaw with the homepage. Having the homepage just be the most recent images submitted to the site is a very, VERY bad idea. It means that the homepage, the hub of the site and most user's first impression of the community, is completely un-moderated and open to abuse. I know the admins did a lot to crack down on abuse after the gore incident, but there are no real checks to prevent images like the ones on Friday from slipping through. Even when they are caught quickly, the damage has already been done. The tag system also doesn't prevent this, as bad actors won't bother to tag anything. This is also an issue for new users who don't have accounts and haven't gone through the (awful) process of blocking tags manually. For new users, the homepage is a cesspit of extreme fetish content.

Instead of site-wide recent submissions, I think the homepage should have 2 feeds, both of which should be rather easy to set up with the site's current code. Users with accounts would see both, and new users would only see the second. The first feed would just be the user's /msg page re-arranged, showing all of the new art and journals from the accounts they follow plus some side panels to check new comments, messages, and shouts. The second feed would be a collection of the most favorited submissions in the past 24 hours. This setup brings the bare minimum of quality control and requires no actual curation on the admin's side. This can also be done without replacing this site's refreshing Web 1.0 style with another soulless algorithmic feed.

In an ideal world, I would also want a third, more customizable feed, but I fear this would be difficult with the dinosaur code that they are working with. For instance, I would love to have a feed that would show all recent submissions for specific, user-specified tags. Since this site doesn't have algorithms, this would allow users to discover new artists who make the kind of art that they want to see, and would help them avoid the stuff they don't want to see. It would also incentivize more artists to tag properly since it would increase their chances of having their art be discovered.