The person I'm replying to said "If you think this is NSFW, then I don't think you should be spending any time on the internet. The internet is not safe for you."
this is not about different values but about oppression.
if a colleague were to share this image at work, i would tell them to stop wasting my time with this dumb stuff. if it was a member of a team i am leading i would tell them to stop goofing around and get back to work.
if on the other hand, someone would denounce this person for sharing inappropriate images, i would consider that an act of oppression. we are supposed to work together, and not against each other.
a work culture where every little transgression has severe consequences is not healthy.
if this image makes someone uncomfortable, they are welcome to talk to me and i will listen to learn why. i suspect most likely, it's not the image itself that's the problem, but the attitude of those who laugh at it. i will then talk to those people and do my best to get them to improve their attitude about such matters.
there are things that are inappropriate to do at work, and one of them is to make dumb jokes like this, but that doesn't make the image itself not safe for work.
and as for choosing my workplace, i come from a country where employees actually have rights. and one of those rights is to share their personal opinions, even if others disagree, as long as doing so is not disruptive. the idea that the leaders in the company can tell their employees what they are allowed to talk about or not is rather alien to me.
this doesn't mean that it's ok to say or share things that are hurtful. it only means that there is no topic that is a priori not allowed to be discussed at the work place.
if this image comes up because someone in my team actually did mistype their url, they may share it with the team, and if they have the appropriate attitude, they will dismiss it, denounce the maker of that website as juvenile and move on. if someone walks by, having no idea why this image is there on the screen, they may inquire about it, or come to me and ask me what that is supposed to be about. we'll check, find out and move on.
calling this image not safe for work, creates an environment of fear, that itself is not healthy and in the country where i come from, not acceptable.
I usually take "NSFW" to mean, Thing you might be embarrassed for other people whom you may not know well to see you looking at without context, not necessarily that it's going to result in severe consequences or trauma. I'm sure there are companies where an image like this would warrant an overreaction, and I agree with you on the absurdity of that, but I think the less hyperbolic meaning above is more common.
It really depends on the degree to which your co-workers and clients lack a sense of humor.
For example, in the early 00's I was working for a company that built a lot of CMS sites. One of the test images my co-worker used was Yoda driving a go-kart. A customer got offended, so we were instructed to use really boring images that just had the word "test" on them.
This one I can kind of understand. Moreso than the Yoda one.
There’s a good chance at least one piece of copy will be missed when replacing the placeholder text, and for a vegan company, that can easily cause outrage for their customers since it’s just full of meat products. There are a lot of reasons for people being vegan and some hold incredibly strong beliefs on meat products.
To be clear, it wasn't a vegan company or even anything related to food -- it was a shipping company. There just happened to be someone who worked there who was an outspoken vegan.
Since their story happened 20 years ago its probably not related, but Reddit banned r/LegoYoda because of the captions on some photos of Yoda driving a 2003 Honda Civic.
It's just that gif of David Hasselhoff in a speedo where it keeps zooming in on his crotch and it's just more David Hasselhoffs in speedos forever. An image that I assume anyone who's even heard of the Internet has already seen a hundred times. I wouldn't call it NSFW, personally.
[EDIT] I mean, contextually, if you're being weird about it or posting that kind of thing all the time, yeah, it could become NSFW. But I don't think sharing this particular thing maybe with a "warning: low-quality gif of Hasselhoff in speedo" in case anyone cares, is over the line.
NSFW had become an euphemism for p-o-r-n(w/exposed parts) and in that sense it’s not NSFW because. In literal sense it is. And that discrepancy is somewhat confusing.
I'm curious why you jumped to "women" here, when they aren't relevant to the conversation. Do you think women need to be protected from unsafe imagery at work, or "nsfw" is designed to protect women?
GP isn’t necessarily assuming bad faith. Suggesting that women are any more or less likely to be offended by something is Considered Harmful because it enforces gender binaries and stereotypes.
Most people don’t have malicious intent. The biggest reason that the tech industry is so infamously misogynistic is because people don’t actually know much about the issues of gender, and don’t really know what is misogyny.
Let me make this a little clearer and more to the point: suggesting that a company of 80% women would appreciate a mild dick joke in the context of whether or not the joke is safe for work is enforcing a gender binary that both separates women from men (by suggesting that there’s different senses of humor between them) and erases non-binary people. If you can think about it this way I’m pretty sure you can see why it’s also misogynistic even if you’re being “positive” towards women, as well as problematic in general, without GP needing any malicious intent whatsoever. And it could be avoided just as easily by being educated and aware.
This isn’t some sort of “snowflake” shit, either. We just live in a society that perpetuates these harmful gender stereotypes even during water cooler chit-chat, and the only way to change it is to point it out.
Please also assume good faith.
Edit: I don’t like the tone that I wrote this comment in, and so I want to make myself clear that I’m not trying to attack anybody either. My point is really that comments can be harmful without being written with malicious intent, and pointing it out when possible is important if anybody wants to see that aspect of society change.
> Pretty sure that your interpretation of their intent behind bringing up "women" says more about you then it does about them....
Ah yes, the classic "You're sexist for pointing out sexism" argument.
> An alternative interpretation would be "many women find phallic humor to be funny".
An interpretation which has nothing to do with the comments at hand, which is determining if some content is SFW or not.
> As the HN comment guidelines suggest: > Assume good faith.
Yes, that means assume good faith when there is uncertainty. I don't see much uncertainty in the post in question, they are fairly explicit about their point.
EDIT: It is not NSFW. If you think this is NSFW, then I don't think you should be spending any time on the internet. The internet is not safe for you.