This is a very problematic choice and as much as I want to think it wasn't malicious, at every turn it sure looks like it's meant to be inflammatory.
I can think of exactly one good reason to mark religious content as NSFW (under F-Droid's bizarre and very not normal definition of that word): To protect persons living in areas of the world where association with that religion is ruinous or outright dangerous due to persecution.
Aside from that extreme outlier, this is very bad, to not only associate a censoring label to anybody's relgious text, but a label that accuses the text of being offensive in the name of not producing offense. Virtue-signaled sensitivity to users desires (as if that's a single, unified, knowable thing), "political incorrectness" and "religious... settings"? Yikes, so much irony. Anti-feature indeed.
This whole matter is far outside the bounds of a software repository's domain of responsibility, and it's inappropriate for them to try.
In the "most literal" interpretation no. It's generally safe to read the Bible at work, (during times when reading anything non-work related is allowed).
Abrahamic religious texts, and a lot of others as well, are offensive. They clearly and directly glorify oppressive and/or genocidal violence in the past. There's a very strong argument that they demand similar violence in the present and future. They definitely demand a whole bunch of evil and oppressive social institutions. They're more offensive than hardcore porn. Any "believers" who claim they don't really mean what they say should get exactly as much consideration as people who claim hardcore porn doesn't really mean the sex.
It's just that F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of caring what's "NSFW".
No they are not. Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn". And I am saying that as someone who is not Christian and finds a lot of what Christianity stands for off-putting or even unethical. There is a reason people who want quick individual fun go for porn and not for a bible.
If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps and ignored things like reddit when doing this I would say its just an honest mistake, but they only seemingly marked Bible related apps. In one instance the developers app isn't even an app that contains the Bible, its a Bible reading tracker so you can keep track of which verses you have read thus far, still marked NSFW. There was not enough thought put into this ban and it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
> We don't flag general apps, e.g., ebook readers and browsers. But bible readers are not general apps. They are designed to read bible and there are NSFW contents in bible.
Honestly I think their argument is pretty weak, especially since like you said in this case it was a bible reading tracker.
> If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps. ［...］ it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
Not true. Quran just as targeted as Bible.
> and ignored things like reddit
What do you mean with "ignored reddit"? There is no official reddit app on f-droid and community clients are flagged with the "depends on or promotes non-free network service" anti-feature.
An offline reading-tracking app being flagged sounds like one false positive that should be corrected, though. Have you tried submitting a PR for it?
It seems someone at F-Droid may have a political axe to grind with the current US presidency and the majority of the population of America who elected (1.)them.
Don't get me wrong, I hold the "eligible but didn't vote" group equally accountable for the current regime, but it was not the majority of the population that voted for him.
"If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98."
Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
But I get it at the same time - some people may want them on their devices.
I'm more concerned in this case that NSFW section contains "political incorrectness". Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases? A "committee" of experts on discord?
> Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
I get what you are trying to say, but so far, there are actual real high-effort apps. Sefaria is my greatest example of that, since it tries not to be just a book reading app, but to visually show a graph of how text is related between translations, midrash and more commentary. But yeah, most are surely low-effort, I can't disagree on that.
> Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases?
It's the same question as "Who watches the watchers?", I don't think a centralized architecture, like F-Droid or Android itself, can solve it.
In this case PWAs appear to be a good option for that kind of content, if only we could make their installation and use as seamless as using the playstore. They might be on par with F-Droid, however.
Yeah I'm just glad this NSFW tag filters out all this junk.... The screenshot in the thread of all the Bible apps in search after toggling filter is actually funny.
> The current NSFW anti-feature definition is listed here: Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and copied below for reference:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
> The key words here are the user. Apps should only be assigned this anti-feature if the app contains content that the user may not want publicized or visible elsewhere. Most, if not all users of Bible apps would indeed want the content of the apps to be publicized and visible elsewhere, so this anti-feature should not apply to Bible apps according to this definition.
F-Droid are in the FA stage of FAFO. If they don't reverse this, they will find themselves in the FO stage. Anyone can hold the opinion that "religion or its texts are ruinous" but you can never apply it in practice in a liberal democracy (even in secular states) simply because religious and expression rights are legally protected.
Don't moral police people especially on something that is as controversial as this.
Or this could be the FO itself. Both the threshold for NSFW as well as anti-puritanism sentiment has crept up so high that it has reached "religion is a cancer" stage.
> religious and expression rights are legally protected.
What "liberal democracy" has laws that tell F-Droid that it has to carry any particular apps, or how it has to mark them, again? There are some places that like to call themselves "liberal democracies" and have "must not carry" laws, but that's as far as it goes (and, on edit, those don't generally aim at religious content).
In fact I think you will probably find that there are no must-carry-religious-content laws anywhere, liberal or not. Even in utterly totalitarian states, the closest anything comes is rules that government spyware, or maybe propaganda, must be installed.
The only "FO" that will or should happen to F-Droid is that it may lose more users and/or contributors one way than the other.
"Since we have been awarded funding from the OTF Sustainability grant to explore F-Droid policies, we have taken a look at some EU, UK and global content moderation regulations and guidelines to how it may impact F-Droid. The good news is that in almost all cases we are adhering to the guidelines and regulations, in that we do not have illegal, harmful or exploitative apps on the main repo. The exception being the handful of apps we have tagged NSFW."
If they insist on flagging things as NSFW then this would be the correct action for those apps that contain the texts. It seems like apps that are bible related and don't contain the text are being flagged though which should be fixed.
This is my issue with it as well, but also, why did the PR only target Bible apps? Seemingly in a very lazy way at that. Had they taken time to understand how each app works and its purpose, they would have only flagged apps that contain the Bible itself. I would hope reddit and other apps that actually contain graphic NSFW content are next?
The only merge request you've seen targets bible apps. How do you know this isn't one part of a larger effort to correctly mark apps? Maybe they've tackled other categories previously, or had intended to tackle other categories going forward. The fact that bible apps is included in one wave of markings doesn't mean only bible apps are affected.
I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.
I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?
Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.
I mean, unless you work at an organisation that deals with a specific religion, I would say that they're all NSFW, as there's no reason to be using them at work, and they're bound to cause controvosy at some point.
Given the level of NSFW material in some of them (sex, violence, etc), I think it's not surprising they're getting labelled as such, even without the link to a religion.
Seems legit. These topics should not form any part of work or government. What you do in your own time is of course completely up to you, as with any other NSFW content.
The US Constitution's First Amendment protects religion from government. There is no amendment protecting porn or gratuitous violence. Marking the religious apps as NSFW may be a violation of the First Amendment and could potentially be challenged in court, to a potentially huge sum of money and F-Droid's potential detriment.
The First Amendment does not apply to fucking app stores. It applies to the government and only to the government. That does include the government leaning on people, but it does not include editorial or curation decisions made by totally private organizations.
If you tried to take your position to a court in the US, even now, you'd be treated as a frivolous litigant... which, to be clear, means being told to fuck off and not come back.
Please stop posting this kind of ignorance. It burns.
Generally speaking, only images/videos are NSFW-taggable.
The argument can be made than an app which displays religious imagery is not suitable for the workplace, but if it's just a reader with texts, then not.
If someone wants to spy over your shoulder to read text on your screen, and it doesn't jibe with their religion, that is their problem.
And, if that's where the goalposts lie, then atheistic texts could be offensive in such a way. I.e. a Mastodon post claiming "there is no god" should be marked NSFW and blurred out until you click something.
There is a world outside the USA where most of what you wrote doesn’t apply.
Here I think the labelling doesn’t really make sense but it never does anyway and pretty much means "this content is part of a corpus American think is objectionable and wouldn’t want to be seen with in public”.
I enjoy the controversy for putting in light the usual imperial blindness however.
This seems reasonable. The content includes themes (death, rape, violence, etc) that are generally considered NSFW by most modern day rating agencies. Just because cultures have historically seeded the texts for a long period of time doesn't make them SFW. If ESRB/MPAA had to rate a modern reboot, I don't think it would get a T/PG-13.
Personally, I wouldn't want my kids exposed to this kind of material without at least having a chance to talk to them about it first. Would you want your child getting sucked into something like Scientology without your knowledge?
It's only reasonable if reason is applied, rather than one particular set of contributors' political sensibilities. Unfortunately, there is zero logical consistency in what is marked NSFW and what isn't. That's the entire problem. F-Droid's authoritarian moral-policing crew are coming up with any flimsy justification for censorship applied inconsistently rather than taking an objective look at the issue. Read the comments and you'll see their tone is clearly dismissive and condescending, not collaborative and "Hmm, I can see how maybe this line of policing is inconsistent." This is how this kind of political-bias-pretending-to-be-objectivity tends to unfold with religious adherents, which these F-Droid contributors seem to be.
"one particular set of contributors' political sensibilities." - the entire western world is now particular sets of political and ideological sensibilities. Why puritan christians always assume that theirs is somehow different of others and won't be subject to new puritanism?
"Read the comments and you'll see their tone is clearly dismissive and condescending" - you think that way because you are biased to classify your religious text as not nsfw - but there is no such reason really - christianity is no longer main ideology of everyone.
This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
What Bible reader wants that fact hidden? That is the opposite sentiment of everyone I've actually seen. That honestly makes it seem even more illogical.
I feel like you didn't read the discussion at all? One of the apps does not contain any Bible verses, it is used to track which books, chapters and verses you've read.
Does it matter? F-Droid is a distributor, they're allowed to reject apps they consider controversial or outside their wheelhouse. The person who spoke up was correct, the ruling is consistent and the definition of NSFW content makes sense to me. Evangelism isn't exempted from being called and labelled as slopware.
These people can perfectly well distribute their apps without F-Droid's help, they're not refusing to sign their app or somesuch.
F-Droid "Anti-Feature flags" are not block lists. They are for users to filter content. The content is still available.
>> When reviewing apps to accept, F-Droid takes the user’s point of view, first and foremost. We start with strict acceptance criteria based on the principles of free software and user control. There are some things about an app that might not block it from inclusion, but many users might not want to accept them. For these kinds of things, F-Droid has a defined set of Anti-Features. Apps can then be marked with these Anti-Features so users can clearly choose whether the app is still acceptable.
>> Anti-Features are organized into “flags” that packagers can use to mark apps, warning of possibly undesirable behaviour from the user’s perspective, often serving the interest of the developer or a third party. Free software packages do not exist in a bubble. For one piece of software to be useful, it usually has to integrate with some other software. Therefore, users that want free software also want to know if an app depends on or promotes any proprietary software. Sometimes, there are concepts in Anti-Features that overlap with tactics used by third parties against users. F-Droid always marks Anti-Features from the user’s point of view. For example, NSFW might be construed as similar to a censor’s blocklists, but in our case, the focus is on the user’s context and keeping the user in control.
F-Droid is no longer accepting "NSFW" apps (as they dubiously define them) and will eventually remove them from the repo. This tag is only a stopgap until they figure out how to move them out of the F-Droid repo.
Oh that's disappointing. I have no issue with them flagging bible apps (it's just a flag and I welcome the ability to filter) but I do think nsfw content does belong in an open app ecosystem under the appropriate flagging. Including religion for those who subscribe to that.
This hides those apps from the search unless that user enables the NSFW filter. When seen through that lens, I can’t imagine the overlap of users who are searching for a Bible app and who also want to show NSFW apps with them. When seen through that lens, it doesn’t seem like this is a user-friendly decision or one that is taking the user in control or taking their context into account.
> 2. F-Droid and other software managers SHOULD handle NSFW content, but the Bible does not contain this content (such as in Ezekiel chapter 23).
Why pick out a tiny bit of Ezekiel when you have the entire book of Song of Solomon?
Anyways, I think the more interesting tension is: What tag or flag would apply to the Bible that does not apply to the Wikipedia app? I have literally used Wikipedia to look up sex positions, which it covers in detail and with pictures.
Yeah, like, there's straight-up photos of penises and vaginas and naked people of all sorts on Wikipedia. It absolutely should be considered a NSFW app.
My understanding of NSFW is that it means "not safe for work" and in the contexts I was in, bible was safe for work. I have yet to see an angry atheist demanding that bibles cant be seen on account of Ezekiel chapter 23 like content. As funny as gotcha of "bible contains stories about sexuality" is, back in real world, I have yet to meet someone who would equate it with erotics.
And yes, you can talk about books and movies in which comparable scenes appear in work too.
Clearly someone 'wants to do something controversial'.
Pathetic. Carte blanc on anything using the word Bible is a telltale sign. A 'I've read these verses' tracker also banned, having contained none of what they object to. Violent video game descriptions not banned. Do it right or don't do it. It's simple.
NSFW should mean something akin to Not Safe for Work lol. If you're going to use that tag at all, the tag should exist on pretty much anything that exists purely for entertainment value. I would argue that religious texts (as well as sexually explicit scientific articles) are not NSFW, but pretty much every game is.
If you're sitting around reading the Bible when you should be working, why should your boss treat that as better than sitting around playing a game when you should be working?
But originally "NSFW" was meant for stuff you might not want to do on your break. It is true that if you use that kind of definition, these particular apps aren't going to get you in trouble in most workplaces. The official F-Droid definition that people have been quoting is mostly like that too. But the popular definition of "NSFW" has drifted, so users will be confused... which is yet another reason that it's not a category an app repository should be trying to maintain.
Mostly agree, but some people do consult religious texts for work. It doesn't strike me as categorically NSFW, but I think you and I agree that that's the issue: the definition of the NSFW category. Going further, I think it's not possible to define in a way that makes everyone happy; it's not as unambiguous as say, 18+ content, so we should just omit it altogether and let people make up their own minds as to what is safe in their workplace.
* "New Oklahoma schools superintendent rescinds mandate for Bible instruction in schools": https://apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-su... (apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-superintendent-630b2f706731224a070d7fef6a35b7d8)
> The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter.
Yes, I have read it, as have billions of others, and we don't agree with you. Your personal political sensibilities are not shared by all. For what it's worth I wouldn't flag any of your chosen religious texts either no matter what they were.
unless I am misunderstanding, this would allow you to hide the app from sharing settings, so that others don't see you are e.g. reading the quran (where otherwise they may have not known) and has nothing to do with whether or not you have a job where you e.g. work.
Right, I wonder what else is under NSFW. Are they really forcing users to enable NSFW which includes actual smut, in order to get a bible app? This is malicious.
So we should expect them to NSFW all manga/anime reading/browsing apps. Clearly many hypersexualise women, possibly minors, normalize sexual abuse, violence, both text and visuals
Probably all social client apps for their addictive characteristics, and unhealthy polarizing content, and generally mental health degrading. Including Facebook, Reddit, fediverse...
Let's be real no one is going to read the bible by accident. It is much easier for a young person to find explicit content in Lemmy/fediverse apps
Before the topic is ironically flagged, I guess it is time to have "the talk".
Although you can construct peaceful narratives from both books, and most people are trying to do that, and I commend and appreciate their efforts immensely, fact of the matter is: you are swimming up the current.
The societies depicted in them were highly disturbed, warring tribes. The lessons from stories were harsh, often bordering on sadism. Pretty much everyone grew up with trauma if they survived.
Although you can find little nuggets of wisdom here and there about being humble and patient and not getting on a high horse, calling these books key to the universe is like pushing a camel through a needle hole.
Now should people mark "holy" book apps unsafe? maybe, but it isn't going to save children from being exposed. It will just disturb well meaning people and enrage the not so nice ones.
The bible is a long introduction to the punchline, that the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone, and that it wants everyone to be like that.
> the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone
Well, after personally destroying some cities, cursing an entire civilization with plagues including the death of their firstborn, and ordering the "chosen people" to take over some land by slaughtering everybody living there. And the "getting killed" part didn't remove the threat of eternal fire for anybody who doesn't go along with the program. That's the big stuff I remember off the top of my head.
You have to ignore a lot of stuff in both testaments to get to where you're trying to go.
I mean, yes, these are religious texts, but if we are to judge them on a level with other content, they absolutely warrant a warning.
The abrahamic religious texts intersect largely around the Old Testament, which is a smorgasbord of genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse of all flavours, and all the rest.
I guess the question is whether religious texts should be exempt from content warnings, in which case one should expect films like “The Passion of the Christ” to be available for general audiences, not R.
Apart from anything else, the Song of Solomon (which I actually like!) or Ezekiel 23:20 would probably trigger some kind of automated detection system. Not to mention the legitimately horrible parts like Deuteronomy 22:23.
From an App Store rating perspective, this particularly affects children, which leads to a much more focused question:
Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
And if so, then what categories of apps are exempt from otherwise-mandatory content restriction processes for children? The Satanists no doubt stand ready to step in if anyone tries to disguise “exempt only Christian bible apps” under the cloak of “exempt all religious apps”, but shouldn’t this also exclude the Education category so that history and language students aren’t disadvantaged?
This change doesn’t much affect adults, though no doubt they will be leading the charges of complaint against it. It absolutely affects minors, though, who will encounter a higher bar of difficulty in studying religions or foreign languages or world history without explicit parental consent.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that outcome, or any of this at all, but I wanted to make sure that an impacted group with little ability to speak for itself is recognized by those — by us all adults, specifically — who unilaterally compose and impose policies upon them.
If you see this as the innocent equivalent of a “content warning,” then I would expect more apps to be flagged. The commenters in that thread point out numerous apps or games that are obviously built around content that is not appropriate for children.
Perhaps this is the only “think of the children” content warning they have, and therefore it seems odd when applied to religious texts. It’s like a movie rating system where there are only G and X ratings. If it’s not G, it gets lumped in with other stuff, including X-rated porn, and the only way to find it in our App Store is to allow for X-rated content.
Seems like a bug at best, but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to think this is an “aww shucks, rules are rules” application of some policy.
Hm... that seems strained. The film got an R because of visible blood/gore scenes and violence. There's nothing controversial about that at all, swap the script with an explicitly atheist one that rejects the divinity of Christ and crucifies a 100% mortal man in exactly the same way and you'd get an obvious R, because crucifixion is a violent act absent of any context.
And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?
I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.
I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.
Uncle Tom's cabin actually should be banned based on their rules, but not because of its depiction of slavery, for the ending, where Uncle Tom refuses to rat out the slave women he helped escape and in turn is brutally whipped to death, whilst forgiving those who are whipping him. The violence and gore in the ending is enough regardless of the rest of the book.
Aside: If you've never read it, the depiction of that book in media has been corrupted by the racist "Tom Shows" in the south from the 19th and 20th century that painted Uncle Tom as a weak, pathetic man who betrayed his people, when really, he was a 20-something year old man in peak physical condition who chose to die rather than selling out the people he tried to help.
Neither uncle tom’s cabin nor the diary of Anne Frank advocated slavery nor genocide.
I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s
Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.
What is the funniest is that this is the action of a social justice warrior on a crusade, exhibiting the exact same behaviour he purports to be against.
Consistency? How do you propose allowing smut and violence from some religions without allowing it from others? If there are existing rules, they should be applied consistently.
Oh well. To be honest I was pretty disappointed that Google was going after them, but the writing seems to be on the wall. With behavior like this, I do not even want to use their software at all.
Android has been going more and more to shit anyways. The best part was always that you could escape Google, but that option seems to be closing down.
Exactly, but if you say that you'll just be accused of yourself being a biased bigot, conveniently distracting from the original reason the discussion started at all! These psychological tactics don't work on people anymore.
But religions are only normal once they have numbers, theres no judgement on the content. These cults just have to survive and thrive long enough to become normalised.
You can see everything as a cult. Science, with its cultic belief that everything is a particle also just survived long enough to become normal. The question is, are members of one cult wise enough to accept other cults, or are they so insecure that they have to tag them with "NSFW"?
As much antipathy as I have for religion, I disagree wholeheartedly. Bias in any form just enables rationalizing a counter-bias. And frankly, the folks who do exactly that sort of counter-bias today are very good at it. We should be careful about giving them more ammo, this tit-for-tat is tearing us apart.
I understand what you're saying but just like "absolute freedom of speech", the ratchet only works one direction. In fact you identified it as really good counter bias. It's analogous to Overton Window always opening to the right.
You've hit on a good point, but I don't know what to do about it.
So true. There are entire libraries that only include books that have been made illegal by various states across the world. People are naturally attracted to taboos and this will only draw more attention to the bible.
So... what's the big deal? Putting aside the various arguments whether religious texts should be marked as such, the wording of this policy, etc, etc... literally what difference does it make that these apps now have this flag? Do people think users will see this flag and be like, "Oh dear me I had no idea the Bible was NSFW; won't be reading that now!"?
This is a very problematic choice and as much as I want to think it wasn't malicious, at every turn it sure looks like it's meant to be inflammatory.
I can think of exactly one good reason to mark religious content as NSFW (under F-Droid's bizarre and very not normal definition of that word): To protect persons living in areas of the world where association with that religion is ruinous or outright dangerous due to persecution.
Aside from that extreme outlier, this is very bad, to not only associate a censoring label to anybody's relgious text, but a label that accuses the text of being offensive in the name of not producing offense. Virtue-signaled sensitivity to users desires (as if that's a single, unified, knowable thing), "political incorrectness" and "religious... settings"? Yikes, so much irony. Anti-feature indeed.
This whole matter is far outside the bounds of a software repository's domain of responsibility, and it's inappropriate for them to try.
Most religious texts are NSFW in the most literal interpretation. They contain violence and rape in great detail.
Which is fine, but it is just NSFW.
In the "most literal" interpretation no. It's generally safe to read the Bible at work, (during times when reading anything non-work related is allowed).
The old testament has depiction of rape and violence. If the new testaments is also tagged nsfw though, I'll claim that their sensitivity is too high.
Obviously a man nailed to a cross is also pretty violent.
Revelations is pretty metal.
new testament scripture about slavery: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
new testament scripture about killing women and children: https://www.google.com/search?q=new+testament+scripture+abou...
What was "Passion of the Christ" rated, and why?
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> label that accuses the text of being offensive
Abrahamic religious texts, and a lot of others as well, are offensive. They clearly and directly glorify oppressive and/or genocidal violence in the past. There's a very strong argument that they demand similar violence in the present and future. They definitely demand a whole bunch of evil and oppressive social institutions. They're more offensive than hardcore porn. Any "believers" who claim they don't really mean what they say should get exactly as much consideration as people who claim hardcore porn doesn't really mean the sex.
It's just that F-Droid shouldn't be in the business of caring what's "NSFW".
> They're more offensive than hardcore porn.
No they are not. Not unless you are intentionally taking in super weird definition of "offensive" or "hardcore porn". And I am saying that as someone who is not Christian and finds a lot of what Christianity stands for off-putting or even unethical. There is a reason people who want quick individual fun go for porn and not for a bible.
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> I can think of exactly one good reason to mark religious content as NSFW
Fundamentalism ?
What about religious content of pornographic nature?
Discussion of the merge request to mark it as nsfw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45409794
I still don't get it to be honest.
If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps and ignored things like reddit when doing this I would say its just an honest mistake, but they only seemingly marked Bible related apps. In one instance the developers app isn't even an app that contains the Bible, its a Bible reading tracker so you can keep track of which verses you have read thus far, still marked NSFW. There was not enough thought put into this ban and it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
They seem to disagree https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/-/merge_requests/27861#...
> We don't flag general apps, e.g., ebook readers and browsers. But bible readers are not general apps. They are designed to read bible and there are NSFW contents in bible.
Honestly I think their argument is pretty weak, especially since like you said in this case it was a bible reading tracker.
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> If it wasn't for the fact that they totally only targeted Bible apps. ［...］ it only seems to target one demographic of apps.
Not true. Quran just as targeted as Bible.
> and ignored things like reddit
What do you mean with "ignored reddit"? There is no official reddit app on f-droid and community clients are flagged with the "depends on or promotes non-free network service" anti-feature.
An offline reading-tracking app being flagged sounds like one false positive that should be corrected, though. Have you tried submitting a PR for it?
> still marked NSFW
"NSFW" is just the name of the F-Droid Anti-Feature, which is quite broad than what "not safe for work" implies:
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"authoritarian regimes"
It seems someone at F-Droid may have a political axe to grind with the current US presidency and the majority of the population of America who elected (1.)them.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_presidentia...
majority of voting population
Don't get me wrong, I hold the "eligible but didn't vote" group equally accountable for the current regime, but it was not the majority of the population that voted for him.
"If "Did Not Vote" had been a presidential candidate, they would have beaten Donald Trump by 9.1 million votes, and they would have won 21 states, earning 265 electoral college votes to Trump's 175 and Harris's 98."
https://www.environmentalvoter.org/updates/2024-was-landslid...
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Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
But I get it at the same time - some people may want them on their devices.
I'm more concerned in this case that NSFW section contains "political incorrectness". Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases? A "committee" of experts on discord?
> Maybe I'm in the minority but I consider religious text books, prayer tracking/reading apps as the low-effort ones - doesn't matter which religion it is. These will eventually show up in the "store" in countless versions.
I get what you are trying to say, but so far, there are actual real high-effort apps. Sefaria is my greatest example of that, since it tries not to be just a book reading app, but to visually show a graph of how text is related between translations, midrash and more commentary. But yeah, most are surely low-effort, I can't disagree on that.
> Who's going to decide here what's incorrect and what's not in some cases?
It's the same question as "Who watches the watchers?", I don't think a centralized architecture, like F-Droid or Android itself, can solve it.
In this case PWAs appear to be a good option for that kind of content, if only we could make their installation and use as seamless as using the playstore. They might be on par with F-Droid, however.
Yeah I'm just glad this NSFW tag filters out all this junk.... The screenshot in the thread of all the Bible apps in search after toggling filter is actually funny.
This should have been the end of it.
> The current NSFW anti-feature definition is listed here: Anti-Features | F-Droid - Free and Open Source Android App Repository and copied below for reference:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere. The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter. This is especially relevant in environments like workplaces, schools, religious and family settings. The name comes from the Internet term “Not safe for work”.
> The key words here are the user. Apps should only be assigned this anti-feature if the app contains content that the user may not want publicized or visible elsewhere. Most, if not all users of Bible apps would indeed want the content of the apps to be publicized and visible elsewhere, so this anti-feature should not apply to Bible apps according to this definition.
F-Droid are in the FA stage of FAFO. If they don't reverse this, they will find themselves in the FO stage. Anyone can hold the opinion that "religion or its texts are ruinous" but you can never apply it in practice in a liberal democracy (even in secular states) simply because religious and expression rights are legally protected.
Don't moral police people especially on something that is as controversial as this.
Or this could be the FO itself. Both the threshold for NSFW as well as anti-puritanism sentiment has crept up so high that it has reached "religion is a cancer" stage.
> religious and expression rights are legally protected.
What "liberal democracy" has laws that tell F-Droid that it has to carry any particular apps, or how it has to mark them, again? There are some places that like to call themselves "liberal democracies" and have "must not carry" laws, but that's as far as it goes (and, on edit, those don't generally aim at religious content).
In fact I think you will probably find that there are no must-carry-religious-content laws anywhere, liberal or not. Even in utterly totalitarian states, the closest anything comes is rules that government spyware, or maybe propaganda, must be installed.
The only "FO" that will or should happen to F-Droid is that it may lose more users and/or contributors one way than the other.
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One interesting quote I found in [1]:
"Since we have been awarded funding from the OTF Sustainability grant to explore F-Droid policies, we have taken a look at some EU, UK and global content moderation regulations and guidelines to how it may impact F-Droid. The good news is that in almost all cases we are adhering to the guidelines and regulations, in that we do not have illegal, harmful or exploitative apps on the main repo. The exception being the handful of apps we have tagged NSFW."
[1] https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252#note_2578531026
If they insist on flagging things as NSFW then this would be the correct action for those apps that contain the texts. It seems like apps that are bible related and don't contain the text are being flagged though which should be fixed.
This is my issue with it as well, but also, why did the PR only target Bible apps? Seemingly in a very lazy way at that. Had they taken time to understand how each app works and its purpose, they would have only flagged apps that contain the Bible itself. I would hope reddit and other apps that actually contain graphic NSFW content are next?
The only merge request you've seen targets bible apps. How do you know this isn't one part of a larger effort to correctly mark apps? Maybe they've tackled other categories previously, or had intended to tackle other categories going forward. The fact that bible apps is included in one wave of markings doesn't mean only bible apps are affected.
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Totally agree. They should be flagged 18+ and required ID verification if we want to play on a level field.
How about "a small, strapped project that can use all the friends it can get shouldn't be wasting time on maintaining irrelevant metadata"?
Not having categories like "NSFW" would be a nice level playing field.
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I think there's a large cultural bias at play here. Different nations have different relationships to religion. As a french person, the decision to mark religious content as NSFW seems totally normal to me, but I also know that french people are (often too) fierce atheists.
I also understand things are different in many places, but I think the argument is too heated right now, maybe everyone needs to take a step back and think in a more "international" way?
Someone in the linked thread suggested a new tag altogether for religious content, that might be a sound decision.
As a French person the decision seems abhorrent to me. Atheists in France are also in the minority by most measures.
I mean, unless you work at an organisation that deals with a specific religion, I would say that they're all NSFW, as there's no reason to be using them at work, and they're bound to cause controvosy at some point.
Given the level of NSFW material in some of them (sex, violence, etc), I think it's not surprising they're getting labelled as such, even without the link to a religion.
Seems legit. These topics should not form any part of work or government. What you do in your own time is of course completely up to you, as with any other NSFW content.
The US Constitution's First Amendment protects religion from government. There is no amendment protecting porn or gratuitous violence. Marking the religious apps as NSFW may be a violation of the First Amendment and could potentially be challenged in court, to a potentially huge sum of money and F-Droid's potential detriment.
The First Amendment does not apply to fucking app stores. It applies to the government and only to the government. That does include the government leaning on people, but it does not include editorial or curation decisions made by totally private organizations.
If you tried to take your position to a court in the US, even now, you'd be treated as a frivolous litigant... which, to be clear, means being told to fuck off and not come back.
Please stop posting this kind of ignorance. It burns.
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Generally speaking, only images/videos are NSFW-taggable.
The argument can be made than an app which displays religious imagery is not suitable for the workplace, but if it's just a reader with texts, then not.
If someone wants to spy over your shoulder to read text on your screen, and it doesn't jibe with their religion, that is their problem.
And, if that's where the goalposts lie, then atheistic texts could be offensive in such a way. I.e. a Mastodon post claiming "there is no god" should be marked NSFW and blurred out until you click something.
There is a world outside the USA where most of what you wrote doesn’t apply.
Here I think the labelling doesn’t really make sense but it never does anyway and pretty much means "this content is part of a corpus American think is objectionable and wouldn’t want to be seen with in public”.
I enjoy the controversy for putting in light the usual imperial blindness however.
Funny you should mention that because some draft of my comment did specify "North American workplace" but it got lost in some edit.
Open source and stepping in to be a morality judge really seems like a difficult line to take.
This seems reasonable. The content includes themes (death, rape, violence, etc) that are generally considered NSFW by most modern day rating agencies. Just because cultures have historically seeded the texts for a long period of time doesn't make them SFW. If ESRB/MPAA had to rate a modern reboot, I don't think it would get a T/PG-13.
Personally, I wouldn't want my kids exposed to this kind of material without at least having a chance to talk to them about it first. Would you want your child getting sucked into something like Scientology without your knowledge?
Would you agree the Wikipedia app should be marked NSFW? It also contains a whole lot of objectionable stuff, often with pictures.
It's only reasonable if reason is applied, rather than one particular set of contributors' political sensibilities. Unfortunately, there is zero logical consistency in what is marked NSFW and what isn't. That's the entire problem. F-Droid's authoritarian moral-policing crew are coming up with any flimsy justification for censorship applied inconsistently rather than taking an objective look at the issue. Read the comments and you'll see their tone is clearly dismissive and condescending, not collaborative and "Hmm, I can see how maybe this line of policing is inconsistent." This is how this kind of political-bias-pretending-to-be-objectivity tends to unfold with religious adherents, which these F-Droid contributors seem to be.
"one particular set of contributors' political sensibilities." - the entire western world is now particular sets of political and ideological sensibilities. Why puritan christians always assume that theirs is somehow different of others and won't be subject to new puritanism?
"Read the comments and you'll see their tone is clearly dismissive and condescending" - you think that way because you are biased to classify your religious text as not nsfw - but there is no such reason really - christianity is no longer main ideology of everyone.
It's a bit jarring how obtuse a lot of people are in that thread, since two things can be true:
- Religious books are not for kids
- They aren't primarily written to be violent
Instead it's more like a Mexican stand off, whoever first tries to be reasonable gets shot.
The justification makes perfect sense.
What Bible reader wants that fact hidden? That is the opposite sentiment of everyone I've actually seen. That honestly makes it seem even more illogical.
If you are in islamists run area, you want that hidden. For safety.
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I feel like you didn't read the discussion at all? One of the apps does not contain any Bible verses, it is used to track which books, chapters and verses you've read.
Does it matter? F-Droid is a distributor, they're allowed to reject apps they consider controversial or outside their wheelhouse. The person who spoke up was correct, the ruling is consistent and the definition of NSFW content makes sense to me. Evangelism isn't exempted from being called and labelled as slopware.
These people can perfectly well distribute their apps without F-Droid's help, they're not refusing to sign their app or somesuch.
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Time for an f-droid competitor? The UI is outdated anyways.
Outdated maybe, but still quite functional. What is your issue with it?
if people find the UI so bad, wouldnt it be easier to try to push an updated UI than getting all the infrastructure and everything going?
Which UI? f-droid has many frontends, with wildly varying design sensibilities and approaches.
Huh, I didn't know that. Thanks.
F-Droid "Anti-Feature flags" are not block lists. They are for users to filter content. The content is still available.
>> When reviewing apps to accept, F-Droid takes the user’s point of view, first and foremost. We start with strict acceptance criteria based on the principles of free software and user control. There are some things about an app that might not block it from inclusion, but many users might not want to accept them. For these kinds of things, F-Droid has a defined set of Anti-Features. Apps can then be marked with these Anti-Features so users can clearly choose whether the app is still acceptable.
>> Anti-Features are organized into “flags” that packagers can use to mark apps, warning of possibly undesirable behaviour from the user’s perspective, often serving the interest of the developer or a third party. Free software packages do not exist in a bubble. For one piece of software to be useful, it usually has to integrate with some other software. Therefore, users that want free software also want to know if an app depends on or promotes any proprietary software. Sometimes, there are concepts in Anti-Features that overlap with tactics used by third parties against users. F-Droid always marks Anti-Features from the user’s point of view. For example, NSFW might be construed as similar to a censor’s blocklists, but in our case, the focus is on the user’s context and keeping the user in control.
Emphasis mine.
F-Droid is no longer accepting "NSFW" apps (as they dubiously define them) and will eventually remove them from the repo. This tag is only a stopgap until they figure out how to move them out of the F-Droid repo.
https://gitlab.com/fdroid/admin/-/issues/252
Was not aware of this and it does put the flagging in a different light.
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Oh that's disappointing. I have no issue with them flagging bible apps (it's just a flag and I welcome the ability to filter) but I do think nsfw content does belong in an open app ecosystem under the appropriate flagging. Including religion for those who subscribe to that.
This hides those apps from the search unless that user enables the NSFW filter. When seen through that lens, I can’t imagine the overlap of users who are searching for a Bible app and who also want to show NSFW apps with them. When seen through that lens, it doesn’t seem like this is a user-friendly decision or one that is taking the user in control or taking their context into account.
To all the people being performatively upset by this, please clarify your position. Do you believe:
1. F-Droid and other software managers should not have special labels or handling for NSFW content.
2. F-Droid and other software managers SHOULD handle NSFW content, but the Bible does not contain this content (such as in Ezekiel chapter 23).
3. F-Droid should not consider religious texts to be NSFW even if they contain NSFW contents.
> 2. F-Droid and other software managers SHOULD handle NSFW content, but the Bible does not contain this content (such as in Ezekiel chapter 23).
Why pick out a tiny bit of Ezekiel when you have the entire book of Song of Solomon?
Anyways, I think the more interesting tension is: What tag or flag would apply to the Bible that does not apply to the Wikipedia app? I have literally used Wikipedia to look up sex positions, which it covers in detail and with pictures.
Yeah, like, there's straight-up photos of penises and vaginas and naked people of all sorts on Wikipedia. It absolutely should be considered a NSFW app.
My understanding of NSFW is that it means "not safe for work" and in the contexts I was in, bible was safe for work. I have yet to see an angry atheist demanding that bibles cant be seen on account of Ezekiel chapter 23 like content. As funny as gotcha of "bible contains stories about sexuality" is, back in real world, I have yet to meet someone who would equate it with erotics.
And yes, you can talk about books and movies in which comparable scenes appear in work too.
Performative ignorance is much more annoying
Clearly someone 'wants to do something controversial'.
Pathetic. Carte blanc on anything using the word Bible is a telltale sign. A 'I've read these verses' tracker also banned, having contained none of what they object to. Violent video game descriptions not banned. Do it right or don't do it. It's simple.
NSFW should mean something akin to Not Safe for Work lol. If you're going to use that tag at all, the tag should exist on pretty much anything that exists purely for entertainment value. I would argue that religious texts (as well as sexually explicit scientific articles) are not NSFW, but pretty much every game is.
If you're sitting around reading the Bible when you should be working, why should your boss treat that as better than sitting around playing a game when you should be working?
But originally "NSFW" was meant for stuff you might not want to do on your break. It is true that if you use that kind of definition, these particular apps aren't going to get you in trouble in most workplaces. The official F-Droid definition that people have been quoting is mostly like that too. But the popular definition of "NSFW" has drifted, so users will be confused... which is yet another reason that it's not a category an app repository should be trying to maintain.
Mostly agree, but some people do consult religious texts for work. It doesn't strike me as categorically NSFW, but I think you and I agree that that's the issue: the definition of the NSFW category. Going further, I think it's not possible to define in a way that makes everyone happy; it's not as unambiguous as say, 18+ content, so we should just omit it altogether and let people make up their own minds as to what is safe in their workplace.
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* "New Oklahoma schools superintendent rescinds mandate for Bible instruction in schools": https://apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-su... (apnews.com/article/oklahoma-schools-bible-mandate-superintendent-630b2f706731224a070d7fef6a35b7d8)
* "Want the Bible in public school classrooms? There's an app for that": https://www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/11/04/an-oklahoman... (www.oklahoman.com/story/news/2024/11/04/an-oklahoman-wants-ryan-walters-to-considering-a-free-bible-app-instead-of-spending-millions-on-athe/75570802007/); https://archive.ph/14iDg
NSFW meaning "content that you may not want to view in public", is the Bible or Quran really that?
That's not what NSFW means in this context.
> The marked app may contain nudity, profanity, slurs, violence, intense sexuality, political incorrectness, or other potentially disturbing subject matter.
No, he was exactly right. That says "may" because it's just a comment, not F-Droid's actual definition, which you cut out:
> This Anti-Feature is applied to an app that contains content that the user may not want to be publicized or visible everywhere.
https://f-droid.org/docs/Anti-Features/#nsfw
That is clearly not applicable to the vast majority of these apps' users as evidenced by their outrage.
Have you read it? Yes they are
Yes, I have read it, as have billions of others, and we don't agree with you. Your personal political sensibilities are not shared by all. For what it's worth I wouldn't flag any of your chosen religious texts either no matter what they were.
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unless I am misunderstanding, this would allow you to hide the app from sharing settings, so that others don't see you are e.g. reading the quran (where otherwise they may have not known) and has nothing to do with whether or not you have a job where you e.g. work.
It also hides these apps from the search by default unless you enable the NSFW filter.
Right, I wonder what else is under NSFW. Are they really forcing users to enable NSFW which includes actual smut, in order to get a bible app? This is malicious.
So we should expect them to NSFW all manga/anime reading/browsing apps. Clearly many hypersexualise women, possibly minors, normalize sexual abuse, violence, both text and visuals
Probably all social client apps for their addictive characteristics, and unhealthy polarizing content, and generally mental health degrading. Including Facebook, Reddit, fediverse...
Let's be real no one is going to read the bible by accident. It is much easier for a young person to find explicit content in Lemmy/fediverse apps
Because they are?
It is like red states in USA few years ago banning NSFW books from schools only to find out that Bible is NSFW too by every today metric.
Why would it be surprising for them? I guess the never read the book they are preaching.
Before the topic is ironically flagged, I guess it is time to have "the talk".
Although you can construct peaceful narratives from both books, and most people are trying to do that, and I commend and appreciate their efforts immensely, fact of the matter is: you are swimming up the current.
The societies depicted in them were highly disturbed, warring tribes. The lessons from stories were harsh, often bordering on sadism. Pretty much everyone grew up with trauma if they survived.
Although you can find little nuggets of wisdom here and there about being humble and patient and not getting on a high horse, calling these books key to the universe is like pushing a camel through a needle hole.
Now should people mark "holy" book apps unsafe? maybe, but it isn't going to save children from being exposed. It will just disturb well meaning people and enrage the not so nice ones.
Totally agreed. Anecdotal, but actually reading the Bible, linear + cover to cover, was one of biggest reasons I became an atheist.
The bible is a long introduction to the punchline, that the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone, and that it wants everyone to be like that.
> is like pushing a camel through a needle hole
I see what you did there...
> the highest entity rather gets himself killed, then raising the hand against anyone
Well, after personally destroying some cities, cursing an entire civilization with plagues including the death of their firstborn, and ordering the "chosen people" to take over some land by slaughtering everybody living there. And the "getting killed" part didn't remove the threat of eternal fire for anybody who doesn't go along with the program. That's the big stuff I remember off the top of my head.
You have to ignore a lot of stuff in both testaments to get to where you're trying to go.
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I mean, yes, these are religious texts, but if we are to judge them on a level with other content, they absolutely warrant a warning.
The abrahamic religious texts intersect largely around the Old Testament, which is a smorgasbord of genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse of all flavours, and all the rest.
I guess the question is whether religious texts should be exempt from content warnings, in which case one should expect films like “The Passion of the Christ” to be available for general audiences, not R.
Exempting religious content makes no sense in any context to me. It's all human generated content.
Apart from anything else, the Song of Solomon (which I actually like!) or Ezekiel 23:20 would probably trigger some kind of automated detection system. Not to mention the legitimately horrible parts like Deuteronomy 22:23.
From an App Store rating perspective, this particularly affects children, which leads to a much more focused question:
Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
And if so, then what categories of apps are exempt from otherwise-mandatory content restriction processes for children? The Satanists no doubt stand ready to step in if anyone tries to disguise “exempt only Christian bible apps” under the cloak of “exempt all religious apps”, but shouldn’t this also exclude the Education category so that history and language students aren’t disadvantaged?
This change doesn’t much affect adults, though no doubt they will be leading the charges of complaint against it. It absolutely affects minors, though, who will encounter a higher bar of difficulty in studying religions or foreign languages or world history without explicit parental consent.
Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about that outcome, or any of this at all, but I wanted to make sure that an impacted group with little ability to speak for itself is recognized by those — by us all adults, specifically — who unilaterally compose and impose policies upon them.
> Should minors have the right to install and use apps without parental approval that grant them access to content that is accepted to contain:
>> genocide, slavery, casual murder, infanticide, sexual abuse
Like wikipedia?
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If you see this as the innocent equivalent of a “content warning,” then I would expect more apps to be flagged. The commenters in that thread point out numerous apps or games that are obviously built around content that is not appropriate for children.
Perhaps this is the only “think of the children” content warning they have, and therefore it seems odd when applied to religious texts. It’s like a movie rating system where there are only G and X ratings. If it’s not G, it gets lumped in with other stuff, including X-rated porn, and the only way to find it in our App Store is to allow for X-rated content.
Seems like a bug at best, but I think you’d have to be pretty naive to think this is an “aww shucks, rules are rules” application of some policy.
Hm... that seems strained. The film got an R because of visible blood/gore scenes and violence. There's nothing controversial about that at all, swap the script with an explicitly atheist one that rejects the divinity of Christ and crucifies a 100% mortal man in exactly the same way and you'd get an obvious R, because crucifixion is a violent act absent of any context.
And if you really want to go with the old testament having NSFW themes in its text (which it does), that seems like a frightenly slippery slope. If slavery and genocide are verboten, are you going to rule out Uncle Tom's Cabin or the Diary of Anne Frank too? History textbooks? Where does it stop?
I suspect your response is going to be that you think the bible is treating those subjects in an inappropriate way. Which is to say, you think it's a Bad Book and want to censor it for its meaning, not its content.
I mean, I happen to agree that it's a bad book. But... yikes, as it were. No, we don't do that.
Uncle Tom's cabin actually should be banned based on their rules, but not because of its depiction of slavery, for the ending, where Uncle Tom refuses to rat out the slave women he helped escape and in turn is brutally whipped to death, whilst forgiving those who are whipping him. The violence and gore in the ending is enough regardless of the rest of the book.
Aside: If you've never read it, the depiction of that book in media has been corrupted by the racist "Tom Shows" in the south from the 19th and 20th century that painted Uncle Tom as a weak, pathetic man who betrayed his people, when really, he was a 20-something year old man in peak physical condition who chose to die rather than selling out the people he tried to help.
Neither uncle tom’s cabin nor the diary of Anne Frank advocated slavery nor genocide.
I don’t think anything should be outright censored - but I also don’t think that “Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man.”, or The Levite’s Concubine, for instance, is necessarily something you want to spring on people, and if we’re going to do content warnings - and as a culture we do - we should be consistent.
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What is the funniest is that this is the action of a social justice warrior on a crusade, exhibiting the exact same behaviour he purports to be against.
Consistency? How do you propose allowing smut and violence from some religions without allowing it from others? If there are existing rules, they should be applied consistently.
And after exhibiting said behavior, when you doth protest, they will call you the bigot (eventually).
Oh well. To be honest I was pretty disappointed that Google was going after them, but the writing seems to be on the wall. With behavior like this, I do not even want to use their software at all.
Android has been going more and more to shit anyways. The best part was always that you could escape Google, but that option seems to be closing down.
Insufferable r/atheism-tier behavior. I'm glad I don't rely on F-Droid for anything critical.
Exactly, but if you say that you'll just be accused of yourself being a biased bigot, conveniently distracting from the original reason the discussion started at all! These psychological tactics don't work on people anymore.
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Don't take HN threads into religious flamewar please. Last thing we need here.
I honestly meant this in a "no religion in the office" sense, but people started responding with bible quotes.
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Freedom of religion is a fundamental right.
Tagging a religious book or a reader of such as "NSFW" means, declaring it as "not normal".
Declaring something, which is a fundamental right, as not normal, is discrimination.
But religions are only normal once they have numbers, theres no judgement on the content. These cults just have to survive and thrive long enough to become normalised.
You can see everything as a cult. Science, with its cultic belief that everything is a particle also just survived long enough to become normal. The question is, are members of one cult wise enough to accept other cults, or are they so insecure that they have to tag them with "NSFW"?
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Religion is not normal and I don't want it, so well done.
I know it’s not the stated reason for the flag, but maybe it’s ok to see a little bias towards atheism here and there.
"It's ok when it is my bias" doesn't make it ok.
As much antipathy as I have for religion, I disagree wholeheartedly. Bias in any form just enables rationalizing a counter-bias. And frankly, the folks who do exactly that sort of counter-bias today are very good at it. We should be careful about giving them more ammo, this tit-for-tat is tearing us apart.
I understand what you're saying but just like "absolute freedom of speech", the ratchet only works one direction. In fact you identified it as really good counter bias. It's analogous to Overton Window always opening to the right.
You've hit on a good point, but I don't know what to do about it.
So true. There are entire libraries that only include books that have been made illegal by various states across the world. People are naturally attracted to taboos and this will only draw more attention to the bible.
Amen, brother
So... what's the big deal? Putting aside the various arguments whether religious texts should be marked as such, the wording of this policy, etc, etc... literally what difference does it make that these apps now have this flag? Do people think users will see this flag and be like, "Oh dear me I had no idea the Bible was NSFW; won't be reading that now!"?
Just confused about the outrage.
You have to enable a setting to see apps marked with that anti-feature when searching
So it hurts their goal of evangelizing off of other people's volunteer infrastructure....so sad...anyway ..
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