Congrats NeverBored Studio on releasing ThreadBound.

Recently I read a proposal for a NSFW (not safe for work) tag, and I liked the idea for a few minutes but I’ve disliked it ever since. The most-discussed problem with a <nsfw> tag is the cultural specificity of what’s safe and unsafe for your work environment, for example could you watch South Park.

I really see the biggest problem as where the NSFW bit should live, in the link or in the content. Probably everything on www.dirtynastypicturesofhorriblethings.com is unsafe for work, so it’d be easiest to send a X-NSFW header to every http request, and the browser could display an “Are you sure you want to see nsfw content?” prompt before showing the page. However the cultural question is much easier, if you consider it to mean “This link is considerably less work safe than the content around it.” In that a link to fark.com might be nsfw if it’s coming from the Wall Street Journal, and then a link from fark.com could itself be nsfw if it linked to nudity.

Generally though, I think it’s the wrong solution. I really want an attribute on links to say “this link opens a PDF,” because in so many environments, starting Adobe Reader is tantamount to crashing the machine, but the correct solution is for the browser to warn me and handle it correctly (which is what my machines do). And that is even easier in that compliance wouldn’t be voluntary, a nsfw tag would still leave you victim to pranksters and lazy posters (which judging by the sheer number of lolcats is just about all of us). Worst of all, the scenario this proposal is trying to solve is “I want to browse the web at work and not get in trouble,” so I don’t really see any buy-in from corporations since it’s a pretty tough sell as a new “feature”.

There is a lot of opportunity to enrich the machine understanding of web communications, but I really think this problem is probably best addressed with some kind of clever browser plugin — most search engines sensor their results, a starting point might be to show a warning if your link wouldn’t show up in censored results.

Edit: An obvious (but the kind of clever obvious that you miss) pair of points from reddit:

• From jamt9000, this can already be done on a website level, by just using a class=”nsfw”, if it catches on, browsers will support it without any new standards.
• And naner points out that much of the actual nsfw images are advertisements (probably since they need to attract attention) which would break any voluntary proposal