OpenFur Report on 2018 FA Upload Content

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elysium
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OpenFur Report on 2018 FA Upload Content

#1

Post by elysium »

Hoping this is okay because it's technically SFW, but talks (academically) about some NSFW subject matter without too much explicit detail or images or anything, just conceptually. Maybe a bit of a strong first non-introductory post to make haha, but considering I've seen other topics discussing NSFW stuff in this board... hopefully this is okay? If not, please feel free to tell me to make this disappear or move it somewhere more appropriate.

Anyway, so has anyone else seen this doing the rounds?

https://dumbhaus.github.io/openfur/

I know I'm the social science grad student here, so these things make me nerd out, but I personally thought it was absolutely fascinating to read. Of course it's not 100% accurate because it relies on search tags, which I... don't see being used often very accurately, but still. Also I was surprised that they didn't include paws under the "feet" category, but I suppose that is a little more complicated to account for? Seems like a pretty big omission though, given the amount of paw stuff I see around and its uniqueness as a furry-specific interest.

Would be interesting to compare to, say, uploads to E621 over the same period which is MUCH stricter and more comprehensive with tagging than FA is (though there'd also be a need to try to account for back-uploads of older art vs. uploads of newly-produced art), but still a window into furries are into. And I'm rambling like a nerd, so... I'll leave things here for now.
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Rakuen Growlithe
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Re: OpenFur Report on 2018 FA Upload Content

#2

Post by Rakuen Growlithe »

I've seen it and I would not consider it particularly good or useful.

It's hardly (as they claim) the first attempt to do this. I know one guy did the same thing for multiple sites in 2014 and 2015. (Maybe other years too.)

Image

He found much less adult content than in this new survey. The mostly clean content part is (or should be) well known at this point. How the exact percentage has changed over the years could be interesting but I don't really trust this new data. It does a random sampling approach which is nice but the picture above used data provided from FA itself which counted the rating of every single post. So its approximate sampling versus actual data.

But whatever the details, the broad trend there is roughly the same. The tag analysis is what is new but I don't trust it. The first problem (and it is a major problem) is that FA submissions are very poorly tagged if they are tagged at all. From what I know of it, I wouldn't consider FA tags reliable enough to learn anything from them.

Even if the tags were reliable, I disagree with the approach taken. He grabbed the tags which were common in NSFW content and then made quite a leap to say that general works tagged with those tags are probably mature. I don't think that reasoning really holds up and there is nothing written to support that. He could have manually checked a subset of general submissions that he considered likely to have mature content to see whether it really had mature (or at least a suggestive) content but that was not done. And while some of the tags are likely to be racy even in a submission rated as general, its worth thinking about what else those tags could be applied to.

In the list of sexualised content tags and groups are such things as feral, bondage, transformation and tongue. Now while we can all see how those might be sexualised, it doesn't make sense to say that that applies to the general content as well. That report would classify The Lion King as having a sexual background (feral). It would do the same thing to The Great Mouse Detective (bondage and feral), Brother Bear (transformation and feral) and probably anything which features dogs as their tongues often hang out when panting. For example, Cerberus in Tartarus in the Season 8 finale of My Little Pony (also feral).

So I don't think it is a novel, good or useful analysis. There are people that have done the same thing with e621 as well, although I am not sure whether they put it online anywhere. There have been two or three talks on their data at Eurofurence. They did a really good job. There was a web scraper that pulled basically all of e621 and they have information on everything. They can show breakdowns of e621 users favourite tags, how tags changed over time and even made a massive network showing how tags cluster together. That network is pretty amazing because you can see some really interesting things there with how tags relate to one other.
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Re: OpenFur Report on 2018 FA Upload Content

#3

Post by elysium »

Yeah it's definitely very far from "scientifically accurate" or anything, but it was the first such "study" of sorts that I'd ever heard of, trying to quantify trends in sub-interests and whatnot, so I thought it was cool. I hadn't ever heard of this one you've now shown, that's very cool, is there a link to it being hosted somewhere?

Also I've become quite intimately familiar with a lot of the work done by the FurScience team, so I have a pretty good idea of what they have to say. As a result, I've also taken up an interest in a lot of amateur studies that have been done by furries, on furries, outside of the academia because they often cover stuff that the academics don't even know to look for, or stuff that they won't touch for some or other reason. Makes for a rounder picture of everything, even if not up to scientific rigour; gives one a vague idea of what's going on if nothing else. Have stacks of these things lying around somewhere.
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Re: OpenFur Report on 2018 FA Upload Content

#4

Post by Rakuen Growlithe »

The one I posted has been in different places. Where I managed to find it again (at least the most up to date) was on Weasyl.
https://www.weasyl.com/~garekmaxwell/su ... stics-2014
https://www.weasyl.com/~garekmaxwell/su ... stics-2015
The e621 is by far the best quality project like this but all I could find was this old Github page (https://github.com/SkyhawkDataScience/e621-analytics) which doesn't seem to have the actual data. It was originally done by Skyhawk but I don't know where the most up-to-date stuff is or where he has any personal pages. Stigmata worked with him at the first presentation but no link to anything from him. It seems like Koltars presented the same data set this year but I went to a different panel. And I also can't find him anywhere.

The Furscience work is also interesting but very different to this sort of thing. In any case, there is a fur on the Furscience team so its not done by complete outsiders. And they have a couple of furs that also serve as advisors.
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Re: OpenFur Report on 2018 FA Upload Content

#5

Post by elysium »

Awesome, thanks for those links! Into the stash they go. I'll have to look at them in a lot more depth later and see how they compare to the OpenFur stats.
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Re: OpenFur Report on 2018 FA Upload Content

#6

Post by Raven Song »

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