The first image is quite disturbing. I wasn't ready for that. Maybe we need tags for those kinds of images.
Through understanding, we can dismiss a chunk of the fear/repulsion we might feel for images such as those.
Images have emotional impact.
I think many view stoicism in the face of such imagery to be a sign of an enlightened mind, but I disagree. Empathy is a form of intelligence. The images from the article are disturbing, and I'd argue they should be. That so many of us are quick to discount the obvious pain and suffering within is concerning to me, and I'd even label it a deficiency. We should feel upset by death and dismemberment.
It is not a case of lacking empathy, it is more a case of recognizing that those images, as gory is they might be, are simply depictions of raw nature functioning as it should. Predator eats prey, and both play a role in this cycle. I personally find it fascinating, especially as humans evolved past the need to adapt to nature, and rather manipulate nature to better suit themselves.
Since the spring/summer, I feel like I've noticed a lot more downvotes being handed out. I really wish I had access to anonymized HN voting data so I could see whether it's a small group of accounts doing it, or if there's other patterns of behaviour.
Oh, and people are allowed to find things disturbing!! Whatever the experience of the generic HN user might be, there's a myriad of reasons that someone is upset by horrific images. It's like mocking someone for not watching cartel torture videos or something!
Let people enjoy things, and let people dislike things without bullying.
Doesn't this also apply to those who are downvoting the parent?
They may find the parent's comment itself to be disturbing.
Maybe a small fraction of the readerbase are random downvoters, another misanthropes, another just don't like tangential remarks about images period, etc...
I am genuinely asking because with the amount of brutality we see everyday that picture did not look bad to me.
Not that you have to participate, but realize that trying to avoid bad things can only result in avoiding much of the world. Even tho the bad things are present, there's many good things there too.
Or work like the conventional commits standard, and use "CW(nudity)" and "CW(gore)" where CW = Content Warning.
But then you'd have people pedantically arguing over exactly what words to use. Maybe tags instead? "CW(nature,gore,sea,flesh)".
Of course then you'd be relying on people's good graces to classify the links correctly. I have some hope that at least a sizable minority would use the content warnings correctly, mostly because of Lemmy and Mastodon. On the fediverse, people often make an effort to describe the images they post in descriptive text, so maybe they'd classify links well enough?
However, I see it nearly daily because I consume HN using a feed reader and don’t rely on the HN homepage at all. So in my list of HN stories I see nothing flagged in my reader and will often pull up a post that should be totally appropriate for HN and hardly controversial at all just to see it now flagged and every so often interesting commentary completely shut down.
But I am not worried, because if this site gets to the point where we see these self-appointed censors make this place an uninteresting I’ll just move on.
Overall, studies across a range of trigger warning types/groups have not found there's a significantly beneficial effect (and have found some minor negative effects).
It also didn’t cover types of trigger warnings, referred to people who consider trauma part of their “core identity”, and use self reporting of ptsd. I find any online survey that uses self reporting to define the population to be lesser quality. Like when pre-Kinsey researchers did the self reported penis size study.
For "Cross-cultural communication tensions", I think this essay is excellent: https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/