Not everyone is always in the mood for any kind of picture.
The other day I was reading an article about some homeless people which mentioned some rather nasty sounding diseases they were suffering from; I wanted to look up some more details on that, but since there's a good chance the top of the Wikipedia page has an untasteful image I didn't. Am I able to view some pictures? Sure. Is such a picture useful? Absolutely. I just wasn't in the mood at that moment.
Sometimes I wish Wikipedia had some better controls for this kind of stuff: no censorship, just opt-in blur out some of this stuff until you click on it, like reddit.
In general I think giving people control over these kind of things is a good thing.
I am aware you can do that. Obviously many images on Wikipedia are completely fine and useful I don't want to disable all images, and I'm not going to muck about with a bunch of browser settings every time I want to open Wikipedia, nor do I want to continuously try to guess what a page may or may not contain (which will undoubtable be wrong at least in some occasions). This is a non-solution.
Respectfully, if it didn't affect you such that a trigger can put you in a state you can barely function, and/or become a danger to yourself or others, then you haven't been through the type of experience being referred to here.
I've made no such emotionally-charged and disrespectful claim. There are no such "standards" being discussed. I'm not sure why you've introduced the concept.
The subject being discussed is this, when the person stated:
> This is how you get rid of hypersensitivity after all, by exposure to whatever it is you're overly sensitive to. Avoiding exposure only increases the shock the next time you get exposed.
They appear unaware that there are types of hypersensitivity that do not get better when exposed repeatedly and in fact become much worse and potentially life-threatening.
The person goes on to appear to consider themselves a member of such a group whilst simultaneously claiming they are unaffected in the same way as other members of the group.
But, the group being discussed, as I see it, is delineated precisely by being affected in that way.
To resolve this contradiction, I'm attempting to precisely describe the group, their characteristics, the terms being used and what they mean to me at least, which appears to me to be information that person may be missing.
> In other words: trigger warnings are counterproductive in that they cultivate sensitivities instead of counteracting them.
Or, they give people with a sensitivity a moment to fortify themselves, or delay reading/looking until they know they'll have a moment where they can afford to get a little derailed. Of all the people I know who value trigger warnings/content warnings/content notes and use them to adjust their own behaviour, exactly none of them use them to avoid their triggers 100% of the time. I'm sure such people are out there, but they're a small minority. Rather, they make mental distress a little more predictable and easier to navigate.
Your advice to seek out exposure to the sensitivity is, as a sibling comment says, perhaps better done under supervision a little more professional than a HN comment, but more importantly, also suggests a certain mindfulness about managing the sensitivity. Getting exposed to the sensitivity might well decrease its pull, but getting surprised by the sensitivity is more likely to re-traumatise.
Hard disagree. Some people are hyper-sensitive due to extreme trauma, which can trigger into
all kinds of things that can't be fathomed by the unaffected.
It's also something particular to this site. The crossover of visually-sensitive with those who choose to hang out on one of the few text-only sites on the internet is probably high.
The link is bare and with no clue as to the content other than it goes to "wikipedia", somewhat of click that could be considered to be safe. To me this justifies a warning.
I'm an arachnophobe. If people reliably put "cw spiders" on links to spiders, my life would be a bit better. (Not a lot, because it's already not that hard to avoid pics of spiders online.)
What we're talking about here isn't 'may contain nuts', it's 'definitely contains actual nuts'. This link doesn't have a "chance" of seeing a stuffed goose with an arrow in its neck, that is in fact what is there. Your example doesn't fit.
You seem to be very sensitive to the idea of people watching out for each other. Maybe you should start watching out for others so you can get rid of your sensitivity.
Depends. Some people are heavily traumatized, e.g. from childhood abuse. The title provides almost no indication as to what the content might be (OK, maybe a little, but only if you speak German), so I think it's fair to warn others for whom this kind of stuff can be a problem. I agree with your sentiment for "regular people", though.
