When I developed Daisy Garden for Android one of my goals was to build a simple environment in which people could share something, knowing that there was no possibility of being offended, or of giving offense. I certainly wanted an application where I never needed to be policeman to its users.
Imagining the phone in the hands of, say, a five-year-old child, it turns out that it is harder than one might expect to build something that permits safe and ready sharing; there are many constraints:
No user-supplied text — As soon as you allow users to type something - anything - and exhibit it to other users, there is the obvious potential for rudeness. I’m (broadly speaking) a libertarian so this doesn’t bother me much, but its obviously very easy for daft individuals to actively offend others in this way. Limiting the amount of text is useless, the Anglo Saxons bequeathed us a wonderfully rich collections of short curse words. Even with three characters, someone is going to try and produce an ASCII art penis, I just know it, because…
No user-supplied-imagery — …any environment where the public can upload photographs or pictures (even ones made from ASCII characters) will, eventually, contain pictures/representations of genitalia. I’m not sure why this is, perhaps sociologists can already explain the phenomenon, but it’s certainly lemmatical that…
Limited composition — …whatever medium you provide for visual expression, someone will use it to draw a penis. Even Nintendo were powerless contain this urge of humanity. Did they ever anticipate that inviting users to compete using their Mii designs would provide a worldwide forum for pornographic avatars?
Now, collaborative filtering can certainly address these issues, but only after a number of individuals have flagged the offending content. Returning to my example of the five-year-old holding a mobile phone, that child’s parent might not feel that a “flag as inappropriate” link was adequate in this context.
Back to Daisy Garden. In addition to these constraints, sharing necessitates that there is something worth sharing. Further to this, if you want people to share across cultural boundaries, it has to be something universal, something that everyone can appreciate. This is what led me to the idea of flowers, and gardens.
And I’m not as authoritarian within Daisy Garden as the observations above might suggest - where individuals share outside of the application, I’m much more relaxed - for example, users can name their flowers when they share them with others. But now that I’m beginning to add features that will allow users to share their garden designs with all other users of the application, I’m very glad I considered these things before I released the early versions of Daisy Garden.
P.S.
I did want to post/tweet this under the title “How to keep your application genital free”, but didn’t want to offend anyone.
