litphoria

For example, foot play is listed under neither or both, which is very silly to me, since there's a very clear giving and a very clear taking role in that particular interest

As someone into foot play: no there is not. For various activities various things that happen within footplay, there are give/take roles, but who does footjobs vs who does foot worship are opposite. The same goes for other something-play interests: who 'gives' in food play, breath play, blood play and so on varies depending on what you're doing within it.

Interesting point, I understood foot play as giving footjobs but Velus is right. If I kiss your feet, if I give you a foot massage. Is this footplay giving or taking? Even nonconsensual sex. Who is giving the noncon sex, the top or the dom? Usually the top is the dom, but if the female boss says: "Mister Miller fuck me or you are fired", ist she receiving noncon sex, because she is passive/penatrated or giving noncon sex because she is enforcing the sex?

I think we are going too much into details, though. The general question is : Does it make sense to combine interests with symbols to change their meaning. What are the advantages and disadvantages compared to only use interests? If I split up "Footplay" into three interests, I can use better descriptions. "Footplay (my feet)", "Footplay", "Footplay (your feet)". There are surely also other aspects. It's similar with traits.

The point is not if I only like foot massages. The point is, that with "give" or "take" I cannot express if I want to give you a foot massage or to get one from you. But I can express this with "Footplay (my feet)". "Footplay (my feet)" adds an aditional information to every interest that involves feet. "Footplay (giving)" does not since the meaning of giving is unclear for some interests involving feet. Of course more specificity is more useful, but it also means, more interests, more work at the character creation, bigger profiles.

"Give" can mean, being the active part, but also being dominant, penetrating. If I am the mistress and say: "Slave. On your knees. Massage my feet!" then I am giving you a foot massage. Imagine you char is a dominatrix. How do you set foot play? Give or take? You could decide, that you are the active part, the dominating part, so you give foot play. Or you take foot play, because it's your feet, your slave has to worship.

"Giving foot play (my feet)" makes no sense since "(my feet)" shall replace "take". "Foot play (my feet)" means, that my feet are involved - massaged, kissed, give a foot job with them. For other interests there would be similar but different addidtions. Like "noncon (victim)", Ageplay (child), Condoms (using).

The problem is, you dont say: "Give me a foot massage", you express that foot massage is "give" for you, by setting the over all interest "Foot play" to "give". If you are a male and give oral sex, does this mean, you are dominant and give face fucks, or are you submissive and give blowjobs?

Well, there is a footplay, a tickling, and a licking interest. If you are only into tickling feet you would place tickling and footplay under core and licking under no. So you can be sure, your feet are tickled but not licked.

If I replace foot play with more specific interests this means the number of interests will increase, the character-profile is more difficult to create and to read due endless lists of interests.

I assume the splitting of the profile creation process into two parts, creating and editing, is an attempt to circumvent this problem. The creation is easy thanks to short lists of traits and interests. Then you decide if you want to take the time to add more details (the little arrows and hearts).

One thing that I didn't see mentioned: descriptions. Sure, it doesn't help in searches, but if you only like foot massages then you can put that in the description under "Footplay."
Again, doesn't help in searches, but that's what the description is for, clarification. If you put "giving" for an interest, but you think it might be unclear what that meant (given the interest itself) you can clarify that in the description.

Right. Giving/taking have functional purpose in searching and comparison. If people use give/take inconsistently, it means I'll give up searching by it, and profile comparisons get less accurate.

Descriptions can clarify but I think we'd agree that profile readability suffers a bit, and give/take arrows become more an indicator that some specific requirements exist for this interest (and that we should read the attached description if there is one).

This is why I've marked ambiguity or convolution as a problem in a black and white fashion - "sorta works" in this system means "doesn't really work".

If people use give/take inconsistently, it means I'll give up searching by it, and profile comparisons get less accurate.

I should clarify: give/take being used inconsistently for one interest means I'd give up specifying give/take for that interest, since I'd just get a mix of results either way. In those cases give/take isnt really doing much and is dead weight at best.

However it actively undermines profile comparisons, as they will detect compatibility or incompatibility where it doesn't actually exist or the opposite may be the case, and that hurts the overall compatibility score or highlights problems which may not exist. So, half the interests having ambiguity or convolution on this front degrades comparisons.

As long as that thing's feasible, Jack. We don't know yet, not having done it. It seems pretty good on paper though.

Why not just get rid of foot play or blood playor age play and replace them with (a bunch of specific things)

I would hope we never remove those. I enjoy foot play, and it's way more helpful to just say so in such a sweeping term than to bloat my list with every specific and hope people notice them all and read between the lines (or read the descriptions) to notice that yeah, I'm broadly just into foot play.

Unfortunately though, give/take doesn't apply to something called "foot play".

Swapping out give/take for "my feet" / "your feet" on this specific interest sounds like a reasonable step. It's on my mind that several of these could have give/take clarified by simply having "performing" for one side, but what should be on the other side (receiving, viewing, not performing) seems to vary case to case. We could also find more specific things per each interest. The challenge there is it makes search less quick - "what were the sides for this specific interest again...?". We could also however have a search that helps them fill that out via autocomplete beneath specific words: type "vaginal sex", receive a dropdown beneath it offering "taking vaginal sex" and "giving vaginal sex" as an autocomplete. Do the same for other interests in the search so that people don't have to specifically remember the "sides" of each.

I am absolutely with you. The point is not to reduce the number of interests, the point is to make it easy to set them and to read them later. Expandable subkinks (like in F-list) could be a possibility to deal with 1k+ kinks. Or there is a big button "Show/Hide subkinks". This could even reduce the number of main kinks, since things like "stealing" could become subkinks.

but that wouldn't work very well for some of the others. Like, what would blood play (my blood) mean?

Well yeah we didn't suggest it for that. That would be silly. We're not doing a solve-everything ultimate whammy here, we are hashing out options.

Jack I think you might be getting distracted from the point. We are just talking about what could work well and it sounds like you have points you're trying to argue hard and I'm not sure what they are or why. Like yeah I can still specify foot play, but the point is we need to do something about how give/take doesn't work for that specific interest, associations aren't here or there.

Please take a step back and consider what's going on here, I just want to talk about possible resolutions to these interests which don't have give/take working well.

For example: remove it entirely from the various "play" and "doesn't apply" interests, because it's irrelevant to them.

Turning them into themes without give/take is a totally valid resolution.

Adding associations doesn't itself do anything about the fact foot play has a nonfunctional give/take. It's useful but even when it lands foot play will still have a nonfunctional give/take unless we do something about that specifically.

Understood that none of this exists in a vacuum. The argumentativeness you were bringing to this talk (just an open talk) was still strange and seemed unwarranted.

I kinda dismissed this initially, but if you're aware that each "problem interest" would need a different solution, then why not separate feedback? I'd assumed that this being one thread wanted to discuss one single solution, so I've been thinking about it that way.

No it's seriously just here to be a discussion for what to do, full stop, no action items nor monolithic solution suggested. From this talk we can go make other feedback. That's why it's not separate feedback - because it isn't. It's a place to talk.

I'd assume that associations wouldn't have a give/take option, since they'd include things like BDSM, Story, Age Play, Size Play, Foot Play, Domesticity, Adventure, ect. None of which work very well with give/take. They're all way too large with way too many options for that to really be feasible (same problem as now with them).

You seem to be under the impression associations will be a type of interest. They're not. They're not interests, theyre the lines we draw between them to say that if you're into X and/or Y interest you'll probably be into Z too. Like if you're into fingerjobs and vaginal sex maybe you're into hand jobs too. If you're into {some foot play specifics} maybe you're into foot play. Maybe if you're into realistic melee you're into combat.

The system may draw these lines automatically. It might be used for match making, recommending you interests, or letting you leave some out (because associations can imply them). So yes, they won't have give/take because they are something else entirely.

Well, my idea was to integrate the "give/take arrow" into the name of the interest. Instead of one button for "Oral sex" you would have four buttons then, named: "Oral sex <--", "Oral sex -->" , "Oral sex <-->" and "Oral sex". The advantage would be that instead of using arrows meaning "give " and "take" for every interest, you can use different words.

This can be combined with splitting up the interests. More specific interests will minimize the problem but not solve it. Condoms, Diaper play, pregnancy, stealing could still be a problem.

Diapering is not an interest we have though. Please let's not confuse interests that do exist with ones that don't. Names are important. The interest we have is diaper play, noun, not diapering, verb.

Pregnancy is not repeated, it was specifically divided up into the act of impregnation (for male or female) and separately the idea of having someone simply being pregnant, because some are interested in one but not the other. Two of these are an act with give/take. Pregnancy is not one of them.

Stealing definitely does as long as you keep in mind that give is just the word used for "do/perform/send/enact", making "giving stealing" an oddly convoluted way to indicate stealing from people, but still very much possible to use give/take wit

Except we are not using those words, we are using giving, and giving does not mean those words. Others may not be making the same mental reasoning, so this does not pass muster as justification. It's convoluted and ambiguous.

Yes, it would quadruple the list of buttons during editing, but it would halve the number of clicks. Now you have to get every interest in the right category, then you have to go through the whole list again and set the "give/take" arrows, instead of doing both with one click. Basically you could use the drop down boxes, which now set the arrow, to change the name of the interest, then the list of buttons remains the same size.

It makes anything more clear since instead of "giving oral sex" there could be a better name.

The point is not, if we can agree what "oral sex giving" means. If you have 1000+ kinks and you just think one second for every kink how to set the arrow, it takes you over fifteen minutes. When I created my character and clicked edit and realized that every single interest and trait has a little drop down box I thought something like: "Oh, come on." :)

The question is, "Diaper play (wearing/not wearing)" and "Diaper play (taking/giving)", what is the faster and easier choice? What is the active part here btw. the one wearing them?

I agree with the OP and have seen this raised in another feedback about something else. The gist was that all Interests should default to N/A and let the user set the ones they wish. The point was that this would result in less work for the user, and be more accurate for any given person as a starting default. A refinement might be to default certain interests at the time of picking based on the profile's personality settings, but this should only be done for a subset of Interests. As the OP states, half the interests don't really make a lot of sense to have anything but N/A set on them.

It's occurred to me a lot of the ambiguous situations can be better off with give/take being replaced with you/me. Like: Crossdressing (you) makes more sense than Crossdressing (giving) or (taking), right?

But not all of them. What does: Anal sex (you) mean for example? Or spanking (me)?

Oh, yeah, goodness, that's just a situational replacement for some of them. Anal sex & spanking would keep giving/taking.

Ah, I see. That's similar like my idea, just simpler, with only two variations.

Now that I read up, you're right!