#I cannot comphend how ineffective it must be

[anonforlackofabettername]

I run a tumblr community on here. It’s small, all ages, fairly slow — nothing to really write home about. I’m fairly hands off as an admin (I only made the community so that it would exist, not because I had some grand vision for it) and most of my work is removing spam posts and porn bots from the community. That being said, I do every couple of weeks take a glance through everyone who’s joined to make sure there aren’t any porn bot or spam accounts lurking around. One of those checks had someone who’d been on tumblr for all of a week with an “[age under 18], 18+ dni” message in their pinned. Why they decided to join an all ages community run by adults idk but after talking with the other mods we decided that the best course of action was to remove them from the community with a note of “hey if you decide you’re comfortable interacting with adults feel free to come back but until then, sorry.”

I share this because there was no way for them to interact in the community without violating their own stated DNI. Maybe they just wanted to lurk. Maybe they didn’t think that far ahead cause they were a teenager. It’s really unimportant in the grand scheme of things. They put themselves in a position where any post they made was going to have their boundaries violated and rather than wait until an incident happened, it was easiest and safest from a mod perspective to remove them from the space. That’s what I think about now when I think about DNIs. I think about someone walking into a room full of people talking with a sign that says “if the wrong person talks to me I’ll start screaming” and the knowledge that 99% of the people talking were the wrong person.

i don't respect DNIs not in the sense i go out of my way to break them but in the sense that i don't respect DNIs as a concept and consider them to be something of a red flag in general.

i'm not sure how to explain it but it's the combination of usually putting very serious issues on the same level as fandom stuff, the fact that half the time people don't even know what they're against beyond 'the bad stuff' therefore even further watering these issues down, and the idea that other people are expected to manage your online existence for you.

there's a passiveness to it that i think is actually a problem and it does not surprise me in the slightest that people with DNIs tend to view what media they consume as activism. do you get what i'm saying.