Survey announcement
On May 29th 2024, the mods of GWA announced a survey. The survey asked participants to share their views on different kinks, what kinks they think belong on the subreddit and which don’t, what they want to see from the mods, and a few more questions. Participants had 3 weeks to get their responses in.
In the comments of that announcement, one of the moderators gave some reasons for the survey’s existence:
members requested to be included in moderation discussions, especially after the apparently random and abitrary ban on the futa tag.
to discover what expectations members have surrounding content available in this space, primarily in regards to the open letter and its demands to ban F4M lesbian audios.
Importantly however, the moderators never state that they will respect the outcome of the vote on certain content being on the subreddit. The survey was just to see how the community felt on the issue of F4M lesbian audios and content on the site as a whole.
Survey results
On August 3rd 2024, a month after the survey ended, the results were made public. 15K people participated in the survey. A poorly made summary of the data (PDF, 3.8MB) was also released. Instead of subjecting the reader to that, a recreation of the summary can be found below.
Discussion
The outcome of the survey can be summarized as people didn’t want things to be banned, they just wanted mandatory tags for some taboo subjects.
Demographics
The subreddit membership is on average male and straight, submissive or switch, visit the site a few times per week, and rarely ever post but they do listen to audios and are interested in exploring their/new kinks.
Note: Initially the survey results announcement claimed 1% of the respondents were gay but later made an edit to change this figure to 7% (swapping with the unsure/exploring category). The summary document and the above recreation retain the initial 1% figure.
Content moderation
Unsurprisingly, only 6% of respondents felt F4M lesbian audios didn’t belong on the subreddit. That being said, people didn’t feel the same way about incest and race play. A significant portion of respondents felt they didn’t belong on the subreddit.
In the comments of the survey results announcement, a moderator shared with us this fact: of the responders who identified themselves as lesbian, 83% of them voted for [orientation play] to remain on the subreddit.
Note: Only a summary of the data was released, not the data itself. This is significant because we can’t do any further analysis on any trends in the data (e.g. the portion of trans women who voted to ban orientation play, if men and women felt differently about content moderation and kinks). The moderators cited privacy concerns for not releasing the data.