Gregory's Serverwe’ve all seen some amazing conversations unfold here but what you don’t see until you make a post that elicits hordes of replies, is how infuriating it is to get bombarded with carbon copies of the same idea you’ve already refuted 8 times. we need clear threading and an upvote system and yeah, QTs
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@seachanger you’re highlighting, IMO, one of the key challenges/issues with federation. Similar ideas/concepts can be surfaced across the fediverse, but not connected and amplified (to demonstrate support) because they’re decentralized and dispersed. It’s great to have democratization, but if there’s no simple way to aggregate or connect, then it’s less beneficial in the long run.  @kameka yeah and compounded by inability to text search. I think there are ways to solve these problems but as we see on every single major platform, leadership does not necessarily want the same things as the user base. In theory, we should be able to have more influence as users here but theory is not always praxis! @seachanger in season 1 of social media, it was possible to “build it, and they will come” because it was a novelty. Unfortunately, for the new social media companies and platforms being built now, we’re in season 3 of social media. What users want is paramount to what companies and platforms want to build (especially since there is healthy competition for the same users). The past few weeks have been a live use case of this, IMO: Threads decreased engagement, Bluesky this week… @seachanger everyone is baffled when i explain that private/dm replies from reply guys drove me off this platform for months @gren ugh I’m so sorry. I feel kind of terrible because for the first year I was here I just didn’t experience it in the same way that I have on other platforms. I’m so used to being bombarded on FB and twitter by White Men Who Explain Things to Me that mastodon actually was a blissful relief. Until my posts started getting more boosts and then suddenly I understood. They are like an infinite army of robot soldiers sprinting toward my defenses lol. Shoot one and more appear  @seachanger I have a reputation of writing disclaimers on the tail end of my posts asking folks to not reply with certain things. Sometimes it's done very tongue-and-cheek, but the main onus for it is I've gotten the same damn replies from folks before and they were just as unhelpful then as they would be on any new post. There's a lot of folks that want to help people, but much like a crowd rushing to help one person it can turn into a stampede. @seachanger serious question sorry do the "unlisted" and "followers only" buttons help at all? I just found out about unlisted I think "follower only replies" allowed or more control over that It's something a) I struggle with and try not to do even though I can be yappy and b) one of my favorite people on Mastodon or really in the whole world gets absolutely fed up with this shit @Robotron I think they actually don’t help. If deployed on the post they limit reach. If deployed on replies they may prevent others from seeing that their concern has already been addressed @seachanger I remember when I first came to masto in Sept there were huge massive discussions pro and anti QT but yes that would absolutely help Upvotes too although if it worked like reddit, right, no one would see an oft down voted stupid reply and then think "hey! No one's schooled this person on this cromulent fact" [adjusts fedora] @seachanger Are you sure the problem is that replies aren't visible? And not just that the kind of people who interact the way you've described tend not to look, read or care whether their point has been addressed (because it was never about that). @tokyo_0 i think it’s both. All social media platforms are filled with people who don’t respond thoughtfully, but the degree to which they impact the person with the post is mitigated in various ways across different platforms. the problem here is not just demographics or visibility but also user control over audience  @seachanger Yeah, I've seen a bit of this and the invisible, repeating reply guys are exhausting. Genuine question, though: How do you see QTs helping here? I've had some luck adding replies to my original post (something like a P.S.) to add clarifications/answer common questions. But most of my repeating replies aren't from people who follow me, so they wouldn't see the QT anyway. I'm guessing you're envisioning some kind of different situation, then? Always appreciate your thoughts. @seachanger And just to be super clear (for anyone out there who might want to start some Discourse) I'm not reflexively anti-QT. Just curious. @design_law One thing people did on Twitter is pull up annoying replies with a QT so that everyone can actually see it, and deal with it publicly. It takes a lot more work to do that here and this is what I saw people of color talking about last fall—they are being treated one way in the replies, but a lot of people just have no idea what’s even happening leaving the original poster feeling alone/vulnerable/bombarded @design_law but another person in tbr replies here did remark that even that had limited effectiveness for them personally so 🤷🏼♀️  @seachanger speaking as someone who had (has?) a moderately popular account and many viral tweets in The Other Place, these features absolutely do not mitigate having the same reply 1000 times over, because the issue is people just think their point is Special and Unique so will make it over and over nonetheless; it's simply a product of reach. @stavvers so to you it feels the same across platforms? I felt like twitter was kinda good at hiding “low quality” replies @seachanger from my perspective, it absolutely was not and once a tweet got Out There it would be the same replies over and over, maybe people replying to the top two bad replies and replying-all so there's now an argument in the mentions (arguably even more annoying). And then if it gets to big, it would be QT-ed, which led to even *more* of the same replies and same QT notifications. The only actually good feature twitter had in curbing that was being able to switch off replies. @seachanger that said, the QT feature was very cathartic from my end, meant I could pick a couple of bad replies at random and set my followers on them, but in my experience it was never, in any way, constructively helpful to stopping the reply thing because at the end of the day it's just jerks being jerks @seachanger tbh I feel like the problem you outline is broadly a human problem - experienced fedi users *know* that not all replies show up - especially abusive ones - and that's a product of how federation *works*, so the big problem isn't threading or quoting to increase reach, but white users denying there's a problem to sweep it under the carpet. |
the tough thing is you just don’t really see it until you write a post that really extends beyond your own followers and into the nether regions of the fediverse. so one person can be ready to implode from dealing with this pattern while hundreds of others really have no idea that it even exists! not good and def an impediment to attracting some of the thinkers and writers we’d love to have in this space