Gregory's Server@TechConnectify quality filter is algorithm.
Legit replies got caught up in the twitter Read More all the time. That is NOT a solution, couldn’t stand that “feature” on twitter and thankfully tweetdeck+tweetbot always showed all replies.
Keep it the heck away from masto (algorithms).
I feel bad for the issue you’re experiencing though. Maybe there are other solutions. Some people go the defederation route but I think that’s typically too heavy handed. Fedi is still tackling this.
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Top-level
Colin
46 comments | Expand all CWs
Colin
@TechConnectify why should replies not have a right? Who decides what gets shown? How can this be tailored for each instance (or do people even want it at all?). Twitter routinely hid ordinary replies. And as far as the problem: I have to click a button and then see stuff that I was missing and should’ve seen without a click. It’s completely arbitrary. 
Technology Connections
@colinstu I guess we have a philosophical difference here. I believe as the original poster, I need agency over my replies. A filter on replies does not affect your feed or what you follow. If you want to be a busybody and read the replies to a post, and you're going to be bummed that some of them are hidden behind a filter, I don't know what to tell you other than maybe you just need to let go a little bit.
Technology Connections
@colinstu I believe strongly that when I make a post, that is my space. It should have rules that make me comfortable. What you are suggesting is that anyone having a party by law must have their doors unlocked so anyone from the street at any time can come in and loudly make their voice heard. It's completely disrespectful to the conversations going on, and to the person hosting the party (the OP in this metaphor). Does this help you understand my position? 
Michael Gemar
@TechConnectify @colinstu You do not owe people your attention. (Then again, I don’t even answer my phone if I don’t recognize the caller.)
Triply🐰🐰🐰
@TechConnectify @colinstu
Technology Connections
@Triply @colinstu not at all. In fact, to me, it feels like you have a misunderstanding. For one, try to imagine life with 35,000 followers. Imagine what my notifications look like when every single reply gets pushed through. Now imagine when a good 5% of them are rather tactless and hurtful to read. The needs of a user change as their following grows. That is just a fact of life.
Triply🐰🐰🐰
@TechConnectify @colinstu Like anything else in life, advanced tasks require advanced tools. Hopefully with the decline of twitter we see more development in other software like Mastodon..
Dubi is here :Dambo8:
@TechConnectify @Triply @colinstu it sounds like what's needed is a user-side algorithm, rather than a Mastodon-wide change. Basically, it sounds like there's room to develop an app geared towards high-activity accounts that will implement the algorithm on your personal notifications, rather than forcing all mastodon users to use the algorithm.
Danny Blue
@TechConnectify @colinstu individual algos should be something we can accept. How you curate your replies and your feed don't have anything to do with me or affect my experience.
das-g
@TechConnectify I guess a lot of this comes down to different pictures people have in mind. To you, a thread you start is like a private party you host. Others however might see the Fediverse more like a town square, where if you exclaim something, that's an invitation for anyone listening to also share their opinion on it, especially if it's different from yours, whilst those agreeing with a statement might often just silently but visibly nod (star / favorite a post).
Technology Connections
@das_g @colinstu honestly, a bigger problem is that this is a nuanced thing and everybody has problems with nuance these days. Yes, I want it to be something like a public square environment. But I also wanted to be one where I have direction over the conversation. I feel I am asking for very similar protections that are taken to heart here against things like dogpiling - but people largely don't imagine a swarm of irritating jerks to be akin to that. I do.
Technology Connections
@das_g @colinstu I want it to be somewhere between completely open for anyone to yell at me and completely closed off. In real life, this happens naturally. When there's a crowd of people around having a nice conversation and some asshole shows up to throw rocks at the host, that asshole faces repercussions because the crowd sees it and respects the host. That just does not happen here at all.
haikushane :d20:
@TechConnectify I think that doesn't happen because no one else sees the trolls, since we're not following them... That's the system working.
Technology Connections
@shane please tell me you understand that the system "working" sucks ass for me.
Jimmy replied to Technology
@TechConnectify @shane Responding so I can try to understand better... I think you're pointing out there's a scale issue with public replies that most people with a few hundred followers won't experience. And the existing mechanisms aren't automatically excluding rude or pointlessly argumentative replies and pile-ons. Because of federation/mastodon not enough people see the replies to help moderate interactions to improve social behaviour. Am I close to following things ok?
Technology Connections replied to Jimmy
@JimmyKip @shane You're following them pretty much exactly. There is too much in my notifications for me to manage, a lot of it I would hope would be hidden behind a content filter because it stings to see (and that's going to have to be automatically because it's not like jerks recognize they're being jerks, and if they do they probably want to be) and nobody else sees that stuff so it's left with zero consequences.
Jimmy replied to Technology
@TechConnectify @shane You mean you're saying you can't come up with a regex filter that captures jerks replies, but not thoughtful interactions!? ;) I think I agree with what you're saying in that case. What you're describing is not a problem for me as I mostly post to an echo chamber on my instance, and a good engagement is a handful of boosts / replies :) Until you posted about these issues, I dont think I knew I wasn't seeing replies to your posts. Might chat to my admin.
Technology Connections replied to Jimmy
@JimmyKip @shane to clarify, I'm not necessarily saying that those posts don't show up. My understanding is that this is improving. But the replies are just a big giant bucket, and unless you want to look through the whole thing and scroll down to the very bottom, you're probably not seeing the stuff that's irritating me. Because all of that stuff ends up in my notifications unless I turn them off which defeats the whole point of this place
Jimmy replied to Technology
@TechConnectify @shane Right, I understand that part. For a high engagement poster, you've probably got the added problem that once a discussion is started people will reply with comments to your first post that others have already made, and you've already addressed further in the thread of replies that they haven't seen / read yet. And whether intended or not by the responders I can easily see how the end result is an unpleasant flood of replies either way.
Jimmy replied to Technology
@TechConnectify Have been considering what limited options exist to help with the problem, and you're right they're not great. I suppose there might be a way to post generally and have replies to those muted/filtered out entirely. Then when posting for discussion to do so under a hashtag you follow with notifications on. But that's ugly & kludgy and while it might work, if its the only slightly useful option I can think of then that is kinda the whole point of the problem.
Patch Arcana
@TechConnectify @das_g @colinstu Even in the wide-open public square mental model of a possible use of fedi/activity-pub-based tools, it's not all that unreasonable to turn to someone who has come up to your conversing group purely to be disruptive, and tell them how much of which particulates they can pound, in which manner and what direction.
duk
@TechConnectify@mas.to @das_g@chaos.social @colinstu@birdbutt.com Part of this discussion feels similar to @jwz@mastodon.social's points about reply control and the discussion around what a top-level post is supposed to actually be
Kenneth Henderick
@TechConnectify @das_g @colinstu I think it would be nice if users can just make replies as they wish, just like on twitter. Then clients (the apps) could have support for filtering algorithms, just like ad-blockers in browsers. The client loads replies, feeds them through some (can be built-in, based on a ruleset, or some fancy ai run on some server) engine that filters out all shitty replies. Don't want a filter? Great. Want to filter nsfw? Great. Want to filter shitposts? Great 
das-g
@TechConnectify I'm not sure the comparison with "real live" holds up so well. Sure, most conversations *you and me* experienced offline so far have been civil. But human history has no shortage on pogroms, lynch mobs, public stonings, outright group-conducted massacres. And while that might seem like whataboutism, it goes to show that group dynamics online or offline can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the circumstances.
das-g
@TechConnectify But I completely agree that for online, the software, the platforms are part of these circumstances, and that we have to design them such that they lead the group dynamics to moderation, not to escalation, and such that everyone has the freedom to—without too much effort—ignore what isn't good for them.
Technology Connections
@das_g @colinstu oh, to be clear, I know things go sideways in real life too. In fact they can go much more sideways than they can online. But I brought this up because fundamentally I believe there are no social systems built into this platform right now. Replies just go into a big bucket. We have deliberately made likes not really matter. So there is no way for anyone to signal any issues except by directly replying which is not tenable.
Expert Plus 🍀 replied to Technology
@TechConnectify @das_g @colinstu hey guys, for some of you my response didn't show up, so here is a direct link to it: https://venera.social/display/85a863ed-1365-6cb5-516c-69e052248794
das-g replied to Expert Plus 🍀
[Can't reply to https://venera.social/display/85a863ed-1365-6cb5-516c-69e052248794, thus here:] @expert re "private party": I guess not so much in the sense of an invite-only party, but in that of a party on private property or organized privately, thus a party where the host is shown some respect and can lay down some ground rules. However, that currently seems to be more the role of instance admins than of thread OPs.
jz.tusk
@das_g @TechConnectify @colinstu Have you heard of "the heckler's veto"? It's good a strict meaning within law, but I've seen it used in social forum contexts too. And most of them use it as "we should do things to make sure the a-holes aren't able to wreck any conversation they feel like". Mastodon seems to say "hecklers, man, what are you going to do amiright?", or leave each individual to fight them on their own. ...
jz.tusk
@das_g @TechConnectify @colinstu There's a real failure to understand how people can act together socially for a shared good that I bump into on Mastodon, and it kinda surprises me.
Colin
@TechConnectify I just like being informed. Having an algorithm making me do 🙉🙈 on my own behalf without any sort of settings or control is not my idea of being informed.
Technology Connections
@colinstu nobody says it has to be one size fits all. I don't know why everybody here thinks I'm forcing anyone to do anything when I point out features I would like to see 
Jame
@TechConnectify@mas.to @colinstu@birdbutt.com An easy solution may be to have a developer make an extension that runs client side and puts replies on your side through a quality filter. Problem would be finding someone to do it, would probably be something that a bounty would need to be opened for.
Colin
@TechConnectify you say “on twitter I didn’t have to do this” so I can only assume (or others assume) “I want mastodon to work like twitter” ie: one size fits all.
joshhunt
@colinstu back on Twitter, I had a very modest 4k followers and I absolutely needed twitters filters to suppress notifications from people that don’t follow me, and I don’t follow. Giving people more tools to decide how they want their experience is a good thing! Do one here is entitled to the attention of others!
blackcoat
@TechConnectify @colinstu I think that where your metaphor there breaks down is that it was actually that you were having a party in a night club and only the folks who made it past some arbitrary door screening that you didn't control made it into your party. Sure, you could go look for what was happening on the sidewalk, but you had a good party going inside, why bother. 
Flaky :blue_jay:
@colinstu @TechConnectify Personally, I don't think algorithms are the problem per se. It's the lack of transparency that's the problem. Mastodon - which is one of the many software packages that power the fediverse - is open-source code, so a quality filter that can be read and scrutinised wouldn't actually hurt the user experience whatsoever. I'd say it has to be opt-in, and maybe part of the new account onboarding process as a "do you want this?" sorta deal.
Colin
@Flaky @TechConnectify yeah I want full transparency. That’s rarely the case and hence the distrust. But yeah, options and transparency are key if it were to exist. |
@colinstu legitimate question for you: what exactly is the problem if some replies are behind the read more button?
Why do you believe that you should have a *right* to put your reply directly in front of the poster?