And my polite criticism of #Mastodon is being greeting with obscenities. What more do you need to know about this ecosystem?
@lauren The weird hostility to any criticism, or even frank discussion, of this platform has baffled me since day one here.
It's an open platform and protocol for discussion. Expecting people not to discuss it is, well, strange.
@lauren The difference (and it's an important one) between this place and twitter is that on Twitter the expression of any opinion on any subject gets you inappropriately hostile responses from strangers. Here, it's more limited. Mostly, it's just opinions about things like whether Mastodon should have a better search feature that are guaranteed to get you that.
@mattblaze Agreed, but that's really just a difference of degree, and not a foundational difference. And it seems to be becoming even less of a difference over time.
@lauren @mattblaze Think there are significant differences of degree resulting from the overall incentive structure. Still trolls can have their toots "blow up" through boosts, but the context people see them in it is significantly less incoherent just from overall post length, and instance blocking (incentivized by volunteers wanting less headaches, not employees wanting to maximize engagement) means most people aren't exposed to the worst of it most of the time.
@lauren @mattblaze Too, Twitter provides extensive trolling statistics for trolls to measure which of their tweets are best at trolling, with counts of impressions, clicks to expand, etc. The trolling tools don't interact directly with most Twitter users most of the time (most don't even know it exists, even though it's available to all users), but it enables far more effective trolling for the elite 1% of trolls willing to put in the effort, and everyone suffers the results.
@lauren @mattblaze The extent to which people will voluntarily choose to respond to thoughtful insights rather than flamebait and trolling, given the opportunity to do either, is of course limited; but on Twitter the flamebait and trolling don't even have to compete - thoughtful insights are prohibited on the platform by simple technical means.
@lauren @mattblaze And that's how you guys ended up electing a Twitter troll and reality-show TV host president.