volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
Again it sounds like you are continuing to project your values on others.
I just don't care about the same things you care about.
I'm not missing out, it's just not something I value, not something I particularly want.
It sounds like you probably want that kind of thing, but different people are different, and that's not the kind of thing I want.
I love how the person declaring "Oh yes it should!" accuses others of having really strong moralistic opinions.
In any case as set above this could all be handled client side letting the user choose their own policies.
If you don't want to be notified when somebody replies to your content through a boost, great, put a setting in the client not to notify you. Sounds good to me. The user should be in control.
However, your proposal takes value out of the system. It breaks chains of information and breaks connections between authorship and readership that many authors are very interested in.
If you don't like it, again fine, set up the client not to notify you of those responses. Simple. It's a feature I would fully support, a solution to your concern I am all for.
It's not a feature I would turn on but I fully support it existing so that anybody who wants it that way can turn it on and off as they want.
Some moralistic opinion if I'm supporting your ability to have the platform act the way you want!
Well that's just wrong. I get all kinds of interesting conversations.
Again you seem to be projecting and making assumptions.
If I boost a post by somebody like Low Quality Facts I FULLY EXPECT anybody replying to go to that other account, the one I boosted. I don't lose anything because I wouldn't expect them to reply to me. Why would I?
If I boost that content over there I would expect the replies to go to that content over there.
Same when people boost comments I make. I expect replies to go to me, not to someone else.
Nobody has exhorted me to do anything. I don't know what your picturing having happened, but I assure you you are making some assumptions that are way off.
But that's exactly my point! Boosting does not lead to conversation for the person doing the boosting because it's not their conversation. That seems entirely correct to me.
Boosting is saying, hey there's this other cool conversation happening over there! Check it out! Join in!
It's not the conversation of the booster. Why should the booster get conversation? Why should boosting lead to conversation?
If anything that's what QT is for. If I want to start a new conversation separate from the existing one then I would QT to start a new thread with my own addition to what has already been said.
Boosting doesn't lead to conversation, to new conversation, because it shouldn't. Boosting is boosting an existing conversation an existing thread started by some other author who deserves to follow the thread they started and not have it taken away by that artificial disconnect.
This is largely my whole point.
@freemo Oh but to be clear, a person who's guilty of something with $1,000 fine might be given 20 bucks for their time but they still have to pay the $1,000 fine!
That is not what I said.
I think that you are getting confused by other people using social media different than you personally use it, and not realizing that there are different ways to use such a platform.
I think you're not appreciating the diversity of use that social media enables, allowing different people to derive different values from the platforms.
For example, some people REALLY REALLY LOVE the gamification that comes from follower counts. They love that dopamine shot. Other people, myself included, don't care one bit about that.
It sounds to me like you are falling into their trap of assuming everyone else uses the platform in a certain way, when that's just not the case.
Maybe your request here matches a one size fits all usage scenario that's just not the way social media really works.
Diversity is a good thing. Conformance to a single usage means we lose out on a good deal of value, and I don't think you are appreciating that diversity.
@freemo That's only true, legally speaking, if that's what the law says!
Yes, there would have to be a law saying cops owe people compensation for their time. And there's no particular reason that the law can't explicitly say that the compensation takes priority over pay. It might even be implicitly true even if it's not made explicit that way.
Police departments do run out of money in the real world, and they even have to close down and fire all the cops occasionally. I know if at least one instance of exactly that happening, when some officers really screwed up and the costs of dealing with their screw up broke the budget of the department, so they had to fold, firing everybody.
If the department has to give up conveniences and then has salaries at risk because officers are detaining people without justifiable reason, they're going to feel that pain.
@freemo I don't know how you expect to pay people out of a $0 budget!
I think you might be projecting there, as your assumptions about me personally are pretty far off.
I really don't care about people clicking through. But the idea is I put out there, when they get boosted, I like to see the replies so I can reply back to them, and that's a lot of how I use this platform.
I don't want the conversation interrupted because there was a boost between me and them.
@siderea I talk to a lot of people on here.
I get all the engagement I want--any day of the week I can come on here and have a chat with somebody, and other people reply back with their thoughts and we have discussions.
So I'm not sure what you're talking about.
I'm not one to pay attention to followers, and I also don't care to follow many people either, because I'm much more interested in ideas than follower count metrics.
But yeah a lot of the people I end up talking with are because something that I said gets boosted, and someone else replies to that and I end up having an exchange with them.
@freemo firstly, hey free pay for the people that get stopped!
Honestly the part of my plan I worry about the most is people intentionally looking guilty trying to be stopped to make a quick buck.
But the cops don't get to just raise taxes on their own.
The department would have to stand in front of city councils, legislatures, etc, to explain why money needs to be diverted from schools and other popular programs, or why taxes need to be raised, because some jerks of officers keep harassing citizens without showing results.
When the department sees its budget trashed to the point where it needs to start firing people, they're going to fire the offenders first, which is a pretty good reason not to be an offender.
@freemo I've always thought that any time somebody has to stop and deal with a cop they should be compensated for their time, out of the agency's budget.
If you're stopped for a traffic stop for 10 minutes, even if you are guilty, they pay you for your time. If you get brought in for questioning, again whether you are guilty or not, paid for your time.
If police departments have to give up their budgets to pay people for the inconvenience they impose on them, maybe they would be more careful about who they detain and how efficiently they do what they need to do.
I'm not even on board with ACAB. I just think this would be a fair way to align interests more positively.
But it does mean that any officer that is stopping too many people without good reasons would probably be held accountable by the police department that's losing too much money on him.
@Fragglemuppet I'm not a Muppets fan, but I will go ahead and make a snide remark that lately Star Trek has really made Muppets out of itself :-)
This is a general criticism I have--fine: ax I grind :) --about #Mastodon in that it could be doing so much more if it focused on empowering users to influence their own experience the way they wanted it to be, letting different users have different experiences on this platform.
It keeps coming up over and over with Mastodon. Developers either make decisions for users or they give posters the responsibility for figuring out what readers are going to see.
I just think the approach of Mastodon developers has often really missed that opportunity.
At every turn I would want to see Mastodon developers keeping in mind the focus of empowering the readers to have the client they want.
@freemo Yeah, asking people to put their evidence on their table sounds like a pretty good idea.
But it does get frustrating when you ask if there has been evidence, and people were reply that there absolutely has, and what they present isn't evidence at all, and you point that out, and they say it is, and at that point there's nowhere else to go with it.
It's raining outside!
What's your evidence?
Well here's a bucket full of water from the rain!
...That bucket is empty.
No it's full of rain! Look at all this water in it!
Siiiigh
I refer to it as the book club theory. We all showed up to the book club, and we all read books with the same title, but the plot lines were different in different people's copies, so it's pretty darn hard to discuss the book.
@David I'm of the opinion that we should let people do their art the way they want to do their art, so okay fine we can point out that alt text is important for the vision impaired, but if the artist feels that it's not right for their expression, I absolutely don't think we should hold that against them.
Or one way to put it is that if we all have to choose between you posting without alt text or you feeling kind of suffocated by that ask, I'd rather you post without alt text.
The way I look at it this is supposed to be about expression and any requirements that interfere with that expression, however the author/artist feels right, is something we ought to not impose.
@wjmaggos I don't think so.
When I put an idea out there, that someone would like to talk about, how do I know to go searching for it? How many conversations am I going to miss because I didn't know to go search for replies to some content I put out a while back?
No, if someone has something to add to something I've said, I want to be notified so I don't miss it.
OR, how about this, let the end user decide what notifications they want. Keep the functionality in the system, but let the end user decide how they'd like to set their notification preferences.
I always want to talk about empowering people to make their own experiences here, not take away options.
I *believe* the system probably already exposes enough info that it can tell if something is a reply to a boost, and it can mute that if the user doesn't want to know about it.
@DemDifference it'd be a waste.
Anyone not already in the choir it'd speak to knows why those statistics are misleading at beast, so they'd just ignore them.
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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