In my opinion, quote tweets don't lead to harassment any more than replies lead to harassment or tagging leads to harassment. The feature was born out of organic user behavior and users manually typing "RT" in front of stuff they were quote tweeting in order to share. Not having native QTs and forcing people to manually type "RT" with the text they were quote tweeting led to confusion and misinformation spreading as ppl would often alter the manual RT text! 2/
In my experience, people are far more likely to harass in the replies than in the quote posts bc quote posts posts to their own timeline. And regardless, I think having a native way to amplify and comment or add to content on a platform is really important. This is why TikTok has the Stitch and Duet function. 3/
Even on Tumblr, the Reblog feature includes the original post. Do Tumblr reblogs lead to harassment? No!! This is natural user behavior and makes the sharing of ideas, information, commentary, etc easier. It's what users will do anyway whether or not you facilitate it. By refusing to acknowledge this and making it harder for ppl however, the platform will be less useful and re-shared information will be less reliable 4/
@taylorlorenz The instance I'm on has the quote-toot feature available. It renders as "QT: [stuff you quoted here]" on servers that do not offer it. If it's that important, you can always join an instance that offers QT as a feature.
Quote-toot image
@mrdrozdov @taylorlorenz Hi! This is what quote-toots look like to me on my instance web interface.