quote-toot meta
I have to admit I *appreciate* the fact that there are no quote-toots on fedi. I do think it helps avoid certain kinds of pile-ons and abuse.
That said, when a bunch of people from communities that are often affected by such pile-ons and abuse tell me that:
1. that abuse happens to them on fedi anyway;
2. quote-toots would be useful to them, also in the context of fighting such abuse,
…I shut up and listen. And learn. There is so much to learn!
quote-toot meta, measuring effect
I think we also need to talk about how to measure effects of introducing such tools here.
If we don't measure it, we *won't really know* if it made the discourse better or worse. If it did help some communities, and if it made it more difficult for others. And these are important things to know!
I don't have an answer here, and I am not saying lack of answer here should stop the on-going discussion about adding quote-toots!
But we should talk about this too. 🤔
quote-toot meta, measuring effect
Introduction is also not really a single event here, which:
a) makes measuring effects harder, because introduction time is correlated with outcomes via the decision process that caused introduction to happen,
b) makes measuring effects harder, because effects might occur on the other end (out of "writer" and "reader") from where the change took place,
c) makes measuring effects easier if they are very fast (by looking at correlations in the time window where the introduction is happening).
(b) is a problem shared by experiments in anything-that-involves-person-to-person-interactions. (c) is sadly somewhat poorer than doing random assignment experiments on a single instance.
I wonder when we'll see first piece of instance software that (a) supports local experiments (or slow rollouts of features) that randomly assign users (b) supports multi-instance experiments. I'm not sure whether/in what form (b) would be a positive development though~~
quote-toot meta, measuring effect
I'm not sure that a world where everyone solemnly sworn not to solve this problem wouldn't be better.
There are some (slow and costly) mechanisms that already provide some feedback: people move between instances depending on their instances' choices. The slowness and cost seems to be an obvious disadvantage, but it forces sparing usage. An advantage of these mechanisms is that proxies it uses are rather good.
Anything that involves measurement of faster effects involves creating proxies and acting on them. There is the obvious problem of optimizing for wrong proxies, but sadly there's also the problem of values of those proxies being touted publicly as reasons to choose your instance.
quote-toot meta, measuring effect
@robryk these are excellent points
quote-toot meta, measuring effect
@robryk totally! It's an overall-difficult problem, but one that fedi needs to start thinking about how to solve as more and more people flock on here.
Up until now-ish we could rely on "word of mouth" personal connection type data flows, but that is becoming more and more fraught.