“The problem is, there’s a certain type of pedantry that has followed the internet through its various forms, especially in more technical channels, and it often creates a negative experience because it seems to be driven by ideology or disdain for people who don’t think the same way.” https://tedium.co/2023/11/21/mastodon-reply-guy-problem/
Curious to hear if others on here are experiencing what’s described in this piece. I enjoy most of the replies I get on here (though I never have time to respond to most of them, I like reading them)
I do think Mastodon could use more safety/audience limiting tools though, like what Ernie describes. Esp for larger-ish accounts on here who get a lot of replies, it would be nice to limit conversations on some posts. I would also love a real DM inbox on Mastodon! but that might be a pipe dream 😅
@taylorlorenz In case you haven't seen, we're experimenting with something in this area:
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/11/improving-the-quality-of-conversations-on-mastodon/
I didn't expect to like this idea, but I do. I hope it comes to the clients I use.
If you really want to move the needle, make the reply button work differently when one is replying to a boosted toot: if my buddy Alice boosts a toot by Ben, and I hit reply from my stream where I see that it's an Alice-boosted toot, that reply should go to Alice, not Ben. I don't know who Ben is. Ben doesn't know who I am. Why should I be having a conversation with Ben, a complete stranger, when it was my friend Alice thought whatever he wrote was interesting enough to promote to her stream? It's my friend Alice I should be having that conversation with.
Ben didn't start a conversation with me or ask my opinion. Alice, however, very much did something to start a conversation with me: by boosting Ben's toot she said to me, and all her other her followers, hey, all, check out this thing Ben wrote.
The way replies work in the context of boosted toots, it's almost like a game of "Let's You and Him Fight" baked into the very architecture of Mastodon. Someone you know and might have some rapport with promotes something someone else said whom you do not know and do not have a particular connection with, and what they said might piss you off.
Ordinarily, if your friend sent you an article that pissed you off, you would tell your friend that. You might say something like, "I didn't think you thought like this. You actually share this point of view?" But that's not how replies in the context of boosted toots work. Instead you're putting the position of expressing an opinion to the person who is quite likely a complete stranger who just said this offensive thing. That's probably going to come out like, "Well that's wrong. Allow me to explain to you why the thing you're promulgating in the world is so wrong."
The way reply works in the context of boosted toots, it's almost as if the person doing the boosting was saying, "Hey, did you know this other person was saying this thing you really disagree with? Well, why don't you go on and tell them what you think. Sure, I'm the one inflicting it on you in your timeline, but leave me out of it."
It's just fundamentally such a recipe for causing conflict and hostility. It deprecates friends or at least friendly acquaintances discussing things amongst themselves, wish they might be expected to do with mutual understanding and charity, in favor of instigating discussion between complete strangers who are already at odds with one another, which is going to go about as well as we have observed it to go.
@siderea and this is one of the GREAT arguments for the #RT feature that so many talk about being, you know, the devil, the worst thing that could ever afflict a social media platform.
Retweeting/tooting/whatever allows people to discuss a post without having to involve the original poster, even for legitimately drama-free reasons.
And in other cases it allows a firewall to prevent escalation, just as described here.
I hear the feature will someday be added to #Mastodon but the resistance to adding it was always misguided.
A bunch of folks have noticed how similar what I have suggested is to QTs, but there's two important differences.
First,
QTs are an optional feature for the hinge person to elect to use. I'm actually talking about changing the default (software) behavior of reply in the context of a boost.
Giving people QTs maybe great for other reasons but it doesn't solve this problem that I am proposing this would solve. I'm proposing a change that will change a *default*.
Hitting a QT button *allows* someone to *choose* to boost something to their follower with their own commentary, as an *alternative* to replying. The fact it would give people an alternative to elect does not fix the present problems the *reply* function has, with driving conflict.
Hitting a QT button *allows* someone to *choose* to boost something to their follower with their own commentary, as an *alternative* to replying. The fact it would give people an alternative to elect does not fix the present problems the *reply* function has, with driving conflict.
@siderea @volkris @va3db @Gargron @taylorlorenz
the best of all worlds might be no QTs but every boost asking (or allowing) you to add a comment. your followers would see the original post but also be moved to respond to your comment, or comment just to you if you didn't leave a comment. no boosts would default with a comment mechanism that initially included the original poster.
also, the ability to rank comments (but maybe not original posts). I want mastodon and lemmy to merge basically.
@siderea in that case I simply disagree with your proposal altogether :)
I think replies to boosted content SHOULD go back to the author. When I put out content, and someone else boosts, I DO want to be engaged with by default.
I'd say it breaks the conversation, almost hijacking threads away from the author, to break it on the hinge like that.
QTs at least make this action clear, reframing into a new thread with a pointer back to the old one.
So @wjmaggos I'd say this without QTs is the worst of both worlds.
The author's thread is broken, but without a new contextualization to justify that break.
@siderea says the reply function as it is is almost as if the person doing the boosting is saying "Why don't you go on and tell them what you think?"
And that's EXACTLY how I, as an author of content here, expect it to work, it's exactly the value I derive out of the platform.
I'd hate to miss out on the conversation that my content prompted happening elsewhere.
Oh, excellent progress: we're definitely 90%+ agreeing on what the proposal actually *is*, just disagreeing on whether or not it's a good idea.
Be careful what you wish for – if this doesn't get fixed, you might well get it! The idea that one might want all the possible engagement one could possibly get is the kind of idea that mostly occurs to people who have not gotten very much engagement yet. You sound like somebody who wants way more attention than they're getting, and has not had to deal with a problem of getting way more attention than they want.
But in any event, there's that remaining 10%. You don't have to worry all *that* much, because my proposal only concerns the behavior of the reply button *on someone's stream*. If they click through to read more of what you wrote, reply button works as it currently does and goes right to you.
I also feel the need to point out, I went and checked out your account. Do you even realize that the number one reason that you get almost no engagement is because you almost exclusively boost other people's toots?
My friend, you think you want this thing very badly because it will give you what you want, but it is exactly the thing keeping you from getting what you want. You're one of the people being bit in the butt by the lack of this feature.
As somebody who boosts a lot, none of your followers ever reply to you about what you boost. You never get to have a conversation with your followers about that stuff. Because of the very problem I'm talking about and trying to solve: when they hit reply on something you boosted to them, you get no notification and you don't get to see it. Any engagement that you manage to spark routes around you entirely.
@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.
Of course you have to go wandering around into other people's conversations to get people to talk to you. Because you are primarily a booster, and boosting does not lead to conversation for the person who does the boosting.
Furthermore, while I think you have badly misidentified which side your bread is buttered on and for entirely selfish reasons should endorse my proposal, I invite you to also consider what this does to the shape of discourse on Mastodon in general.
Allow me to use your stream as an example. When you boost a funny toot from Low Quality Facts, the people who follow you, if they have any response to make, they make it to Low Quality Facts, not you.
But Low Quality Facts already has a ton of engagement. They don't need more commenters. Your loss is their gain, but it's only of marginal value to them.
Now multiply this across very large numbers of other people, just like you, who have been relentlessly exhorted that the way to engage with Mastodon is to boost, boost, boost.
Look at what that does mathematically.
This is a "The rich get richer" dynamic, where posters who already have a lot of attention wind up getting boosted more so they wind up getting more attention.
Meanwhile the people who *do* the boosting get no engagement at all from it. It doesn't make them friends, it doesn't lead to interesting conversations.
This leads to the exact same power-law curve that we saw on Twitter and which so many Mastodonians decry, where a whole lot of big name posters get all the engagement, and ordinary users have trouble even making friends.
It's darkly hilarious to me that this gets blamed on Twitter's algorithm. Turns out you don't need an algorithm to get that kind of distribution of attention. Having boost toots that send replies to that which is boosted instead of the person doing the boosting results in the exact same thing.
Except maybe even more extreme.
Well that's just wrong. I get all kinds of interesting conversations.
I mean, literally, definitionally, no, not *all* kinds: You don't get the conversations that you would have had about the things you boosted, if when you boosted them, replies went to you.
You literally do not get to have those conversations because Mastodon does not support them. That is literally a kind of conversation you do not get to have.
Again: I often will boost things that I'm not actually interested in talking about, that I think are worth other people talking about, so I'm happy not to be in those conversations.
And again, I think that's where QT comes in.
If I want to start a new conversation, if I want to make sure I'm at the center of some conversation, I might QT a post.
But more importantly under your proposal I would be missing out in conversations I'm actually interested in, ones I actually participate in, with the link between the conversation broken by the boost.
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.
> 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?
I'm not saying you DO expect that, I'm saying you SHOULD expect that – in the other sense of the word "expect", that of you should GET to expect that. I'm saying you're missing out on something you don't even realize you're missing out on, because Mastodon disadvantages users like you.
As to why it should work that way, the people who follow you presumably value *you* and what *you* have to say. When you boost Low Quality Facts to them, and their replies go to Low Quality Facts, they might well have rather have discussed with you, the person they know and chose to follow, whatever they have to say about it. But you miss out on that.
Why should your followers' replies go to you about the things you boost? Because they're *your followers*. If they wanted to follow Low Quality Facts and disintermediate you they could do that. But they didn't. They chose to follow you and listen to what you have to post. So absolutely their responses to what you put in front of them should go to you.
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.
@volkris I'll take your word on it.
What I hear you telling me – and please do correct me if this is wrong! – is that you really value having conversations on Mastodon, but not if they're in response to things you boost.
Why is that?
@siderea it's because if I boost something it means I am pointing to somebody else's conversation, it is saying if anybody is interested in this topic, hey there's a neat conversation going on over there.
There's a good chance I'm not even in the conversation, maybe it's not even interesting to me but I think it might be interesting to other people, so I point other people over to that other conversation that they might be interested in.
Meanwhile when I DO contribute something to a conversation and somebody boosts my own contribution, I appreciate that they are directing others toward joining into what we're talking about.
Let me emphasize that in everything I said above I didn't mention followers once. You talk about "your followers" as if there's some sort of ownership, but that's not at all how someone like me approaches social media. I really don't care who does or doesn't follow me, how many people follow me, any of that. I never look at that number because it's just not interesting to me.
I think that might be one thing you're having trouble understanding, that difference.
As far as I'm concerned I don't have followers, if someone wants to follow my account, great! If they don't, great! I don't know those people, so it just doesn't matter to me.
Any day of the week I'm having all the conversations I could possibly want on this platform without once looking at the follower list. That's all I care about.
If I get bored I'll go away, but so long as I'm having conversations with people I get value out of it, and so far it's remained interesting enough for me to stick around.
> Let me emphasize that in everything I said above I didn’t mention followers once.
Right, which is part of the problem: we're specifically discussing a feature that only ever shows up in the context of what followers see.
Look, do you understand that you're not being attacked or criticized for how you use Mastodon? I'm not suggesting that you should change your behavior in any way, or that there is any fault in it. To the contrary, I'm arguing it should be better supported.
The fact of the matter is you do have followers, and you yourself are a follower of others. The follower-followed relationship is a huge and central part of the Mastodon architecture and its dynamics, and certainly it's UX. Pretending it does not is slightly silly and contra reality.
And there's this other question for you, why are you so hot to disown your relationship, such as it is, with the people who chose to follow you? Those people apparently think you're keen. Does that bug you?
@siderea part of the issue might be that you're focused on Mastodon when it's just part of the larger ActivityPub system.
Even if we accept that the follow follower relationship is core to Mastodon--which I really don't, it's just one optional feature--It sounds to me like you're describing a change to the underlying protocol that would impact other interfaces to the platform.
Otherwise, like I said, it could just be handled as an option that each individual user could choose in terms of which notifications they do or don't receive.
As for a relationship, I have no idea who anybody here is, just random people on the internet. These people think I'm keen? On the internet nobody knows you're a dog, and I'm honestly not that interesting.
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.
> Boosting doesn’t lead to conversation, to new conversation, because it shouldn’t.
Oh yes it should!
> 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.
Pay attention: The people who, unlike you, get boosted a lot – which is how this whole discourse started – are making it really clear they're not real interested in that. You who have no particular experience with being the "beneficiary" of this phenomenon keep insisting it's something "deserved".
You are insisting something is a feature that is a bug for the people who actually deal with it. Of whom you are not one.
And, man, you have really strong moralistic opinions about something you have approximately no experience with and are not in a position to say whether or not it's a good or a bad thing.
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!
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.
@volkris
> I talk to a lot of people on here.
I didn't say you don't. I see you all up in all sorts of people's replies.
But stay on target: The proposal at hand concerns the behavior of replies in the context of a boost, and you were complaining that you didn't want that to be changed because you didn't want to be cut out of conversations in response to what you post that gets boosted.
But you post almost nothing that gets boosted. You post almost nothing original. The vast majority of what's in your stream is things other people have written that you have boosted.
Not one of those things promotes conversation with you. You don't have to worry about not getting engagement if replies don't go to the original author but to the person who boosted something, because you approximately never are that person who writes the original thing.
But you do lose out on all the conversations you could be having as somebody who primarily boosts.
@wjmaggos @va3db @Gargron @taylorlorenz