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I wish I could believe the implication of the article, that the Mastodon UX improves the quality of discourse, but I strongly suspect that there's one much more

by sfink 4y ago

I wish I could believe the implication of the article, that the Mastodon UX improves the quality of discourse, but I strongly suspect that there's one much more important Twitter feature that Mastodon lacks that is vastly more important than any mentioned: Twitter just has far more users. Eliminating classes of problematic behavior and incentives by way of avoiding or altering technical features is always going to be a game of whack-a-mole. When you get above some threshold—maybe it's some sort of 'relationship distance', or maybe just a raw number of people—then people will always find a way to game the system. I don't think it's a bug or misfeature in the system, though the system can certainly contribute to where the threshold lies. It's a bug in collective human behavior. So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody. That completely breaks some use cases, but it turns out that anything that allows those use cases turns into a cesspool. Maybe somebody can invent something someday, but I'm doubtful that technical measures or UX can ever compete with our rage and other base urges.

fsflover 4y ago
Looks like federation is the solution here: many not-so-big instances.
- deleted 4y ago
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zerocrates 4y ago
Yeah, I would say that features of the software can definitely affect the community but there's a limit. If you actually have Mastodon grow to include any significant portion of Twitter's userbase then you're going to get much of those same behaviors. Like, on the "dunking" example: people will just use screenshots. Memorably, Twitter didn't have even retweets well into its life, but the users created a de facto system for doing it. This "pave the cowpaths" feature growth was once a defining aspect of Twitter. Many of the people who like Twitter like to dunk, they like to read dunks, and they'll do it wherever they go.
_as31 4y ago
> So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody. Yes, that is one of the main points of the Fediverse. There are people from all sorts of viewpoints there, all the way from Gab to LGBT instances, but my home instance is my "window into the Fediverse", both via instance filtering/silencing/blocking and via organic reach (content that people on your server never interact with won't reach your server), which creates this organic sharding. In essence, I interact with "a corner of the Fediverse", with a fuzzy/organic boundary, and I don't expect to be able to communicate universally. Related article: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introduction-for-2021 https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd... QUOTE FROM ARTICLE (sorry, not sure how to properly quote on HN): Note how this is all emergent behaviour. It’s not based on blocks, though blocks are important to weed off bad parts of the subgraph. But independently from that, each instance’s view of the fediverse is unique, and without anybody doing anything, it naturally converges towards a community that makes sense to the instance’s members. In practice this results in a feeling of social cohesion and intimacy that I haven’t felt online since early Livejournal days. Isn’t that a bubble? How do you avoid an echo chamber? You can follow people with contrasting values if you want, nothing’s stopping you and you don’t need admin permission to do that. But why would you want to write to people who don’t want to read what you write? It’s no more a bubble than your circle of friends. (MY NOTE: Also, you can create multiple accounts if you want multiple "windows into the fediverse". Or create your own server. Or join one of the "free speech" ones.) I get a lot more interaction from a lot more of a diverse crowd here than I did on twitter, because a single shared space like twitter ends up creating a superstar vs. mere mortals dichotomy, and as a mere mortal not posting discourse bait, I never had anybody read my stuff in the first place. Here there’s a small group of people who always interact with my stuff, and I know everybody by name, and I love them all. But how do I promote my toots to a large audience in a system like this? That's the neat part, you don’t. How do I make everything easily discoverable by a large audience? You don’t.

by sfink 4y ago

fsflover 4y ago

Looks like federation is the solution here: many not-so-big instances.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

zerocrates 4y ago

Yeah, I would say that features of the software can definitely affect the community but there's a limit. If you actually have Mastodon grow to include any significant portion of Twitter's userbase then you're going to get much of those same behaviors. Like, on the "dunking" example: people will just use screenshots. Memorably, Twitter didn't have even retweets well into its life, but the users created a de facto system for doing it. This "pave the cowpaths" feature growth was once a defining aspect of Twitter. Many of the people who like Twitter like to dunk, they like to read dunks, and they'll do it wherever they go.

_as31 4y ago

> So far, the most likely solution to the problem of a mass point-to-point communication system is to not have a mass point-to-point communication system. Shard it down until people are able to behave reasonably well, even if that means you can't communicate with just anybody. Yes, that is one of the main points of the Fediverse. There are people from all sorts of viewpoints there, all the way from Gab to LGBT instances, but my home instance is my "window into the Fediverse", both via instance filtering/silencing/blocking and via organic reach (content that people on your server never interact with won't reach your server), which creates this organic sharding. In essence, I interact with "a corner of the Fediverse", with a fuzzy/organic boundary, and I don't expect to be able to communicate universally. Related article: https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introduction-for-2021 https://wordsmith.social/elilla/a-futuristic-mastodon-introd... QUOTE FROM ARTICLE (sorry, not sure how to properly quote on HN): Note how this is all emergent behaviour. It’s not based on blocks, though blocks are important to weed off bad parts of the subgraph. But independently from that, each instance’s view of the fediverse is unique, and without anybody doing anything, it naturally converges towards a community that makes sense to the instance’s members. In practice this results in a feeling of social cohesion and intimacy that I haven’t felt online since early Livejournal days. Isn’t that a bubble? How do you avoid an echo chamber? You can follow people with contrasting values if you want, nothing’s stopping you and you don’t need admin permission to do that. But why would you want to write to people who don’t want to read what you write? It’s no more a bubble than your circle of friends. (MY NOTE: Also, you can create multiple accounts if you want multiple "windows into the fediverse". Or create your own server. Or join one of the "free speech" ones.) I get a lot more interaction from a lot more of a diverse crowd here than I did on twitter, because a single shared space like twitter ends up creating a superstar vs. mere mortals dichotomy, and as a mere mortal not posting discourse bait, I never had anybody read my stuff in the first place. Here there’s a small group of people who always interact with my stuff, and I know everybody by name, and I love them all. But how do I promote my toots to a large audience in a system like this? That's the neat part, you don’t. How do I make everything easily discoverable by a large audience? You don’t.