7 ms·

I'm closing up shop on my Mastodon for the foreseeable future

65 points by justaj 2y ago

justaj 2y ago
I've stumbled across this post by an ex-COBOL admin YouTube creator I've been following after wondering why she wasn't active on Mastodon. Definitely some interesting and nuanced points being made there. She also previously did a video about Mastodon / Fediverse: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mqocW7DUFpg https://youtube.com/watch?v=mqocW7DUFpg - But that was before she left Mastodon.
keikobadthebad 2y ago
I did not hear 'reply guy' before joining mastodon. If you're posting short messages with a reply text box, you can expect to get replies, and the replies are going to reflect how your post was received, no matter how it was sent. It works both ways - I replied to a post from an artist really enraged with AI and pointed out it's no different from a human artist seeing art and incorporating it into their style; that radio dealt with this in the US by legislating 'compulsory licenses' so the outcome is unclear. The response was an immediate perma-ban from mastadon.social... this is not crypto right wing content they are unable to process anything except agreement.
- deleted 2y ago
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- deleted 2y ago
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- esperent 2y ago
  I think it might be good for you to reflect on what this "reply guy" thing actually means, and why it is (IMO) a good idea to use it to judge your comments before replying to someone, if you care in any way about empathic online discourse. For example, the artist: their livelihood is directly threatened by AI, if not now then probably in the near future, and they are responding by posting about their fear. It's transferred into enragement because that's what gets them engagement and support, but underlying that is fear. If they were to directly post about their fear there's a good chance they'd be mocked even worse so don't judge them too harshly for this. Then along comes someone who has no skin in the game, except that they think AI is cool and something they want to be seen as an expert in. They feel it's necessary to point out to the person who is fearing for their way of life how WRONG they are. When all that person wants and needs is support. In these types of situations, when you don't directly have skin in the game, and you don't have any support to offer, it's almost always better not to reply. Make your own post proving how right you are (without linking/tooting/screen-shotting or in any way referencing the other post), and let that other person get the social connections and support that they need. Otherwise, you are Reply Guy!
  - AlexandrB 2y ago
    What you're describing is an echo chamber. If that's something you want there are better ways to get it than a public, general purpose venue like Mastodon. To flip the script a little, would this "Reply Guy" standard also apply when someone with family in Israel posts support for the Israeli government's actions and gets a bunch of replies about how Israel is committing a genocide? I kind of suspect that "Reply Guy" may just be a proxy for saying "you have the wrong politics".
    - oytis 2y ago
      > public, general purpose venue like Mastodon. I guess that's what's wrong with Twitter, and what Mastodon unfortunately copied. The discussion dynamics roughly corresponds to shouting your opinions on a town square - and getting comments from passerbys. There is little expectation of privacy, and few means to create it (banning indiscreet commenters being one of them). That's why Mastodon is great for niche interests - the town in this case is small, and its inhabitants are well-aligned, but might get frustrating as you touch topics where many people can feel they are entitled to having an opinion about.
    - Yotsugi 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - esperent 2y ago
      Support the fearful artist, or leave them alone. Speak up against the person who you see as advocating for genocide. I don't think we need to over complicate this. Just do your best, you'll get it wrong sometimes but that's OK. It's a guideline for positive online discourse, not a law.
      - themaninthedark 2y ago
        I think you missed the nuance there. The hypothetical person supporting Israel has family in the country and is fearful of their family's safety. Wouldn't replying to them make you "Reply Guy"? The parent of the conversation did not say that the artist was fearful, they said "enraged" or angry. It was posited in a child comment that the anger was out of a place of fear. Depending on how you read the initial post, mood and priors, your reply to a comment can differ wildly.
- rpgbr 2y ago
  >If you're posting short messages with a reply text box, you can expect to get replies, and the replies are going to reflect how your post was received, no matter how it was sent. A reply text box should not be an invitation to trash other the person who posted it. This notion that if you're posting in public you're submitting yourself to harassment is pretty bad.
- CM30 2y ago
  Personally I supect it might be due to differing expectations as to what social media conversations are. I think those who weren't super active on forums and other old school chat systems think of them as closer to a chat between friends in a bar than between randoms on the street, and struggle to handle the idea that anyone in the world can reply at any point. But that's kinda the thing. As you said, the whole 'messages with reply text box' design is set up to encourage responses from whoever wants to respond, and social media services are closer to a soapbox in Speaker's Corner or maybe Times Square than a chat between friends at home or in a restaurant.
  - bee_rider 2y ago
    It depends on the “old school forum” I think. Most phpbb style forums had limited populations, so they were more like chats with your friends at a bar; people come and go, but if you are a regular, there are some familiar faces, and you will likely be engaging with the same people in the short term, so being incredibly rude is counter-productive. Really big boards like Something Awful were the ones known for their rudeness.
    - CM30 2y ago
      I guess there was still an expectation that out of that population, anyone could reply to anyone about seemingly anything remotely relevant. I suspect a lot of people online don't see it like that anymore, and in some cases might even be surprised that anyone is responding to them at all. The rudeness is definitely the big issue with modern social media though, and as you said, that comes from how enormous these sites/services are now.
      - bee_rider 2y ago
        I think another big issue with modern twitter style mostly-one-interaction social media is the lack of a community. Even the good old forums, I recall, would have people show up and behave more poorly than was acceptable, get banned, and then you could go back to interacting with your online friends. There’s a sense that the angry person who showed up is the misanthrope, so their opinion doesn’t hurt you. Plus you have more of a model, so-and-so is grumpy and will insult me, but it’s kind of good natured or at least I know how to calibrate their ire.
znpy 2y ago
[flagged]
- Yotsugi 2y ago
  Is it "cancel culture"? Article reads like author simply can't handle what anyone who is even remotely relevant has to deal with on a daily basis. It's just reality of being known by more than a dozen people in one chatroom on internet. There's a reason why most popular people in the world don't run blogposts or personal emails out in the open. They basically have to hire other people to do it for them via company level hierarchies. The problem is there will always be a certain type of social outcast that will do anything for attention even if that requires doing illegal things to be noticed. The only way to avoid these things is to be irrelevant, I never received a death threat in my entire life, but I also don't have anything like a blogpost website either. This has always been the case in life, you also don't say things in public that you'd get beaten over, do you? Whether that's wrong is not my problem though, legal system as it is does not really care and can't prevent these things, the matter of fact is that whether you get beaten is your choice and legal system will only punish in hindsight. On internet, all of that is amplified, but at least noone can beat you up until you go outside. You should be mindful of what you can or cannot handle before you say anything, if you fear any adversity and god forbid are some sort of pacifist who wouldn't defend their own life to death if necessary, it's probably best to say nothing and go unnoticed by anyone, that's just how things always were and always will be on this animal planet.
  - znpy 2y ago
    Yes it’s cancel culture. The rest of your post is mental gymnastics.
lrvick 2y ago
Any medium where you invite commentary from strangers on the internet is going to be full of ignorant commentary. If this is something that stresses you out, probably best to disable comments from anyone you do not follow. Simple as that. I do not think this is a problem with the tool. I do think over-exposure to internet commentary is toxic. Like alcohol, it is a poison that is only fun if you are capable of moderation. Not everyone is, and that is okay. For me I was addicted to reading comments from viral nonsense I did online. Giving up LTE and carrying always-accessible always-online devices meant I can only access the Internet from fixed locations that I am only willing to spend a limited amount of time in. The internet does not follow me or summon me with notifications anymore. I visit the internet on my terms. For me, this made me much happier with my relationship to the internet. YMMV.
- Yotsugi 2y ago
  Regardless of commentary, it's free publicity. As for >Giving up LTE that's very heavily personality dependent, if I didn't want to be bothered by anyone I'd turn off my phone and leave it at home, limiting myself on other days where I do want to access internet from anywhere and be bothered by internet, it would be highly inconvenient for me.
- alt227 2y ago
  Fully agree. This person states how they have joined and left many social media networks over the last 30 years. They often quote the same reasons for leaving them (comment toxicity, it not being 'fun' anymore, etc). However they dont seem to have identifdied the common factor here, they they themselves dont like anonymous negative comments about their posts and content. As you have pointed out, there are tools and ways to mitigate this, primarily blocking replies from people you dont follow.
  - VHRanger 2y ago
    Yeah it's an emotional skill to develop. But the person first needs to realize they are the pattern.
    - 2y ago
JojoFatsani 2y ago
Kudos on stopping. I’ve cut out several of the platforms from my life. The grief of unchecked “opinions”, some of which are enhanced by algorithms, is simply not worth whatever dopamine you get from likes or whatever.
bravetraveler 2y ago
Hopefully some time away does them well. I hope they find their way back, in healthier portions It's a tough knob to dial, attention/engagement. Too much of a thing. Not even going to try to say good/bad/whatever. The internet is what we make of it. I hope they return to strengthen it. This is something I'm working on now, in a different avenue. Work. I changed jobs last week because I was putting too much of myself in, and not getting enough out.
a_bonobo 2y ago
What's interesting here is that many of 'us' and the current mainstream say that Internet toxicity is due to The Algorithm, the methods of Facebook/twitter that maximise engagement leading to constant negativity and toxicity. Mastodon's big selling point during the big move away from Twitter/X was the absence of The Algorithm, it was supposed to be a friendly, geeky thing, free from monetised outrage. But I've seen it for myself, there's an undercurrent of Twitter's holier-than-thou outrage, it's just from different sources: part exclusionary crusty geeks who've always used Mastodon ('you use Windows???'), part exclusionary leftists ('you're with the Judean People's Front????'). Perhaps it's not always The Algorithm that's to blame.
- Yotsugi 2y ago
  When it's a social problem, it's always people who are to blame. Reddit for example even had(? I think they fixed that one) downvote trolls farming downvotes because any attention works, and if it can be measured long term, it's even better! You can't blame made up things if people actively choose to engage with rage baits. Every time something like that has occured, I time and time again notice that people could've solved this by doing nothing. In real social setting, when someone says an unfunny joke, literally nobody laughs, and whoever said it feels very uncomfortable. On internet, when someone writes something stupid, they might sometimes get more replies than an interesting thing... How can something like "The Algorithm" be blamed for people laughing at incredibly bad jokes?
- CM30 2y ago
  It's really just down to the size of the site/service and Dunbar's Number. Whenever a site or service gets big enough that you can't really know everyone who's active there, then it tends to spiral towards toxicity. Hence why big forums used to be a lot crazier/dramatic than smaller ones, why social media platforms tend towards becoming a cesspit over time, and why the means of which a platform is run matters less than people think civility wise.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  The Algorithm(TM) tends to make it worse, in that it greatly increases the risk that weird cranks will see your posts, but "the internet is full of arseholes, some of whom will probably reply-guy you" is a problem as old as Usenet. Personally, I've generally had far more positive interaction on Mastodon than I used to on Twitter, but I've got about 300 followers. I think the author of the article had many thousands, and at that level you're going to be exposed to weird cranks at a much greater rate; the advantage of not having The Algorithm(TM) is likely diminished.
drdrek 2y ago
[flagged]
dt3ft 2y ago
Back in the day, people used to make the infamous "quitting this forum" post. Is this the same thing, but in 2024?
- catapart 2y ago
  I was definitely waiting on the "it's not an airport; you don't have to announce your departure" comment coming around.
rpgbr 2y ago
It's truly disheartening. Instead of embracing the practice of quietly observing, some individuals feel compelled to disparage those they view as less knowledgeable (often inaccurately) in a communal setting.
dsign 2y ago
Here's my "reply-guy" comment of the day: if you are posting about where you buy your wall decoration and you get negative feedback, well, maybe it's not worth to tell strangers where you buy wall decoration. But sometimes somebody puts a lot of effort on creating things for other people to enjoy. It can be a youtube video, a tutorial, a technical opinion. Or curl[^1]. Feedback provided on such an effort often takes a minuscule fraction of the work the creator put in, and they can be really nasty. I just think that providing opinions should require some effort. An affordable amount of effort, but not too low. Maybe if I do something worth of notice someday, I'll invite feedback by creating a public Minecraft server and asking people to log in there and post their comments on the book at coordinates 1000, -58, 1000. [^1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobby/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobb...
- nusl 2y ago
  I disagree with your first sentence. People should be able to post about watching paint dry, or whatever else they want to mention. Strangers disagreeing with your choice of wall paint shouldn't turn into real-world anxiety/stress. It's effectively impossible to post anything or do anything online (or even IRL) where someone won't disagree with you; there will always be someone (that's me toward you in this case), and that's fine. What's not fine is the escalation from "I disagree, here's why" to "I disagree, and I'm going to make you miserable". Add to that death threats and you've got a cocktail for being unhappy. Add to that people doxxing you and harassing your real life for their perceived justices, and it makes you very unhappy. Self-induced outrage seems to be a popular thing now. Where no real problem exists, create one, and manufacture outrage. Find next topic, repeat.
rsynnott 2y ago
> I toot about Matrix, and I’ve got reply-guys berating me for not using XMPP instead. Huh, those are extremely contrarian reply-guys; if anything I would expect the opposite.
- Macha 2y ago
  There's some very passionate XMPP supporters on every HN discussion on Matrix, have you not seen them before?
INTPenis 2y ago
Lack of nuance, and taking things too personal, was why I also left fedi back in 2022. Had been running an instance since 2017. But in the past 2 years I've realized that you should just ignore the haters. They're on youtube too and I don't get involved with them there, so why do I focus on them elsewhere? No need. So I'm actually going to return with a personal instance, simply because I enjoy having somewhere to post random pics and stuff when I'm not by a computer, using my phone. I don't care if anyone follows.
Ciantic 2y ago
The only solution I can think of is smarter algorithms that hide negativity and other unwanted comments. Yes you could limit replies, but that doesn't solve the problem for big accounts, their followers have all kinds of unhinged people who like to ask trivial questions and waste your time. Some think that by changing a service they can get better replies, but there will be no single service that has "sane commenters". This shouldn't be surprising, I saw in Threads complaints that replies had "Facebook vibe", or a common complaint about Mastodon that there were too many geeky reply-guys. Services should have good filtering in place. A lot of big accounts don't have time to read replies, and they probably shouldn't for their own sanity, but they probably want to see replies from people they follow, i.e. their peers.
- BadBadJellyBean 2y ago
  Filtering is always a two edged sword. On the one hand it might keep bad actors at bay on the other it can keep innocent people away. It is putting power in the hands of a machine. Another thing is that bad actors are usually more determined to subvert blocking than good actors are to correct false negatives. It might help some people to have some automatic filtering in place but it also might not.
willjp 2y ago
This is interesting. I don’t find that she’s hating on the tool at all - I think she’s frustrated by negative interactions that sap her energy, has taken note of that, and is explaining her absence. I both agree and disagree with some of the comments. Until very recently my interactions with the internet have been fairly shallow and that has protected me in some ways. But I think some people are looking for community, and want to give a bit more of themselves to form deeper connections. I think others are trying to grow an audience - reading the comments is not much different than surveying your customers. Veronica seems really lovely, and I hope this helps make her life happier.
- Simulacra 2y ago
  What she wants is a billboard, not social media. She seems to want to post her views, and have them be seen, but doesn't want commenting on them they are positive reinforcement.
HuwFulcher 2y ago
I find that Mastodon has become the mirror-verse version of Twitter/X. I've tried spending time on there but unless if you subscribe to certain political/ideological values then you wont find much to hang around for. On the flip side I find the discourse on X a lot more varied. There are definitely big problems with the types of conversations that happen on X but I have to go out of my way to find them. On Mastodon it's not that hard, mainly down to it being a smaller pool of content. ActivityPub/Mastodon is flawed at its core with its concept of federation. They paint a pretty utopian picture of decentralised communities but there really isn't much difference between them. They are mostly part of the same political zeitgeist and if you don't toe the line you get banned. Once you're banned that's it, you've lost your profile, sure you can recreate elsewhere but have to start from scratch. For the problems alternatives have like Nostr at least they are truly censorship resistant.
- krapp 2y ago
  I don't know... I have game developers, authors, scientists, musicians and all sorts of interesting people on my feed, and I see a wide variance in discussion, despite the likely political commonalities. I suppose if you can only find value in online community through political debate and heterodoxy, most well-curated communities will seem hostile to you, since most people aren't looking for shock and chaos.
  - HuwFulcher 2y ago
    I'm not looking for value through political debate and heterodoxy. In fact I'm trying to look for the opposite, I'm glad you seem to have found it! Algorithmic content is a double edged sword. I've found it much easier to find people on X to discuss the non-political content I want. On the other hand it's much harder on Mastodon.
    - krapp 2y ago
      I assumed you were talking about political content because you cited subscription to certain political ideologies as a reason you didn't find the platform useful, and the likelihood of being banned due to "political zeitgeist" as a flaw in the system. I am curious what high quality non-political content you're finding on X and not Mastodon. I'm only still on X because of a few accounts that haven't jumped ship yet, but in my experience, the flood of bots and troll accounts makes it nigh unusable.
flpm 2y ago
Ultimately it's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing, it's a question of respect. We live in a world where either you agree with me in everything or you must be destroyed. The lack of nuance is spot on. The web went from long content in homepages/blogs, to short posts on social medias, to "like" and "share" buttons (1-bit)... it's hard to have nuance when you only take 2 seconds to form your opinion.
lurking15 2y ago
I kind of get the sense that she just finds the generalized sort of person who's drawn to Mastodon to be insufferable.
polytely 2y ago
Setting my mastodon account to locked (followers have to be approved) was the best social media choice I've ever made.

65 points by justaj 2y ago

I've stumbled across this post by an ex-COBOL admin YouTube creator I've been following after wondering why she wasn't active on Mastodon. Definitely some interesting and nuanced points being made there. She also previously did a video about Mastodon / Fediverse: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mqocW7DUFpg https://youtube.com/watch?v=mqocW7DUFpg - But that was before she left Mastodon.

keikobadthebad 2y ago

I did not hear 'reply guy' before joining mastodon. If you're posting short messages with a reply text box, you can expect to get replies, and the replies are going to reflect how your post was received, no matter how it was sent. It works both ways - I replied to a post from an artist really enraged with AI and pointed out it's no different from a human artist seeing art and incorporating it into their style; that radio dealt with this in the US by legislating 'compulsory licenses' so the outcome is unclear. The response was an immediate perma-ban from mastadon.social... this is not crypto right wing content they are unable to process anything except agreement.

deleted 2y ago
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deleted 2y ago
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esperent 2y ago
I think it might be good for you to reflect on what this "reply guy" thing actually means, and why it is (IMO) a good idea to use it to judge your comments before replying to someone, if you care in any way about empathic online discourse. For example, the artist: their livelihood is directly threatened by AI, if not now then probably in the near future, and they are responding by posting about their fear. It's transferred into enragement because that's what gets them engagement and support, but underlying that is fear. If they were to directly post about their fear there's a good chance they'd be mocked even worse so don't judge them too harshly for this. Then along comes someone who has no skin in the game, except that they think AI is cool and something they want to be seen as an expert in. They feel it's necessary to point out to the person who is fearing for their way of life how WRONG they are. When all that person wants and needs is support. In these types of situations, when you don't directly have skin in the game, and you don't have any support to offer, it's almost always better not to reply. Make your own post proving how right you are (without linking/tooting/screen-shotting or in any way referencing the other post), and let that other person get the social connections and support that they need. Otherwise, you are Reply Guy!
- AlexandrB 2y ago
  What you're describing is an echo chamber. If that's something you want there are better ways to get it than a public, general purpose venue like Mastodon. To flip the script a little, would this "Reply Guy" standard also apply when someone with family in Israel posts support for the Israeli government's actions and gets a bunch of replies about how Israel is committing a genocide? I kind of suspect that "Reply Guy" may just be a proxy for saying "you have the wrong politics".
  - oytis 2y ago
    > public, general purpose venue like Mastodon. I guess that's what's wrong with Twitter, and what Mastodon unfortunately copied. The discussion dynamics roughly corresponds to shouting your opinions on a town square - and getting comments from passerbys. There is little expectation of privacy, and few means to create it (banning indiscreet commenters being one of them). That's why Mastodon is great for niche interests - the town in this case is small, and its inhabitants are well-aligned, but might get frustrating as you touch topics where many people can feel they are entitled to having an opinion about.
  - Yotsugi 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - esperent 2y ago
    Support the fearful artist, or leave them alone. Speak up against the person who you see as advocating for genocide. I don't think we need to over complicate this. Just do your best, you'll get it wrong sometimes but that's OK. It's a guideline for positive online discourse, not a law.
    - themaninthedark 2y ago
      I think you missed the nuance there. The hypothetical person supporting Israel has family in the country and is fearful of their family's safety. Wouldn't replying to them make you "Reply Guy"? The parent of the conversation did not say that the artist was fearful, they said "enraged" or angry. It was posited in a child comment that the anger was out of a place of fear. Depending on how you read the initial post, mood and priors, your reply to a comment can differ wildly.
rpgbr 2y ago
>If you're posting short messages with a reply text box, you can expect to get replies, and the replies are going to reflect how your post was received, no matter how it was sent. A reply text box should not be an invitation to trash other the person who posted it. This notion that if you're posting in public you're submitting yourself to harassment is pretty bad.
CM30 2y ago
Personally I supect it might be due to differing expectations as to what social media conversations are. I think those who weren't super active on forums and other old school chat systems think of them as closer to a chat between friends in a bar than between randoms on the street, and struggle to handle the idea that anyone in the world can reply at any point. But that's kinda the thing. As you said, the whole 'messages with reply text box' design is set up to encourage responses from whoever wants to respond, and social media services are closer to a soapbox in Speaker's Corner or maybe Times Square than a chat between friends at home or in a restaurant.
- bee_rider 2y ago
  It depends on the “old school forum” I think. Most phpbb style forums had limited populations, so they were more like chats with your friends at a bar; people come and go, but if you are a regular, there are some familiar faces, and you will likely be engaging with the same people in the short term, so being incredibly rude is counter-productive. Really big boards like Something Awful were the ones known for their rudeness.
  - CM30 2y ago
    I guess there was still an expectation that out of that population, anyone could reply to anyone about seemingly anything remotely relevant. I suspect a lot of people online don't see it like that anymore, and in some cases might even be surprised that anyone is responding to them at all. The rudeness is definitely the big issue with modern social media though, and as you said, that comes from how enormous these sites/services are now.
    - bee_rider 2y ago
      I think another big issue with modern twitter style mostly-one-interaction social media is the lack of a community. Even the good old forums, I recall, would have people show up and behave more poorly than was acceptable, get banned, and then you could go back to interacting with your online friends. There’s a sense that the angry person who showed up is the misanthrope, so their opinion doesn’t hurt you. Plus you have more of a model, so-and-so is grumpy and will insult me, but it’s kind of good natured or at least I know how to calibrate their ire.

znpy 2y ago

[flagged]

Yotsugi 2y ago
Is it "cancel culture"? Article reads like author simply can't handle what anyone who is even remotely relevant has to deal with on a daily basis. It's just reality of being known by more than a dozen people in one chatroom on internet. There's a reason why most popular people in the world don't run blogposts or personal emails out in the open. They basically have to hire other people to do it for them via company level hierarchies. The problem is there will always be a certain type of social outcast that will do anything for attention even if that requires doing illegal things to be noticed. The only way to avoid these things is to be irrelevant, I never received a death threat in my entire life, but I also don't have anything like a blogpost website either. This has always been the case in life, you also don't say things in public that you'd get beaten over, do you? Whether that's wrong is not my problem though, legal system as it is does not really care and can't prevent these things, the matter of fact is that whether you get beaten is your choice and legal system will only punish in hindsight. On internet, all of that is amplified, but at least noone can beat you up until you go outside. You should be mindful of what you can or cannot handle before you say anything, if you fear any adversity and god forbid are some sort of pacifist who wouldn't defend their own life to death if necessary, it's probably best to say nothing and go unnoticed by anyone, that's just how things always were and always will be on this animal planet.
- znpy 2y ago
  Yes it’s cancel culture. The rest of your post is mental gymnastics.

lrvick 2y ago

Any medium where you invite commentary from strangers on the internet is going to be full of ignorant commentary. If this is something that stresses you out, probably best to disable comments from anyone you do not follow. Simple as that. I do not think this is a problem with the tool. I do think over-exposure to internet commentary is toxic. Like alcohol, it is a poison that is only fun if you are capable of moderation. Not everyone is, and that is okay. For me I was addicted to reading comments from viral nonsense I did online. Giving up LTE and carrying always-accessible always-online devices meant I can only access the Internet from fixed locations that I am only willing to spend a limited amount of time in. The internet does not follow me or summon me with notifications anymore. I visit the internet on my terms. For me, this made me much happier with my relationship to the internet. YMMV.

Yotsugi 2y ago
Regardless of commentary, it's free publicity. As for >Giving up LTE that's very heavily personality dependent, if I didn't want to be bothered by anyone I'd turn off my phone and leave it at home, limiting myself on other days where I do want to access internet from anywhere and be bothered by internet, it would be highly inconvenient for me.
alt227 2y ago
Fully agree. This person states how they have joined and left many social media networks over the last 30 years. They often quote the same reasons for leaving them (comment toxicity, it not being 'fun' anymore, etc). However they dont seem to have identifdied the common factor here, they they themselves dont like anonymous negative comments about their posts and content. As you have pointed out, there are tools and ways to mitigate this, primarily blocking replies from people you dont follow.
- VHRanger 2y ago
  Yeah it's an emotional skill to develop. But the person first needs to realize they are the pattern.
  - 2y ago

JojoFatsani 2y ago

Kudos on stopping. I’ve cut out several of the platforms from my life. The grief of unchecked “opinions”, some of which are enhanced by algorithms, is simply not worth whatever dopamine you get from likes or whatever.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Hopefully some time away does them well. I hope they find their way back, in healthier portions It's a tough knob to dial, attention/engagement. Too much of a thing. Not even going to try to say good/bad/whatever. The internet is what we make of it. I hope they return to strengthen it. This is something I'm working on now, in a different avenue. Work. I changed jobs last week because I was putting too much of myself in, and not getting enough out.

a_bonobo 2y ago

What's interesting here is that many of 'us' and the current mainstream say that Internet toxicity is due to The Algorithm, the methods of Facebook/twitter that maximise engagement leading to constant negativity and toxicity. Mastodon's big selling point during the big move away from Twitter/X was the absence of The Algorithm, it was supposed to be a friendly, geeky thing, free from monetised outrage. But I've seen it for myself, there's an undercurrent of Twitter's holier-than-thou outrage, it's just from different sources: part exclusionary crusty geeks who've always used Mastodon ('you use Windows???'), part exclusionary leftists ('you're with the Judean People's Front????'). Perhaps it's not always The Algorithm that's to blame.

Yotsugi 2y ago
When it's a social problem, it's always people who are to blame. Reddit for example even had(? I think they fixed that one) downvote trolls farming downvotes because any attention works, and if it can be measured long term, it's even better! You can't blame made up things if people actively choose to engage with rage baits. Every time something like that has occured, I time and time again notice that people could've solved this by doing nothing. In real social setting, when someone says an unfunny joke, literally nobody laughs, and whoever said it feels very uncomfortable. On internet, when someone writes something stupid, they might sometimes get more replies than an interesting thing... How can something like "The Algorithm" be blamed for people laughing at incredibly bad jokes?
CM30 2y ago
It's really just down to the size of the site/service and Dunbar's Number. Whenever a site or service gets big enough that you can't really know everyone who's active there, then it tends to spiral towards toxicity. Hence why big forums used to be a lot crazier/dramatic than smaller ones, why social media platforms tend towards becoming a cesspit over time, and why the means of which a platform is run matters less than people think civility wise.
rsynnott 2y ago
The Algorithm(TM) tends to make it worse, in that it greatly increases the risk that weird cranks will see your posts, but "the internet is full of arseholes, some of whom will probably reply-guy you" is a problem as old as Usenet. Personally, I've generally had far more positive interaction on Mastodon than I used to on Twitter, but I've got about 300 followers. I think the author of the article had many thousands, and at that level you're going to be exposed to weird cranks at a much greater rate; the advantage of not having The Algorithm(TM) is likely diminished.

drdrek 2y ago

[flagged]

dt3ft 2y ago

Back in the day, people used to make the infamous "quitting this forum" post. Is this the same thing, but in 2024?

catapart 2y ago
I was definitely waiting on the "it's not an airport; you don't have to announce your departure" comment coming around.

rpgbr 2y ago

It's truly disheartening. Instead of embracing the practice of quietly observing, some individuals feel compelled to disparage those they view as less knowledgeable (often inaccurately) in a communal setting.

dsign 2y ago

Here's my "reply-guy" comment of the day: if you are posting about where you buy your wall decoration and you get negative feedback, well, maybe it's not worth to tell strangers where you buy wall decoration. But sometimes somebody puts a lot of effort on creating things for other people to enjoy. It can be a youtube video, a tutorial, a technical opinion. Or curl[^1]. Feedback provided on such an effort often takes a minuscule fraction of the work the creator put in, and they can be really nasty. I just think that providing opinions should require some effort. An affordable amount of effort, but not too low. Maybe if I do something worth of notice someday, I'll invite feedback by creating a public Minecraft server and asking people to log in there and post their comments on the book at coordinates 1000, -58, 1000. [^1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobby/ https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobb...

nusl 2y ago
I disagree with your first sentence. People should be able to post about watching paint dry, or whatever else they want to mention. Strangers disagreeing with your choice of wall paint shouldn't turn into real-world anxiety/stress. It's effectively impossible to post anything or do anything online (or even IRL) where someone won't disagree with you; there will always be someone (that's me toward you in this case), and that's fine. What's not fine is the escalation from "I disagree, here's why" to "I disagree, and I'm going to make you miserable". Add to that death threats and you've got a cocktail for being unhappy. Add to that people doxxing you and harassing your real life for their perceived justices, and it makes you very unhappy. Self-induced outrage seems to be a popular thing now. Where no real problem exists, create one, and manufacture outrage. Find next topic, repeat.

rsynnott 2y ago

> I toot about Matrix, and I’ve got reply-guys berating me for not using XMPP instead. Huh, those are extremely contrarian reply-guys; if anything I would expect the opposite.

Macha 2y ago
There's some very passionate XMPP supporters on every HN discussion on Matrix, have you not seen them before?

INTPenis 2y ago

Lack of nuance, and taking things too personal, was why I also left fedi back in 2022. Had been running an instance since 2017. But in the past 2 years I've realized that you should just ignore the haters. They're on youtube too and I don't get involved with them there, so why do I focus on them elsewhere? No need. So I'm actually going to return with a personal instance, simply because I enjoy having somewhere to post random pics and stuff when I'm not by a computer, using my phone. I don't care if anyone follows.

Ciantic 2y ago

The only solution I can think of is smarter algorithms that hide negativity and other unwanted comments. Yes you could limit replies, but that doesn't solve the problem for big accounts, their followers have all kinds of unhinged people who like to ask trivial questions and waste your time. Some think that by changing a service they can get better replies, but there will be no single service that has "sane commenters". This shouldn't be surprising, I saw in Threads complaints that replies had "Facebook vibe", or a common complaint about Mastodon that there were too many geeky reply-guys. Services should have good filtering in place. A lot of big accounts don't have time to read replies, and they probably shouldn't for their own sanity, but they probably want to see replies from people they follow, i.e. their peers.

BadBadJellyBean 2y ago
Filtering is always a two edged sword. On the one hand it might keep bad actors at bay on the other it can keep innocent people away. It is putting power in the hands of a machine. Another thing is that bad actors are usually more determined to subvert blocking than good actors are to correct false negatives. It might help some people to have some automatic filtering in place but it also might not.

willjp 2y ago

This is interesting. I don’t find that she’s hating on the tool at all - I think she’s frustrated by negative interactions that sap her energy, has taken note of that, and is explaining her absence. I both agree and disagree with some of the comments. Until very recently my interactions with the internet have been fairly shallow and that has protected me in some ways. But I think some people are looking for community, and want to give a bit more of themselves to form deeper connections. I think others are trying to grow an audience - reading the comments is not much different than surveying your customers. Veronica seems really lovely, and I hope this helps make her life happier.

Simulacra 2y ago
What she wants is a billboard, not social media. She seems to want to post her views, and have them be seen, but doesn't want commenting on them they are positive reinforcement.

HuwFulcher 2y ago

I find that Mastodon has become the mirror-verse version of Twitter/X. I've tried spending time on there but unless if you subscribe to certain political/ideological values then you wont find much to hang around for. On the flip side I find the discourse on X a lot more varied. There are definitely big problems with the types of conversations that happen on X but I have to go out of my way to find them. On Mastodon it's not that hard, mainly down to it being a smaller pool of content. ActivityPub/Mastodon is flawed at its core with its concept of federation. They paint a pretty utopian picture of decentralised communities but there really isn't much difference between them. They are mostly part of the same political zeitgeist and if you don't toe the line you get banned. Once you're banned that's it, you've lost your profile, sure you can recreate elsewhere but have to start from scratch. For the problems alternatives have like Nostr at least they are truly censorship resistant.

krapp 2y ago
I don't know... I have game developers, authors, scientists, musicians and all sorts of interesting people on my feed, and I see a wide variance in discussion, despite the likely political commonalities. I suppose if you can only find value in online community through political debate and heterodoxy, most well-curated communities will seem hostile to you, since most people aren't looking for shock and chaos.
- HuwFulcher 2y ago
  I'm not looking for value through political debate and heterodoxy. In fact I'm trying to look for the opposite, I'm glad you seem to have found it! Algorithmic content is a double edged sword. I've found it much easier to find people on X to discuss the non-political content I want. On the other hand it's much harder on Mastodon.
  - krapp 2y ago
    I assumed you were talking about political content because you cited subscription to certain political ideologies as a reason you didn't find the platform useful, and the likelihood of being banned due to "political zeitgeist" as a flaw in the system. I am curious what high quality non-political content you're finding on X and not Mastodon. I'm only still on X because of a few accounts that haven't jumped ship yet, but in my experience, the flood of bots and troll accounts makes it nigh unusable.

flpm 2y ago

Ultimately it's not a question of agreeing or disagreeing, it's a question of respect. We live in a world where either you agree with me in everything or you must be destroyed. The lack of nuance is spot on. The web went from long content in homepages/blogs, to short posts on social medias, to "like" and "share" buttons (1-bit)... it's hard to have nuance when you only take 2 seconds to form your opinion.

lurking15 2y ago

I kind of get the sense that she just finds the generalized sort of person who's drawn to Mastodon to be insufferable.

polytely 2y ago

Setting my mastodon account to locked (followers have to be approved) was the best social media choice I've ever made.