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That ship has sailed, unfortunately. On social media where no markup is permitted (or possible), people will use these to stand out — especially those who make
by Freak_NL 2y ago
That ship has sailed, unfortunately. On social media where no markup is permitted (or possible), people will use these to stand out — especially those who make money on those platforms (not much of a problem on Mastodon though). We, the people who know how this works, can explain all we want, but it will always sound like a hypothetical edge case, even though this does exclude some people from participating.
The only way to stop this would to be to have the platforms where this is abused prevent its use (which would harm legitimate use too, although that is not nearly as prevalent as the 'I just want bold and italic'-case), have those platforms introduce minimal markup (not necessarily wanted), or have browsers and screen readers support these characters (not trivial, I suspect).
- alistairSH 2y agoWhat’s the reasoning behind lack of B/I text on social media? These are mature platforms, I can’t think of a good reason to prefer “math symbols as style” over actual B/I characters?
- reaperducer 2y agoMy guess is that any user input goes through strip_tags() as a precaution.
- Zanni 2y agoAbuse. Twitter/X allowed bold text recently for a few days, and a number of monetized accounts immediately started making all their posts ALL BOLD ALL THE TIME to stand out. Feature dropped soon after.
- eviks 2y agoThis would explain a ban on some high % of bold text in a post, not on making this % 0
- renewedrebecca 2y agoGenerally, Mastodon supports at least a subset of Markdown syntax. Putting text in asterisks for example, will render it in italics. There's no reason why the various SM platforms can't do this.