Please don't solicit or reward requests for #Boosts.
This is a small but insidious debasement of trust and quality wwithin the Fediverse.
I'm still trying to put my finger on just /why/ this is bad, so I'm trusting my gut, mostly. If you look at dana boyd's work, especially on 4chan in Jan/Feb 2018 on Medium, there's much in there.
Meantime, I'm reporting & blocking those requesting boosts, and unfollowing those reboosting them.
Boosting on merit is absolutely OK.
Be good.
What I do boost:
Items of interest to specialised communities. The sort of thing that's hard to gain traction usually. Especially appeals / seeking for like minds. This is something the Net should be inherently useful for.
Specific calls to action I see as useful and also underserved.
Interesting and unusual information. Again, especially if it's otherwise obscure.
Some original content and projects.
I try to avoid the merely cute, though insightfully funny works.
I have a lot of sympathy for this position—I don't request boosts personally, and filter out "boost to" posts. I don't go so far as to unfollow for the practice, but I see the point.
However, *who* are you reporting users to? If you're reporting them to their instance mods, is it against the rules there? If not, you're just creating more work for mods on that instance.
If you're reporting to your own instance mods, is it something that gets accounts silenced?
@codesections Mastodon reports go to my local instance owner (@admin), and optionally the remote originating server. Many are coming from mastodon.social, and I'd spoken to @Gargron about this recently.
The reports may give him a sense of scale and practice.
I'd like to see a gentle discouragement.
A block-on-sight response imposes a behavioural cost, and may be aamongst the more effective tools for addressing this. Imagine YouTube if shitty videos risked channel blocks. Skin in the game.
@dredmorbius @Gargron
Yeah, I take those points. I feel that reports should be reserved for issues that violate the rules of an instance—I figure that mods have enough on their plates without dealing with reports that they can't do anything about since it doesn't break any rules.
You're right that the block-on-sight imposes a cost. It also would impose a cost on *me*—I'd lose access to toots I find interesting. While I dislike the "ask to boost" practice, I don't care enough to pay that cost
@codesections @Gargron Moral sacrifice is sacrifice for a reason.
And a cause.
Yeah, absolutely. But there's such a thing as picking your battles, and reducing the number of "plz boost" posts on Mastodon just isn't one of the battles I've picked at the moment
@codesections And, fairly clearly, I have.
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