Prof Christina PagelA fediverse THREAD on latest NHS situation in England: Ambluance times, A&E, Waiting lists...
1/
Ambulance wait times across the board are the worst they've been for a very long time.
Graph shows category "C2" - not quite life or death, but potentially. Target is 18 minutes wait, but average is now over an hour. Almost 80 minutes in the Midlands and the SW. 2/
Once you get to A&E, waits to be seen are longer than ever. 31% of people now wait longer than 4 hours (target is 5%!).
Unsurprisingly about 5-6% of people leave before being seen - some of those really needed to be seen.
Over 8% of people wait longer than *12 hours* - up from basically 0% pre pandemic.
3/
One of the big issues causing these long waits is that hospitals are full and finding it difficult to discharge people ready to go - often frail older people who have nowhere safe to go with a broken social care system.
About 25% of beds in general wards are occupied by adults otherwise fit to be discharged.
Just since April this year, that's an extra 300,000 days in hospital for patients staying at least a week longer than doctors thought they needed to. 4/
artsyhonker@chrischirp I'm not going to boost these posts without CWs.
TheExecutiveEditor@artsyhonker @chrischirp
Trying to understand the CW metrics and conventions on Mastodon.
Would you expect a CW on each toot? I would have assumed that the fact that all detail was "hidden" in subsequent toots and the first toot was a summary would have provided the equivalent protection?
Trying to understand the CW metrics and conventions on Mastodon.
Would you expect a CW on each toot? I would have assumed that the fact that all detail was "hidden" in subsequent toots and the first toot was a summary would have provided the equivalent protection?
@TheExecutiveEditor
I didn't use a CW because i put no data in the top tweet (public) and then all the following content as an unlisted thread - so people ONLY see that content if they click on the thread to view it.
(At least that's what I understood it does, and what was recommended to me as best practice)
TriciaB@chrischirp @TheExecutiveEditor Yes, seems good to me and seems to follow my newbie understanding of OK, too.
Benjamin S-B 
@chrischirp @TheExecutiveEditor I'm with Christina on this one. The only thing I would have suggested is to add a few hash tags to improve discoverability
@bensb I keep forgetting about hashtags!
I would go back and "delete and redraft" the top tweet with a hashtag but i think that would break the whole thread so I won't. Next time!
@chrischirp 👍 FWIW, I also learnt that you can't edit the top toot of a thread without breaking it when I forgot to add more hashtags 🤦♂️ Could do a public reply with the tags in, but that's not very elegant
Chris GallagherWould editing the first (or any other) toot of a thread break the whole thread? Would be useful to have that confirmed.
@chrischirp
Yes, that was my understanding too. You see the top toot, then click expand to see the rest if you want to. Which seems very similar to what happens when you click the CW button in a single toot.
Yes, that was my understanding too. You see the top toot, then click expand to see the rest if you want to. Which seems very similar to what happens when you click the CW button in a single toot.
@chrischirp @TheExecutiveEditor No, that is not how it works.
Unlisted toots don't appear in the public timeline, but they *do* appear in the timeline of everyone who is following you. So I got every toot in that thread in my timeline with no CW on any of them.
@chrischirp And so did every other person who follows you. And every toot that was boosted appeared in someone *else's* timeline, again with no CW. @TheExecutiveEditor
@chrischirp Having everything after the first toot in a thread is indeed good practice, for keeping your local instance timeline and the federated timeline less cluttered and more chilled. But a toot being unlisted has no impact on its visibility for people who follow you., who will see all of them. @TheExecutiveEditor
@artsyhonker @TheExecutiveEditor oh really? i didn't know that. I had a conversatin with someone about thread best practice and this is what they suggested!
So - should i do BOTH unlisting AND CWs?
@chrischirp @TheExecutiveEditor Yes, if you want people who follow you to have a choice about what they read.
@artsyhonker i thought that's what my method did, but I hadn't considered that other people can boost subsequent tweets and I thought it wouldn't show up for my followers either.
I *am* trying to be respectful and have been using CWs
@chrischirp Yes, I saw you using CWs before, and was pleased and impressed, which was part of why I got so annoyed this time.
Thank you for being responsive about it, however you decide to handle future threads.
@chrischirp @TheExecutiveEditor CW stuff is always worked out in context, in community, and it gets messy sometimes.
For example, it's *not* appropriate for me to ask black or brown people to CW their experiences of racism, or disabled people to CW their experiences of ableism. But it's also not appropriate for me to boost those toots without CWs, because I also have black/brown/disabled followers who sometimes really need a break from that stuff.
@artsyhonker is thre a way to boost someone's post and *add* a CW? I've been wondering about that.
@chrischirp Not easily. I usually reply to the post and put a CW on the reply, with content something like "replying with CW"
@chrischirp The other thing you could do is paste a link to the toot into a new toot iwth a CW. Like I'm doing here, only we already had CWs on the conversation.
Prof Christina Pagel (@[email protected])
Content warning: CW conventions, racism mention
@chrischirp Anyway -- it is late, and I am tired.
Thank you for all your work with COVID data and news, I do very much value your contribution. And thank you also for engaging on the CW stuff, it is tricky to get the hang of at first and I was pretty grumpy.
@artsyhonker it's fine. I get that it must be annoying have all these people come over here trampling around like idiots. sleep well!
Jeri Dansky@TheExecutiveEditor I'm all in favor of CWs when appropriate, and I think you did fine! Nice example of Mastodon threading. And I'm glad you're here.
@jeridansky
@chrischirp
I think that CW's should be context relevant.
I.e. if I follow an account that mostly provides information on a certain subject then or in a certain way that is probably because I want to see that information. However if it were to post something out of the ordinary for it then I would expect a CW.
A lot of accounts seem to function that way from what I have seen.
@chrischirp for context, this is what the creator of Mastodon says:-
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/109323118267580967 and previous toot
@TheExecutiveEditor @chrischirp No, because I was following @chrischirp I saw every single one of the toots in my timeline. Much better to CW every toot than not. If people don't like expanding them individually there is a setting to auto-expand.
@TheExecutiveEditor @chrischirp I've unfollowed for now. I want to stay on top of such news, but I also want to be able to use social media without getting stressed about the state of the world; if other people aren't going to use the existing tools that give me that kind of granular control over *when* I read, then I am going to cut back *what* I read instead.
@TheExecutiveEditor @chrischirp And I'm certainly not going to boost un-CWd threads about NHS crisis into the timelines of people who follow me.
@TheExecutiveEditor @chrischirp So yes: the appropriate thing to do, in my opinion, would be to CW every toot in the thread.
That's easy to do, because when you reply to the first toot it keeps the CW for the next one.
Oh that's helpful to know. I'm also finding a lot of variation in what is considered CW worthy which doesn't help those of us still getting used to the conventions.
Thanks for taking the time to explain things though, now I Ned to see how to "unlist" a toot and why one would bother since it doesn't seem to do what was thought.