Nathan LawrenceNov 19, 2022
I miss quotes, not because I wanna chase clout (who cares, I’m over that in life) but because sometimes I want to boost something up while saying why I think it’s so interesting.
Show threadDuncan BabbageNov 19, 2022

@nathan I get it. I missed Quote reposts too. But reflecting on birdsite, I was once bullied by a famous (left leaning, libertarian) account who quote tweeted to deride me after I politely disagreed with him on something, thus siccing many followers on me.

Mind you, I had another famous amount use old school RT to deliberately mis-quote me in a similar sitn, raising followers’ ire even more. So… bullies gonna bully.

Quote tweets make it too easy to talk about rather than to someone.

Show threadNathan Lawrence

@babbage Unfortunately, I don’t think having quoting or not is what will fix this, because the ultimate way of creating this kind of attack tends to involve cutting a person’s own voice off entirely with things like screenshots anyway.

Removing a formal path to remixing and pushing people toward these alternatives removes a path of accountability and easy system for users to trace context if they’re so inclined. I think those tools are really valuable.

Nov 19, 2022 at 9:30amWeb
Show threadDuncan BabbageNov 19, 2022

@nathan that’s a fair counterpoint. Though even screenshots do add some friction as others have to manually navigate to your account to pile on. But you’re right, being untraceable has definite cons.

As I understand it, the kind of reasons I outlined are ~the explanation behind the Mastodon design decision, and I think will be highly resistant to change. But we’ll see.