Thanasis KiniasStarting to see commercial accounts spamming hashtags on here. As Mastodon becomes more mainstream, it’s probably inevitable that businesses are going to try to use it for marketing, but I don’t feel like there’s anything like consensus around what the boundaries should be.
harrypujols™@tkinias the platform unfortunately chose against verification, and that’s going to bring back old problems that were resolved with a centralized approach, specially phishing.
Tina 
@tkinias I would say do what I’ve done before. Block and move on
OnMSFT on Mastodon@tkinias At the same time, brand interaction is one of Twitter's strengths - being able to flatten the hierarchy and reach out directly to business. It's not only top down marketing, but cut through the hoops customer service.
@onmsft
I dunno. Having a corporate PR account sealion into my mentions if I discussed their product was actually one of the more annoying things about Twitter, and I really hope not to have that replicated here.
I never once had an interaction with a corporate account on there actually resolve my problem.
Jim Carroll - Future Guy
@jimcarroll
the hope is that those of us old enough to remember the bad old days of out-of-control Usenet and e-mail spam take action to nip it in the bud on here
the hope is that those of us old enough to remember the bad old days of out-of-control Usenet and e-mail spam take action to nip it in the bud on here
I have no doubt that corporates will arrive just as they did in '94.
I think the interesting thing is the distributed architecture of this thing - filtering control is i the hands of each instance. So perhaps a new culture of behaivior might be borne.
On the other hand, while depressed about tech last month because of the bird site, I wrote this into my Daily Inspiration:
@jimcarroll
at least we shouldn’t have problems like open relays—the difference from 1994 is that now we know that spammers and scammers have to be actively thwarted and we can’t just naïvely assume good faith from everybody on the Internet
at least we shouldn’t have problems like open relays—the difference from 1994 is that now we know that spammers and scammers have to be actively thwarted and we can’t just naïvely assume good faith from everybody on the Internet
Matilda@tkinias Well, I look forward to blocking them then. I have noticed some actual people doing stealth self-promotion by including additional unrelated to their topic hashtags that are trending and I am unimpressed with that toxic twitter-esque behavior…