Annalee Newitz 🍜Let me put a phrase into your mind: nonconsensual virality. It's why quote-posts on Twitter led to harassment. People's words stolen, taken out of context, used purely to incite a mob of griefers. The answer is to give #Mastodon users control over whether someone else can quote-post them, with a simple "quote or not" setting that can be set before or after the post goes up. We should be allowed to stop people from taking our posts viral without our consent.
I've been a journalist for over twenty years -- I've written for venues ranging from tiny zines to the New York Times. And I think users should have control over quote-posts. If a journo wants to report something that they can’t quote-post, I believe that the ten-second friction required to cut-and-paste some text, or to screengrab it, is helpful to the journalistic process. Taking a beat to consider whether we really want to quote something, and how we want to frame it? Literally our job.
Femme Malheureuse@annaleen This. I've had to think harder about this because I also had to write alt-text to accompany the image embedded with a link. It's definitely a more thoughtful process.
I can understand marginalized persons especially BIPOC want QT, but cultural reasons are a different driver than productivity.
We should be asking what marginalized communities *need* to achieve their aims rather than ask if they want what was provided with little to no BIPOC input at a commercial platform.