Charlie Stross@annaleen is absolutely right when she says this, and here's a demonstration. I mean, OCR of screecaps is literally an OS-provided service these days:
Steven L. Johnson
Annalee Newitz 🍜
Kevin Riggle
mrzaius🚸@kevinriggle @annaleen @steven @cstross I mean, even if you're no Android fanboy, you can still use Google Lens or other third party parsing.
"I've been a journalist for over twenty years I've written for venues ranging from tiny zines to the New York Times. And 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." -Lens
The two inconsequential punctuation errors I see are plenty close enough for alt text
Cavyherd@kevinriggle @annaleen @steven @cstross
One hack here: ctrl-+ zoom to enlarge before screencapping will provide better OCR accuracy.
Judd Storrs@kevinriggle @cavyherd @annaleen @steven @cstross In the year 2000 Github will become curated photo albums of Hollerith cards.
Kate Branden@kevinriggle @annaleen @cavyherd @steven @cstross So leave it as text. Those of use who have been on the other site from the beginning spent years copying and pasting text to make a quote post, so I can say from experience it’s easy to do. You can still include a link to track back to the original.
@annaleen @cstross Agreed, adding a link would address provider a pointer back to original context. And, it's great that Mastodon has an edit button so @cstross can go back and add the missing link.
It sounds like we are in agreement as to what a good QT looks like... so I guess the question then is: should it require a multi-step error-prone manual process or should it be implemented more directly as a standard client feature to ensure all those elements are there in every QT?