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.
Irwin Sheer@annaleen I think it has been overlooked that you can already quote post by including a link to the original post.
Annalee Newitz (@[email protected])
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.
@irwinsheer I have been surprised by how many people don't seem to realize this? Or they think it's too hard to do as compared to a quote-post?
Jim RichardsonInserting the link to a toot at present does not notify the original poster, whereas a good implementation of Annalee's proposal would.
Of course, bad actors could still avoid notifying by using a screenshot or a link, as they can now. But benign users of QT would be happy that the OP was notified.
Josh Soref@jimrhiz @annaleen @irwinsheer I'd expect ActivityPub agents to respect the HTTP standard and include the Referer [sic] header which would mean that their servers could discover those inbound linking elements as users traverse the graph.
Kevin@irwinsheer @annaleen the objection is that it doesn’t show the quoted post inline. I feel it could lead to more sensational, click-bait commentary to entice people to click, or people will just read the comment out of context. If I read “this was a good book” with a link, I don’t know if it’s worth my time. People will naturally gravitate to hyperbole like “This book changed my life!” and then I’ve wasted effort to find out it’s about toads in Guatemala. No offense to toad aficionados.