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.
Alexander 🐘@annaleen how would you prevent screenshots? How would you prevent, that the url to a toot is copied and pasted?
You cannot.
And that's not possible, it's better to accept that and make quotes a feature. This way, it can be controlled how it looks and behaves.
@alexs77 Disagree. Nobody can stamp out all forms of abuse, but we can add some friction. Given what we learned from Twitter, it's clear that adding some friction can actually make a big difference.
@annaleen this "friction" doesn't make it harder to harass a person. It only harms persons that should be protected. To have better protection, a working quote toot feature should be there, so that quoted persons can directly see, where they are quoted.
Not having such a feature is harmful.
[MOVED] Neopolitan@tn5421 @annaleen true. With this friction, it's easier to harass people. Good use cases suffer, though. If I'm annoyed by a toot, it's easy enough to copy the url or Screenshot and poste that, adding a comment like "what a moron". Because then "energy" isn't much of an issue.
But for adding something like "look that's nice" - I often couldn't be bothered.
Having no quote feature achieves the opposite of what is actually wanted.