I will admit I still don't understand what's so offensive about my pointing out the unsafe, confusing semantics of the Mastodon PM mechanism, or why this topic seems to provoke so much anger.

Basically, I have learned nothing from your yelling.

Anyway, while I don't understand why this pisses some people off so much, or why they take my critique of the Mastodon PM semantics so personally, it's now very clear that it does piss some people off quite a bit.

But I'm not going to let that stop me. I'm an expert on security and privacy. And my job is, in large part, to act as a public intellectual. Warning people of dangerous designs that could cause them harm is what I do. If doing so makes me an asshole, so be it.

It's sometimes difficult to remember that communications platforms, including social media platforms like this one, attract a very wide variety of users with a wide range of circumstances. The same systems we might use only for trivial chitchat are likely also being used by political dissidents, labor organizers, and others for whom mistakes can have very serious consequences.

Making social media platforms reliably usable is important, even if it might not seem so to us personally.

@mattblaze I also have impression most social media platforms are designed and built by 20-somethings. whereas most of humanity will be in that age 30 to 90 span. soooooo many UIs are optimized for people with perfect eyesight, giant screens, no glare, high ISP bandwith with low latency and seemless avail. if any one of those is NOT tru for an enduser theyre going to have a shitty UX

tiny fonts, low contrast, tiny buttons, destructive action buttons adjacent to innocent common ones etc