Mastodawn

Mastodon Migration Feb 14

@heliomass

☝️ Very interesting and informative article on Quote Posting. Really appreciate that the Mastodon dev team is talking to the community and thinking this through...

"In order to mitigate these issues, we plan to include several features in our implementation:
-You will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted at all.
-You will be notified when someone quotes you.
-You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time."

#QuotePost

Lauren Weinstein Feb 14

@mastodonmigration @heliomass The ability to remove quoted posts from quoting posts is a recipe for misinformation disasters, since it removes the context of the post that did the quoting. I would strenuously and publicly object to this. I would also note that the ability to say you don't want posts quoted could open a can of worms, since anyone who really wanted to quote a public post could do so with a screen grab of the post of interest, creating the potential for new battles.

Morgan ⚧️Feb 14

@lauren @mastodonmigration @heliomass if there's a notice of "this was a quote post but the original author pulled out" it's not *mis*information, just a *lack* of information. No one is entitled to the information in my posts. So if someone does a quote post and the original quoted post isn't in it, you can just scroll and accept that you don't have all the information! Everyone knowing the context of every post is NOT more important than safety.

@raphaelmorgan @mastodonmigration @heliomass Lack of foundational information can be equally dangerous on a long and complex thread.

Morgan ⚧️Feb 15

@lauren @mastodonmigration @heliomass if someone is harassing me, I frankly don't care what information you can see. It will not kill you not to see my post. What do you do when people block you, cry to their admins that you don't have all the information so you need them to undo it?

There is no way that seeing a quote post missing a quote is all that dangerous. If you don't have all the info, just scroll

Morgan ⚧️Feb 15

@lauren as long as there's an indication that it was once a quote post, I cannot overstate how easy it is to go "damn, no context, guess I don't get to know"

@raphaelmorgan You're assuming most people pay enough attention to realize this. Actually, they usually don't, and misunderstandings based on loss of context (or not even realizing the context was lost) can quickly get out of control. I saw this firsthand at Google when the Google+/YouTube comments integration took place, something I argued strenuously against and that was eventually rescinded, but not before Google+ was seriously damaged reputationally.

Morgan ⚧️Feb 15

@lauren if people are inclined to see a post and run with it without context (and you're right, they are), then we absolutely should not be forcing people to keep our posts in someone else's thread without context. If them not seeing my post will lead to them jumping to conclusions, them seeing my out-of-context post will lead to a dogpile of harassment. I will die on the hill that we should try to avoid dogpiles and harassment. Why are you so insistent that we shouldn't?

@raphaelmorgan What I'm saying is that I saw at scale the problems that can occur with deleted posts and edited posts and other kinds of contextual problems related to threads, both related to G+ and YouTube, during my times working inside Google. And based on that experience having seen what happens at scales ranging from tiny to enormous, my view is that the proposed methodology for dealing with quoted posts on Mastodon is repeating some of the mistakes I saw. But as I said, if that's the path Mastodon devs wants to take, that's their choice of course. And like I said earlier, good luck. I mean that. Cause it's gonna be needed, and I don't want to see Mastodon pulled into new sets of problems, because I do enjoy Mastodon. And that's about all I have to say about this.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan Your mistake is thinking that the problems came from mechanisms of interaction and not from the toxicity of having the platform run and moderated by people with no interest in wellbeing of the community, only engagement and data mining metrics.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan And yes, Google has been Evil since the beginning. I'm sorry that's hard to come to terms with for people who were working there, but there's no need to project that onto communities who are building a future that's not controlled by the likes of them.

Lauren Weinstein

@dalias @raphaelmorgan Google was not evil from the beginning. It certainly made a lot of mistakes early on, and over the years matured into world class expertise in a bunch of important areas, especially security and privacy. Absolutely top notch. I've worked with many of the involved individuals. G+ was problematic for several reasons (it really began as more of an identity service than a standalone social media platform, and the YouTube comments integration was an absolute train wreck that was rescinded too late). In my view, it's been rapidly downhill at Google since Sundar took over, but there was a bunch of very good years of which Googlers can be very proud of their work.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan When I say Google was always evil, I don't mean the people working there weren't well meaning, but the system was evil all along because it was predicated on debt to investors who expected huge returns.

I watched for decades as people in various parts of the company believed they were doing good and it was "just a coincidence" that the things they were doing were enabling bad actors and that they somehow weren't assigned/allowed to do the obvious things to fix that.

@dalias @raphaelmorgan I am not anti-capitalism, and I do not object to the corporate model per se. Compared to many firms, Google managed a decent balance for many years. Again, I consider the atmosphere under Sundar to be very different and frankly very sad to see.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan There's a difference between not objecting to the corporate model and not objecting to the VC model. The claim that the latter necessarily produces evil is much weaker than the claim that corporate model in general produces evil.