GlyphThere's been a lot of fretting recently—some of it from me—about there being Too Much Politics On Here, encouraging people to (A) stop posting so much about it and (B) post about other things. This is a valid concern but I want to take a moment to put a structural lens on this problem.
aeva@glyph this is maybe orthogonal to your thread but a bit of a rhetorical puzzle I've been chewing on lately is how to concisely and memorably communicate "stress is literally physically painfully destroying my body, please, I'm begging you, stop posting misleading Headlines and panic speculation if you're going to talk about current events don't crowd source debunking misinformation please just put in the 30 minutes of rigor yourself" without it reading or reducing to "duh hur im apolitical"
council of anthonys@aeva @glyph maybe there's an in between ui/ux option where we don't algorithmically decide what to show, but we do group and label content topics? Kinda how mastodon currently has the jagged separation stubs at the end of sections of content that I think is organized by time posted / posts you missed
@ant @glyph I've got a private discord for a specific group of local friends and we've got basically two rules the first being "do not make me add rules" and the second being "do not post the news" and this has worked great for years. Our "MAU" is awesome. What's really surprised me is that people who have moved away have become more active.
@ant @glyph group curation is an interesting idea, but I'm a bit nervous about group labeling because that also can create consequences to mobbing which I should hope there's ample examples to point to that being something we should avoid.
but we definitely need tools for better community resilience against corrosive things. eg headlines on news webpages are basically designed to be corrosive because they're trying to extract audiences from social media networks.
@aeva @glyph that's neat, I am the two buttons sweating guy meme thinking about the need to spread news to inform versus just amplifying the panic. It entirely depends on the receiving user's ever changing state of mind, so it seems like a technical piece missing is first-class/mandatory preference setting which is a pretty high barrier to entry and won't beat out plug-and-play options. "Don't post the news" unfortunately can't work for a massive federated network
@ant @glyph you are not being educated by a headline, you are being manipulated; and since you don't read the article before posting about it (lol it's paywalled) the hot takes and critical analysis and speculation may as well be completely and fully detached from reality. you are not educating the general public *you have an addiction*.
@ant @glyph like this is literally a public health crisis as much as anything. it's silly to throw up our hands and say "we can't do it! we can't do it! mastodon is just too big!" someone else is going to "solve" the problem for us if we don't assuming our network doesn't just completely collapse before that
@aeva @glyph I completely agree with you and I'm not saying it's too big I'm saying blanket imposing a rule on everyone online that we don't share news is practically impossible. I like your thinking and feel that thoughts like this should be funnelled toward modifying the default behavior of the software that most people necessarily just use rather than inspect. Along your approach we build configurable info bubble shields around local communities, bigger and broader than individual filters
@aeva @glyph totally lol but education and information are very different concerns, I agree that we have generally far too much information to keep pace with the slower task of education. We need a better bouncer to pace our intake, until then we are bottlenecked and can barely think critically about anything.
@ant @glyph here's some information I just made up, the entire state of Nebraska is a death camp! they're shoveling babies into meat grinders! thousands of babies a second! ah! why is nobody talking about this! you've been informed, so now you're complicit too unless you talk about it!
aren't you glad you're "informed" now?
@aeva @glyph while it's very damaging to absorb all the gruesome details all the time, yes, I am glad that I know roughly how bad things are so that I am inoculated against predatory proselytizers who spend billions of dollars trying to convince me that everything is fine and it's actually brown peoples' fault. My strategy has been the more privilege I have the more I should endure the hell for the purposes of inoculation and distillation into consumable, high level stories about the torment
@aeva @glyph if my peers who are more brutalized than me can't take another single hit, but I can, I might be able to stop them from sinking into right wing propaganda because I've built a collage of pain and can easily draw on it to point out that no, it isn't "too much generosity" or "too much tolerance" causing you pain, it's a handful of very powerful people with attitudes that cascade symbiotically with those of gradations of similarly minded cretins' hell-bent on slavery
@aeva @glyph well the person I was having a meaningful conversation with blocked me because they became exasperated that I was articulating a different opinion than them. I suppose this is a great example of their desired UI/UX - little dictators make rules and anyone who doesn't agree enough doesn't exist. I am interested in building a comms interaction that doesn't encourage this, and some people justly having sharp boundaries is not a problem to me.