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.
@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