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.
We don't have an (sigh) "algorithm" here, so we think of ourselves as liberated from the corrosive engagement-maximizing forces of social media. There is *some* truth to that, but in typical "humanity was the real monster all along" fashion, it undersells what these ML models are actually *doing*.
Twitter, Instagram, et. al. are maximizing engagement by showing you *more* of the kind of posts that'll keep you on the site longer. The kind of posts that distract people, deactivate our collective prefrontal cortex, make us anxious, and generally want to push the lever to get another pellet.
Opting out of the turbo-charging aspect where reactions beget more reactions does *not* opt us out of the fundamental truth that the anxiety-inducing, identity-affirming, mass-audience posts are just going to draw more attention and more approval. We want approval. This is human nature.
Case in point: if I write a long-form blog post that takes me 8 hours to write, that reflects my core competency (Python programming) I will usually get 100 or so 'favs' on it. An anxious (but pithy) post about a recent political development that I am peripherally aware of might do 10x better.
It takes me less time to write, it takes you less time to process, more of you will find it relevant, the whole reward system optimizes for this result. And, even here, there are structural things that reward this as well, although they apply in different degrees to different people.
If I want to take some pictures and post about finding joy in natural beauty, I'm going to get yelled at failing to put in alt text. The website will even yell at me automatically now, to prevent me from posting in the first place. Guess I'll just vent about anxiety instead.
Matt Campbell@glyph Damn, I guess I, and maybe others as well, do need to lighten up about that. Not all media is for everyone; I get that.
@matt FWIW when I see actually visually-impaired people, yourself included, asking for alt text that you're immediately going to _use_, it hardly bothers me at all. And I've extremely rarely felt particularly "yelled at" by you or by any of my other blind followers.
@glyph So, this subthread reminded me of your old personal website, 20+ years ago, where the alt text for the Glyph symbol was something like, "sorry if you're blind, but this is hard to describe, and if you're not, then just use a graphical browser." And that reminded me of the 2015 post where you finally broke down the symbol and what it means: https://blog.glyph.im/2015/01/the-glyph.html
My intent isn't to shame you for that alt text; that was clearly a difficult image to describe well.
@matt this is really the only thing I am looking for from the accessibility community more broadly: accessibility has big costs! It also has big benefits but we are so used to criticizing billion-dollar corporations who are saving like 0.01% on their gross margins by being shit at accessibility that we use the same language to confront people whose entire budget (in time, money, or both) would be immediately destroyed by even a cursory accessibility effort
@glyph Yes, when it comes to visual media in particular, I'm aware that, for example, when I watch a movie that has an audio description track, the only reason we're able to enjoy that is because the likes of Disney can easily afford that extra work. The same goes for accessibility in video games; the big studios can afford to put extra work into accessibility, but indie developers often can't, depending on the kind of game.