It’s been a weird couple days; I keep running into this talking point that “journalists won’t use Mastodon unless we incentivize engagement farming”.
Meanwhile I’m having a *great* experience here, because I use it to— I dunno— actually talk to people and form relationships?
I reject the premise that mastodon isn’t useful for reporters. I think it’s more accurate that modern news orgs use social media in purely extractive ways.
You might get more reporters that way, but you won’t like them.
I think if we’re honest with ourselves, the “service” most reporters provide on social media is entirely self-serving. A one-way firehose of signal boosting and self promotion.
“Look at me! I wrote this story. Click on it!”
And then you ask them a question, or have a correction, and nobody reads it, because Wired doesn’t care about building a community, just reaching a consumer. It’s fire and forget.
We already have a tool for that, it’s RSS. What value does reposting a link here provide?
@Haste I'm imagining a whole lot of reasons why you could expect better turnaround from social media posts, even if you treat it just like a feed and never reply to anything. Primarily engagement--like my blog probably won't get any attention not only because it sucks but also because there's no way to engage with it. Until I fix that I'm probably wasting time.
I can add comments to my site but that's going to be a new service they have to join or I'm enabling social media commentary.
EVHaste
derptron