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 it’s so much easier for them to negotiate a deal with a central owner of non-federated social media to artificially force their posts into your view.
That doesn’t work here if there is an instance devoted to fire and forget with no community participation I’d personally block it at the instance level.
It’s amazing to me that corporations have positions for social media posters but not necessarily participatory users. It’s all about an initial hook, click and view counts.
I don’t care who sees my posts here some are just into the void. I can be as weird as I want to be. Also I have no relatives that call when I post ambiguous song lyrics worried about my mental health.
EVHaste
Patrick Loftus 🖖