Mastodawn

Shrig 🐌Dec 24, 2022

Hot take: Journalists already have websites and blogs and newspapers and magazines and TV and podcasts and newsletters to report in, is it essential that should cross into social media as a publishing platform when social media is (or should be?) inherently a social space and not a publishing space?
Imagine a public forum of old (pre-internet), you'd expect people to bring articles within that space from outside to discuss, not a big newspaper rack at the centre to direct the conversation right?

Shrig 🐌Dec 24, 2022

I'm not 100% against news publishing here, if each news org have their own instance to block/follow accordingly btw, I just really don't think it's the be all and end all if it doesn't take off here. I don't see the problem, if we're here to hang out together and not have stuff randomply thrown at us all the time (often intaling stressful emotional whiplash, and from people with little regard to content warnings etc at that)

Shrig 🐌Dec 24, 2022

What I'd rather see is an RSS renascence, so social media can happen here in the social realm, and news consumed in the way more appropriate purpose-built space of feed readers. That separation is *way* healthier and works better for all involved surely?

Shrig 🐌Dec 24, 2022

Also, as I'm sure we all know: Using social media as a publishing platform in combination with piss-poor moderation has been one of the key grounds the "culture war" is nurtured on. The nastiest voices rise to the top (and find each other!), under "news" posts penned to be as emotionally charged and engagement-pandering as possible. 1/2

Shrig 🐌Dec 24, 2022

Do we need that to seep into every corner of the social media space? Do we even need to "engage" with news beyond consuming it? It's an "absolutely fucking not" from me.
Newsorgs shouldn't be facilitating the "conversation" (more often than not just willfully hosting reems of hate speech to sell ads) 2/2

katrina Dec 24, 2022

@Shrigglepuss "Do we even need to "engage" with news beyond consuming it?"
I think yes, we do.

@katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss yeah - well. apologies for replying to this old remark, but it's kind of perennially relevant... it just makes a good segue for what we want to say, we aren't trying to argue

the manner of engaging with news that we personally prefer is doing something about it

like getting out in the world and taking action to change the course of events

Irenes (many)Apr 6

@katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss of course it is also important to talk with our friends - the people we have bi-directional relationships with - about current events and figure out what we collectively think about them. that's probably the form of engagement you were referencing, and we do agree that it's a good thing when approached properly

Irenes (many)Apr 6

@katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss it's just that directly replying to the author of a piece is essentially never the best way to have those conversations.

Irenes (many)Apr 6

@katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss the relationship between reader and author is not bidirectional, it's parasocial. we are not friends with a journalist simply because we read their articles, and if everyone directs their commentary inward towards a journalist, the sheer mass of it will seem like harassment no matter how friendly everyone tries to be. that is the nature of social media fan-in, as twitter should have demonstrated to everyone by now.

Irenes (many)Apr 6

@katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss additionally, putting our contributions to any discussion in a highly-visible thread such as the journalist author's original post causes it to be seen by people we don't directly know and might be ideologically opposed to, which results in the conversations that follow on from it being more incendiary and less community-driven

it just feeds reactionary thinking habits, all around

🫧 socialcoding..Apr 6

@ireneista @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss

Yes, there's a place for everything, and our future online social networks should better facilitate that people constantly move into and out of different social contexts that come with different cultures, implied and expected behavior, social norms, etc. And adjust their communication style accordingly. This can only work well if and only if there's enough awareness about these contexts, and online between people communicating remotely we need a measure of tech support to help with that.

Fedi with its majority installed base representing traditional content publishing social networks in a more decentralized manner, favors influencer-style social networking. 'Talking' online on these channels represents standing on the central market square on a soapbox. Even for our menial messages we shout, "I bought carrots today". More substantive utterings are weighed critically against a random crowd, who may come in from anywhere on context collapse.

Irenes (many)Apr 6

@smallcircles @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss absolutely agreed. the nature of online communication is that, by default, the distinctions between social contexts and physical settings and so on are erased, which... we've written a bit* about something we call "the cybernetic bias", the tendency to believe that erasing distinctions is a good thing by default... but these particular distinctions are really important and need to be carried forward

Irenes (many)Apr 6

@smallcircles @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss

* https://irenes.space/leaves/2024-10-08-the-cybernetic-bias

the cybernetic bias -- Leaves Given to the Wind

🫧 socialcoding..Apr 6

@ireneista @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss

I like that term.

For SX I phrase it like a severe underestimation on how being separated by copper and glassfibre wires completely changes the social dynamics in ways we aren't really aware of.

Especially if we consider 'online' to be just an extra added mode of communication. It is much more than a wire. We are truly entering, like a different virtual world. Offline centuries of social interaction honed our complex social constructs that are able to uphold modern society, and we are so used to them that we hardly still notice how they work on us.

If we project that and expect it to work the same way online, it is obvious it will not turn out all that well. We have still to *learn* what it truly means to be social online. We have to Reimagine social.

Esp. wrt to the current state of social online, where Big Tech and hypercapitalism used our technoverse to thoroughly disrupts the fabric of society, eroding the social cohesion that existed

🫧 socialcoding..Apr 7

@ireneista @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss

I think online the most missed element are all the countless micro signals, most of which we aren't actively aware of when we communicate with other people face-to-face in the same room. Online comms is even not comparable to standing in the same room separated by a divider wall, where a ton of information is conveyed by intonation, timing, all the sounds and hesitations we make around our spoken words.

In text communicaiton we try to make up for it.. ha ha lolz 🤣 with emoji language and stuff like that. And other online cultural habits. Those are likely much less commonly well-understood than, say, interpreting the micro expressions that cross someone's face when they speak.

Good UX and SX design can do a ton to help convey meaning to plain text, to help add more nuance and meaning and less likelihood for miscommunications to occur.

For SX patterns I mull on Communication profiles that serve as comm channel overlays and set social context.

Irenes (many)Apr 7

@smallcircles @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss absolutely, that all makes sense

🫧 socialcoding..Apr 11

@ireneista @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss

Besides some potential for nerdsniping you on subject matter of #Evolution and #Emergence and how that *potentially* relates to #fedi techz, I wrote a blog post on the topic of #GrassrootsOpenStandards that provide proper mechanisms to introduce #Communication profiles as channel overlays, and stuff like that. Have a look at..

https://social.coop/@smallcircles/116379158584600016

Irenes (many)Apr 11

@smallcircles @katrinatransfem @Shrigglepuss thank you! we'll give it a read when spoons permit

toolbear#🌶️Apr 6

@ireneista
In your opinion, does quote posting address your concerns? Or is it just a variation on replying to the journalist's thread (because of the affordance to discover every quote post)?
@katrinatransfem @[email protected]

Irenes (many)Apr 6

@toolbear @katrinatransfem oh quote posting is way worse, it decontextualizes things. when used by people who genuinely want to have a conversation, quote posting is somewhat damaging, but manageable, but it provides way too much fodder to people who want to actively encourage unintended interpretations of the source material, because it provides an opportunity to prime readers to think about it in certain terms before actually seeing any of it