There are a few fundamentally broken things about how Mastodon posts work that are terrible vectors for abuse, as well as being bad for basic usability. Maybe they are fixable, I don't know. To be clear: I am a fan of Mastodon.... https://jwz.org/b/ykC_
@jwz If your concept became reality, it'd create a third thread architecture in the #Fediverse.
#Mastodon and, AFAIK, everything else based on #ActivityPub has threads tied together from single posts more or less loosely.
#Friendica, #Hubzilla and #Streams have blog-style/Facebook-style/Tumblr-style/... threads which consist of exactly one post, the start post, and comments. Comments always inherit the access permissions of the start post. Whoever wrote the start post can delete any comment anywhere in the thread; I'm not sure if this deletion is actually being federated.
So, in addition to post-plus-post-plus-post and one-post-plus-comments, there'd be only-one-post-with-metadata. And the Fediverse projects would have to convert back and forth all the time.
This is exactly how twitter always worked. To see everyone's posts you just needed to log out our use incognito.
And facebook to a lesser extent-- facebook works more the way you describe, since it's all about private groups and smaller and smaller circles where people become uglier and uglier.
Never thought that being able to hide posts was a good thing. Stop them from spreading? Yes. But keep what was said public--
I find it more disturbing that people can make their posts vanish.
@futurebird@jwz I disagree with @jwz on that point, but think he is right that the model in which a post "owns" its replies, a model supported by ActivityPub but not by Mastodon, would work better: everyone would see a consistent set of replies and they would reside on the original poster's instance (at least, the master copies were, other instances might cache them), and it would be possible to delete offensive or abusive replies.
@futurebird@jwz
I think blocking is useful only in niche cases and offers little over muting offenders.
Offenders see that they have been blocked and gloat about it. Muting removes them from my TL but they still see me — if that irritates the evil ones or makes them lose their time, or convinces the good faith idiots, so much the better.
My use case for blocks is for people I strongly disapprove of and who use my images to further their own aims.
Hey, everybody, check out the above. @jwz explains some of the brokenness of the heart of Mastodon. I strongly concur, and will probably rant at great length about this later.
@jwz "I own the replies to my post" is very important. A lot of grief on the Internet happened because people didn't know they could (and should) delete jerks from their own posts (regardless of platform), rather than give up on comments ever being useful.
@isagalaev@jwz I agree. In a post-and-reply model (in contrast to a post-and-comment model) it is mandatory that there must not be special rules for the first post in a thread. There are no comments, and you own your own posts, only, not the threads you started. That's why there are platforms using a post-and-comment model like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. I hate them, though. I prefer the post-and-reply model, and I prefer to connect my posts to existing threads. It's important to me.
@isagalaev@jwz
Holy shit it is so nice to hear people say this aloud. I've been quietly over here in my corner thinking about launching my own entire rant to this point wondering if I was the only person who got this.
I find Mastodon's complete failure to grasp/implement this principle both maddening and incredibly ironic. This has been, until quite recently, the number one problem with Twitter (and similar systems like G+), and what caused it to be such an utter shit show. Mastodon's failure to allow users to own their comments and provide them with moderator tools reconstitutes exactly the toxic dynamics of Twitter. Mastodon has tried to compensate for this with a model that has the people running instances functioning as moderators, which is a "solution" of such terrible long-term consequences as to be indistinguishable from active sabotage of the Fediverse.
@siderea@isagalaev@jwz This makes me think of YouTube comments where the video author has total control to delete all criticism.
While this is great for moderation when dealing with harassment it is not so great when dealing with scammers or conspiracy theorists posting who have actively bad intentions.
With this level of control you could offer questionable ideas or promote harmful prospects without peer-review or expressed skepticism in the replies.
This would work with a very pro-active server moderation team like say, many small Mastodon servers, but not so good in a more relaxed larger public forum.
It has pros and cons to be aware of. Thank you for the thought experiment, this bears careful considering.
@cragsand, Nothing about YouTube comments constitutes "peer review", in even the most generous, informal sense of the term, and nothing about critical comments has in any way mitigated any of the alt-right nonsense - or any other kind of nonsense - on YouTube.
There is nothing about being able to comment on a YouTube video which is effective at mitigating its harms. The idea that we need to have unmoderatable YouTube comments because somehow that's doing some good, is simply false.
If you have been laboring under the misapprehension that yelling at somebody in the comments on their video somehow alerts the general public to how and why they are spreading misinformation? You're kidding yourself.
I expect this is an unpopular opinion, because people want to think that their being flame warriors in the comment sections of videos is actually a meaningful form of activism, but the thing that actually moves the needle on misinformation and the alt-right pipeline is other videos.
And this is only more and more true the more and more followers/viewers a video has. If a million people watch a video, and a thousand of them leave comments, how many of the viewers of that video do you think are actually ever even going to see your thoughtful takedown of the faux facts in the video?
And exactly how much rebuttal do you think you're going to cram into a YouTube comment? While the video itself is, what, 10 minutes long? A half an hour?
These are very obvious reasons why commenting on videos is pretty much useless to redress their misinformation, especially in comparison to video rebuttals.
But making a video rebuttal, of course, is hard work, it's time-consuming, it requires certain skills, and it requires having your own reach, which you have to develop for yourself.
I understand why most people would not want to do that. But just because the effective approach is unappealing doesn't mean the appealing approach is effective.
@siderea@isagalaev@jwz I agree with you that YouTube comments where you can up/downvote don't really translate to Mastodon and would like to see the feature described implemented. It's having one side be in complete control of a discussion by default that I'm concerned about.
Not every poster wants a discussion at all of course and if a thread is started with this option on, it should be indicated in the initial post that replies are at the discretion of the poster. An option to only allow people you follow to reply would also be a great option to have. If you want an open discussion you'd have third party moderators and turn this off.
For content on YouTube, reading comments and checking up/downvote ratio (was) used that to get an initial take on video accuracy. Less so now since they removed it and the author can delete any comments that are in disagreement. Many users still install third party extensions to recover that functionality to some degree like: https://returnyoutubedislike.com
@jwz Your solution gives the individual control over the replies to their posts, but also empowers them to nuke corrections, debunkers, and alternative povs that don't meet with their approval. As you point out, this isn't blogging. It's microblogging, and the openness of it was one of the things that popularized the Twitter experience in the first place. Does mitigating random personal abuse outweigh the collective need to mitigate propaganda and misinformation? I'm not sure.
@jwz Glad a notable voice is mentioning this. Sooner we fix it the better. The DDoS thing seems like it will be fixed. But the shit on the shoe thing is bad. Blocking users is a nice tool but wrong for this problem. My main objective is to protect other people, it's a bit late for myself by the time I'm looking for the delete comment button. Yeah, somebody could misuse it, but it's the lesser problem, and anyway the disliked and comment-deletion counters would remain.
As a matter of principle, I don't believe there is such a thing as misusing a delete button in such context.
LiveJournal worked under this paradigm, and it was splendid. Dreamwidth still does. In the culture of those platforms, every poster has their own space - which has been described as a living room - and may shape the culture and the norms of that space entirely to their liking. Nobody is entitled to tell a poster how to run their space. If you don't like how somebody is moderating their space, you are entitled not participate in it.
The idea that there can be some form of using delete on comments others have left in one's own space that constitutes "misuse" arises out of a sense of entitlement to go into other people's spaces leave comments in them.
I think that entitlement is absolutely insane, and part of the toxic culture of platforms like Twitter. No one has any such right. If somebody lets you leave comments in their space, you are a guest.
@siderea But I feel like even though it is necessary to be able to delete vile comments, the downside is distortion. Like let's say the OP posts some bad misinformation and you mention that it has been debunked and provide a URL. But they tolerate no corrections so they immediately delete anything that doesn't fit the narrative. It'd be nice if there was at least a sign that all is not well (hence "disapproves" reaction counter not just "likes", and/or tombstone ("comment was deleted").
@jaymcor I see what you're saying, after all Twitter forces those people to tolerate having other people comment on their posts and that's why Twitter is such an absolute bastion against the alt right and all its misinformation.
What you're saying sounds sensible and is actually insane. The idea that the platform should enforce against all users that any other user can come and scrawl whatever they want on their comments because, you imagine, it is some sort of corrective to falsehood? Yeah nah. That doesn't work. Twitter is proof of that. So frankly is YouTube.
But what implementing it does achieve is it makes it possible to hate mob minorities very effectively.
@jaymcor
I promise you giving everyone the ability to delete the garbage that the alt right will leave in your comments given a chance will do infinitely more to contain and tamp down falsehood then giving them free rein.
I mean that's why moderation exists at all to begin with. What we have here on the Fediverse, because each poster doesn't have moderator authority over their own spaces, is a system whereby, instead of every person moderating their own space - which distributes the labor of moderation fairly - we make users have to ask an authority figure to do their moderation for them, and we dump all of the considerable labor of moderation on the shoulders of the poor bastards who volunteered to run the instance.
@siderea We're in agreement that having a delete-comment button is much preferable to not having one. Which is, to be fair, what I said, I just probably didn't say it clearly.
Are you... actually proposing that a distributed discussion forum system that basically didn't meaningfully support moderation and forced users to rely on killfiles, and was so utterly defenseless it was eradicated merely by being linked to by AOL is some sort of positive model? "Do you believe USENET was similarly broken" jfc. USENET was the goddamned Hindenburg of social media.
@jwz 100% all of this. And also RIP your replies because I have made similar comments before and the reflexive defenses on here are gonna be exhausting.
@jwz
OCR of the attached image :
Mastodon's Mastodon'ts
There are a few fundamentaly broken things about how
Mastodon posts work that are terrible vectors for abuse,
as well as being bad for basic usability. Maybe they are
fixable, I don't know.
To be clear: I am a fan of Mastodon. I have been enjoying
my time there much more than I ever enjoyed Twitter or
Facebook or instagram. And I am 100% in the "I won't
touch anything Jack Dorsey has touched" camp. That is
absolutely and forever disqualifying.
Howeve, it is not ideal. It needs fixin'.
• When you block someone, they don't necessarily stop seeing your posts. Maybe they
do, maybe not. "They stop seeing them on X but if they go to Y they can still see it, oh,
but they can still see it on X if they follow someone who"AAAUUGHH STOP, NO.
Blocking on Mastodon does not work the way anyone understands or expects blocking
to work.
You could have copy pasted the text from the page to image description or at the very least told that screenshot is of the text which is behind the hyperlink in the post
@jef@jwz Yep it has to be flexible if the goal is to support all conceivable kinds of social networking.
Mastodon started out as an OStatus server though. I don't know that spec, maybe it was more restrictive and that's why things like this aren't used (yet)?
@jwz You make a lot of good points, certainly some that the developers could take to heart.
I think you didn’t consider the idea that there is a kind of ‘nuclear option’- if you delete your original post, I think the ugly reply goes into limbo and won’t be seen anymore.
Certainly at least not through your account.
Deleting the OP seems to sort of vaporize the thread.
Unless I’m wrong!
Yeah, I've used the nuclear option, myself. Just want to be sure you understand that you are suggesting that if say, somebody posts a racist response among the dozens/scores/hundreds of good comments on a post, the solution to the racist hijacking one's reach is to nuke the entire conversation, from the original OP down through all of the perfectly meritorious comments.
Yes, that in fact works to revoke the appropriated reach the racist availed themselves of. Do you maybe see the problem with that? Do you appreciate how that scales up racism as an interpersonal behavior from mere harassment to a viable DoS?
@siderea@hopeward@jwz In my experience, it's difficult to search for old Mastodon posts. It's almost like everything gets nuked eventually; another of Mastodon's shortcomings, tbh.
@siderea@jwz Hi- sure, I see that. I also wasn’t recommending that as the best option, or even a good option- only that it is simply another option, one that’s possible.
I didn’t use the the term ‘nuclear’ lightly. I meant it as one hopefully would view actual use of a nuke- it’s a thing you never want to do, less desirable than any other way.
I guess I was picturing a quick exchange that didn’t mean much yet, going awry with a bad comment- that getting deleted and then blocking the offender and then even possibly reposting after the block to begin again.
Also, I don’t consider every thought or exchange I bestow on the Internet to be a precious gem that is so meaningful it must be preserved for all time.
As I said to jwz, his thoughts about what could be done differently or better were very good, and I hope such things are in the Mastodon roadmap yet to be developed.
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