It really weirds me out how non-douchey Mastodon is. I have to use twitter for business, for now anyway, but I always feel a little antsy posting there. Like, even nice people sometimes seem like they're just itching to call you at as a moron or bastard. On mastodon, people talk and support. I wonder if the lack of QTs is a big part of it?
@ZachWeinersmith I’d say that the main context change is that we have moderation in here. Real moderation, that is. Entire servers are easily banned. So less bullshit, less morons, it lessens the occasions to get angry.
@ZachWeinersmith This is just guesswork from me, but I think the biggest factor is social context. I think even without QTs, the mood on Masto could turn sour, or the vibe on Twitter could go mostly back to normal, depending on people’s expectations of how the others on the same platform will respond
@ZachWeinersmith Twitter was the place I went to be an asshole to horrible people who deserved to be yelled at. I hated it. When I came to Mastodon, there were a bunch of times at first I starting typing a spicy reply to someone where I had to stop and tell myself, no, people don’t do that here.
Very little to do with individuals and quite a lot to do with the cultural norms and what’s expected behavior.
@ZachWeinersmith I can say that I do behave differently. Now that my mastodon timeline has enough content for me to follow, I finally uninstalled the twitter app because I hated how it made me behave.
@ZachWeinersmith My guess was that it's cultural. As I understand it started with the Free Software, socially inclusive cohort. That edginess just isn't part of that culture.
That said if you venture into following people from servers outside of this culture you might see a change in tone. There's right wing mastodon, shitposter mastodon, etc. Though depending on how far off you venture you won't even be able to follow some of those from here.
@ZachWeinersmith I think its a little bit how the two platforms reward engagement, like you said about the QTs. Twitter it felt like I was always writing a response as an aside or annotation for my followers' consumption, and never talking directly to the op of a post.
@ZachWeinersmith totally I guess, but I don’t think it’s technology, I think it’s culture and moderation, and perhaps selection for people who were disgusted by the other platform
@ZachWeinersmith I have seen a few people I know that I honestly couldn’t follow and Twitter post prosocial material here and I can read it all day so platform influences behavior at least n equals one
@ZachWeinersmith Ad-driven social media platforms are willing to tolerate shocking volumes of abusive users of account of how hate and fear drive "engagement", which drives ad impressions.
Mastodon is not an ad-driven platform. There are absolutely 0 incentives to let awful people exhibit awfulness in the name of engagement. Moderators can (& do) throw the ban-hammer as needed.
@ZachWeinersmith@marcelsalathe I don’t think lack of QT is the main reason. It may help keep some bad-behaved people away but I believe the major difference is the absence of celebrities/ influencers which thrive off anger and this is because the place is very much designed for person-to-person relationships and largely anti-capitalist.
Humans are just nicer when talking to a group of friends than when they try to become a celebrity.
@ZachWeinersmith I think the sign-on process and the requirements to curate your own feed provides a barrier-to-entry that requires good faith to negotiatie
@ZachWeinersmith I doubt it's the QTs specifically; more likely that people feel a greater sense of community here, and with moderation actually being effective here there are far fewer malicious interlopers, which means people don't fall into the pattern of being defensive or standoffish all the time.
@ZachWeinersmith every time my mind shifts back to a mindset where I have to be careful and all that. Somebody in my feed will post #poop or crack a joke about whales or something and I’ll remember that it’s all okay and I can just post what ever. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Hey. Hi stranger. My words are now on your screen. Wild right. This tech still is mindblowing all these decades later. No?
I think that's legit thought, though I miss Twitter's QT concept.
Personally, I think the people here are just different, and the expectations for people on this app are different . There's actually a concept to post here, as opposed to attention seeking or anything else. I also feel that interaction is more genuine here than Twitter.
@ZachWeinersmith Take a look at your instance’s block list to see why that is. Admins put in a lot of work to keep the garbage out. But that also means the lack of trash isn’t inherent to Mastodon, it’s just easier to moderate it here
@ZachWeinersmith my suspicion is that lower user counts encourage the quieter types to post, and those are mostly inoffensive people. I hope someone is writing a paper on all this Fediverse stuff.
@ZachWeinersmith twitter fosters an environment to produce such behaviour as that behaviour draws eyes and attention and therefore more people are exposed to ads.
From what I observed, nice/kind/good behaviour can do that too, in higher numbers, but not that fast, and with the current business model of BirdApp, the faster the money comes the better. One cent today is more valuable to them than one dollar tomorrow despite it not making sense.
So twitter makes asshole behaviour more visible.
@ZachWeinersmith I don't have a link available, but there was an actual data study done a few months ago on the QT question, which found... QTs aren't the issue. And for some communities, they're a very positive force.
I think it's the better moderation and the lack of algorithmic boosting.
@ZachWeinersmith The culture’s pretty different here for sure. I attribute it to the fact that “dunking” on people doesn’t garner a whole lot of attention since Mastodon doesn’t really push content to users. As such, contentious content with a lot of dunking in the replies doesn’t reach your home page as often. So without the incentive to tear people to shreds, people have pivoted toward explaining why a person is a moron instead of just calling them one.
@ZachWeinersmith I think a lot of it has to do with what size your following is. I've had a lot more random Reply Guys and mansplainers and scolds show up in my replies here than I ever did on Twitter, and I lost a lot of the enthusiastic/positive engagement I had over there; but I've got a small personal account with niche interests, and it sure does seem to work the other way for (relatively) large accounts.
@ZachWeinersmith i think it's the better moderation, nobody care if you are a big name with many followers, there is no ad money, so impression numbers are moot, so if you behave badly, you get the boot, you can find another server that tolerates your BS, and people will block that server.
Qt can be used in good and bad ways, and they can be really badly used, but if you get rid of toxic people then i believe that will much happen much less often.
@ZachWeinersmith I feel like part of it is Mastodon is mostly people who for one reason or another didn't like Twitter (without being one of the "free speech" platforms), so at least some of the toxicity and hate spirals gets filtered out from that alone.
@ZachWeinersmith No, it's because most US Americans are sticking with Twitter. Soon as they move over the hate and bigotry will carry on again, because US Americans are the most bigoted, racist, homophobic people on the internet!
@ZachWeinersmith Theorizing as a UX designer: Twitter’s algorithm rewards the kind of pithy, sound bite quips that often take the form of insults. Thoughtful/nuanced posts don’t stoke as much outrage, so lead to less ad revenue.
Mastodon’s lack of ads isn’t just a relief, it’s a whole behavior incentive shift. 🕊️
Some folks are saying the onboarding barrier is a civility feature; I heartily disagree. So many kind people who aren’t techies, maybe more so. I doubt that correlation.
@ZachWeinersmith Hmmm, if go look at a hashtag I can find posts with incredibly dumb comments. Not mean but dumb. Which I don't usually see. So I am guessing that your observation is because of the fediverse partitioning social media space more efficiently.
@ZachWeinersmith a particular thing I noticed about post 2016 Twitter compared to pre 2012 Twitter, is thanks to "engagements" people figured out they will get most exposure by behaving in the most extreme ways.
"I'd like to respectfully disagree" will farm you one like, one high quality reply, and no RT. If your goal is to be an elebrity, the better strategy is "FUCK YOU AND YOUR FAMILY YOU FUCKING FUCKFUCK" which will farm 20 likes, 500 low quality and equally over the top replies, and maybe 500 QRTs calling them a shithead in the most outrageous way possible.
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