Alcun Atirutan BBS

Well, last night's thread sure was (and continues to be) a wild ride.

I'll be blunt here: please believe me that I'm experiencing problems frequently enough to make me not like this place. And **please** try to understand how a repeated onslaught of suggestions on how I myself need to solve those problems doesn't give me much solace.

If I have to be responsible for managing this with whatever tools or strategies you throw at me just to be here happily, that's not something I need in my life.

Please feel free to tell me to pound sand. I don't need to be here, and "successful YouTubers" is hardly a marginalized group.

But also understand that I *want* to be here. I'm not leveraging this platform to spread my videos, I'm here to offer a way for people to connect with me. And I'm here to have fun.

At this point I need to self-censor a /lot/ to keep it fun. I'll try that for a while, but it's a damn shame I need to do it.

@TechConnectify I'm sorry you're not enjoying being on the Fediverse. Having read your thread, I definitely agree with a lot of your assessments of the problems, and I definitely see the frustration with people's replies as well.

I'm curious as to whether you have thoughts about what kind of solutions *would* work for you? Aside from the obvious like adding the missing features you've mentioned to the web client.

Not a gotcha, I'm curious what your thoughts are.

@noracodes broadly, this place needs an etiquette. I have some ideas on how to make that happen, which I have shared with the appropriate folks.

The thing is, I'm on the other side of the automatic moderation coin. Twitter became better for me as a larger user because it would automatically hide people prodding me or being jerks in general. I don't know if I necessarily want that specific thing here, but there needs to be a way for the *crowd* to signal "this is a bad take"

@noracodes the moderation tools everyone tells me to use are the tools I would use as a last resort on Twitter.

Some of that comes from my privilege. Did I ever get a death threat on Twitter? I don't think I did actually. I muted and blocked probably a dozen people the whole time.

But a big part of that was because jerky behavior was seen by other people and called out. Here, it's never called out. And half the time it's not even seen. But the firehose sure makes it to my notifications.

@TechConnectify I can’t imagine how much of a pain in the ass toxic people can be when you start getting even a little success on YouTube. You must feel like you wish you could hire someone to screen your comments.

@mos_8502 This is the thing though! This is the thing that I feel like nobody understands.

Despite the fact that I'm sure my YouTube comments are so much more toxic on the whole than what I get here on Mastodon, /I don't see them/

I have to go into my YouTube studio and look at comments in chronological order if I want to even notice that drivel. Otherwise, it gets filtered way down low and I never have to see it.

To be honest, that's what I want here. Some automatic ranking of quality

@mos_8502 but a lot of people are fundamentally against that here, admittedly for some good reasons.

On the other hand though, I don't think it should be thought of as a right to get your thoughts in front of somebody else. When someone is actually being problematic, enough signal makes it through the noise for that person to hear it.

Here though, everything is signal and nothing is noise. Which means it's all noise.

@TechConnectify The moderation tools folks suggest being blocking? Just to be sure I understand

@noracodes that or reporting. Which to be honest, I don't have a lot of faith actually does much. It might if I moved instances, but nobody seems to understand is yet another point of friction. And it sure feels like victim blaming to tell people "well, you're just on a bad instance"

That gets to the very core of my central conflict here. What is mastodon? The space between the instances or the instances themselves?

The answer is yes. And it's infuriating.

@TechConnectify For comparison’s sake, what was it like on Twitter for that sort of dickish commentary?

@mos_8502 I rarely ever saw it. It would be hidden under "more replies" which, to put that in Mastodon parlance, functioned like content warning.

And if it was bad enough, Twitter just wouldn't let me see it at all.

The people on the other side were mad that they were being shadowbanned or whatever, I'm sure. But it was a hell of a boon for my mental health and made the platform a lot easier to navigate than this one.

@TechConnectify this is in no way justifying any of what you've experienced (sorry about that), but on a more practical note, have you considered moving to an instance where moderation isn't a shitshow? i can give you an invite for the treehouse if you like (we also run a mastodon fork that patches some of the most annoying problems)

@dysfun @TechConnectify Yeah, my minor pet peeve is when people treat Mastodon/The Fediverse like it's a single platform.

It's infinite platforms in infinite combinations. And it's trivial to spin up an instance of one if none of the others are your vibe.

@JustinH @dysfun and yet, the whole point is that these instances talk to each other in a single place and feed. Does nobody understand how from my side of the screen this is expressing two completely incompatible thoughts at the same time?

I understand what you are saying. If my instance is too loosey-goosey about federation or moderation, I might have a better experience on a different instance. But my /actual/ problem is that I'm a big-ish account that lots of people follow.

@JustinH @dysfun I am always going to be exposed to the cracks between moderation. As a matter of fact.

So when I'm here telling people that I think the moderation tools don't work that well for someone like me, and I just get told to do something different or get disbelieved, it's yet another thing keeping me from enjoying myself here.

@TechConnectify @mos_8502 only in small bites (probably because I’ve retracted from here a bit myself) but I’ve experienced this too and immediately made this place way less desirable to be whenever a post gets “popular”. Fucking manifestos getting thrown out left and right that id never see over on bird app

@EposVox @mos_8502 this, too. I got quite the lengthy manifesto in my notifications this morning.

@TechConnectify As someone with a similar number of followers, I’ve been using the same technique I used on Twitter for the ~16 years I was there: carefully managing my follow list, muting people who bother me, and blocking jerks. Overcoming the feeling that I “shouldn’t” do so much muting/blocking (and overcoming the urge to reply to people I should really be muting or blocking) was key to my Twitter happiness. Oh, and I use a good third-party client app, of course: Twitterrific then, Ivory now

@siracusa This is something I'm just going to disagree with then. I never had to engage in much muting or blocking at all on Twitter.

Now I don't think I had the following that you did on Twitter, but it was bigger than the following I have here.

The automated filtering that Twitter did worked very well for me. And maybe some of my experience comes from the fact that I only joined in 2018. It was probably a lot better then than it was in years prior.

But that's missing here.

@TechConnectify I would argue that "Mastodon" as a place is not a meaningful category. I've written about this.

But certainly some people market it as a single cohesive community, and I think that's a mistake, and I'm sorry about it.

I hope you're able to find a community, here or elsewhere, you enjoy being a part of.

@noracodes you may feel it as a mistake, but am I expressing the more popular belief?

Because, like GIF/GIF the public understanding is more important than whatever edict is out there. The public understanding is what defines how people use and understand the platform.

@TechConnectify Right, absolutely. What I'm saying is that the mismatch between the popular belief and the technical reality causes significant friction. That's a problem and it's on us to fix.

@noracodes to be honest, I don't think it can be fixed. You are going to have to adapt to the public imagining of it.

Twitter evolved with time based on how its users used it. That's just how growth happens. And if people here are going to stick to their edicts and try to keep the platform within their imagined confines, I don't think that's going to work well in the end run.

@TechConnectify Yeah, being on Twitter since 2007 and never using the first-party client definitely gave me a different experience. I built up my defenses and overall system over years and years. Again, worth it for me, but there’s probably no shortcut for it. If I had joined Twitter in 2018, boy, would things have been different for me!

@siracusa I guess what I'm getting at then is that Twitter did have that shortcut by 2018.

I don't think there's a reason that shortcut couldn't exist on this platform other than people generally are averse to any kind of automatic filtering or algorithms

@TechConnectify @JustinH to be clear, i absolutely believe you (and i'm sorry you've had a shitty time). but essentially you're on a vanilla mastodon instance (so shit software that only adds what features gargron wants) with shit moderation (so you see more shit than you should have to). is moving instances going to magically make everything perfect? no, but it might make more difference than you think and i don't see any other options on the table.

@dysfun @JustinH Even if this did fix my problem, then we are back to the whole "your instance doesn't /really/ matter, but also it absolutely does" thing that keeps people from signing up in the first place.

To be honest, I think this platform's most evangelistic users love having things to tinker with. They don't understand that a lot of us, though we do enjoy tinkering with some things, don't want to be tinkering with this.

@rl_dane @mos_8502 that would work probably, but it feels like a blunt instrument.

Honestly, I think Mastodon needs to look at things like rankings and some sort of automatic detection of bad behavior like Twitter did. Maybe that's a much harder problem for this platform to tackle, I don't know, but I do worry that the "not built here" ethos is strong here.

@dysfun @TechConnectify @JustinH if I understand the problem, imagine every time you made a post you got thousands of replies, some of which you'd like to interact with, but a significant number of them are from accounts you've never interacted with on random other servers that are borderline abuse.
No amount of moderation on your server instance can address this problem, because your server is doing nothing wrong.

@cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH that is the crux as I understand it.

I'm not being subject to any outright abuse that I think moderation would be fit for. Or at least, not much. But I am subject to general shitty behavior all the time, and it's much more severe than it ever was on Twitter.

The death by a thousand cuts thing is definitely what I'm experiencing, and I think there needs to (and can be) a way to make that less prominent.

@dysfun @TechConnectify @JustinH what is being asked for (I think) is to first recognise the problem. This thread shows that this is far from happening.
Second you need some tools and policies to filter the poor behaviour. Less than a ban, but more than "don't look at messages that are addressed to you, that might upset you"
At least I think that's what is being asked for.

@cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH exactly. One thing that I've just realized is that, when we compare this platform to email, subject lines are effectively content warnings. I don't go to my inbox and see every email that's been sent to me, I see a list of content warnings.

Here, though, it's as if I open my inbox and am reading every single email.

Social media is a different beast from email. A feed full of content warnings is tedious and boring. But there has to be filtering.

@TechConnectify As you’re the reason I’m on mas.to to begin with, and as a huge fan of your content, I do hope the positives outweigh the negatives.

Obviously as a nothing-level social media social media user I find it hard to even mentally picture the experiences you’re having. I do think as the platform continues to grow and mature, moderation tools will as well. (If only due to necessity. But I think moreso as developers figure out clever and workable code that is deemed acceptable.)

@TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I want this platform to work for folks like you, so I'm trying to wrap my head around this. I assume that the volume of block requests you would have to submit is unworkably high, not that your instance is ignoring your block requests? For instance, we're quick to block accounts that are aggressively annoying our users, but we're only like 5 users with the most followed having under 5k followers, so we only get about 1 request/wk.

@holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH On the bird site, this sort of stuff was just... not a thing I ever had to do.

I blocked maybe half a dozen people and muted perhaps a dozen.

The sort of behavior that's bothering me here simply didn't cross my feed on twitter /because they had automated systems to detect it/ and it was hidden.

I'm really asking for a jerkwad detector - not for a means of recourse when I encounter jerkwads. Because, frankly, not much of what they do merits real moderation.

@holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH There is absolutely no means of filtering signal to noise here. And the common response to complaints of noise is to play whack-a-mole and stomp it out, or else move instances because they'll have more thorough instance blocking.

But that's not the problem - it's not individuals. It's behavioral norms in aggregate. Some really shitty behavior is tolerated here in no small part because there's no means for the crowd to signal it's bad behavior.

@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH can you define the jerkward behaviour? We don't get to see all the replies you get on a toot cos of federation weirdness. I'm trying to better understand the behaviour you're trying to block.

@quixoticgeek @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH A lot of it is hard to define - and it evolves over time. That's why we desperately need some way for the *crowd* to be able to push back on bad behavior, but the very Fedi weirdness you talk about is a major barrier there.

In my eyes, the moderation that people advocate for here is the last-resort option. I've not taken it because so far nothing has crossed that particular line.

But I'm exposed to jerks all. the. time.

@quixoticgeek @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH To be sure, some of it happens when I touch on hot-button issues here (how dare you say something nice about YouTube!!!!).

But other times, my post comes across a weird nerd who can't help themselves from replying with something insulting. And while I'm smart enough to know they may not be trying to be insulting, simply being exposed to it affects me in a negative way.

Filtering and etiquette are what's needed here.

@TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH Huh, wow. I'm now wondering if large-follow-count accounts had a very different experience of Twitter than us plebs, and I'm wondering if that's what's contributing to all the talking past each other that's going on over this topic.

I'm assuming it's only a matter of time before someone who doesn't mind digging into the code and is seeing all this creates a fork with filtering tools built in.. but then who knows when those stars will align.

@holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I've been coming to this conclusion myself.

I think some of the people who use language like "took refuge" here were caught in the crossfire of these automated systems. And I can understand how frustrating it would be to feel deprioritized in that way (let alone be one of the folks who regularly experienced actual threats etc.)

Those systems made scale tolerable, though—and perhaps the necessity of those systems is why scale is so frowned-upon here.

@TechConnectify It might be possible to make this opt-in and local for your account. That is you enable the filter algorithm on your side by opting in.

Filtered posts will still there and shown to other people, but you don't get notified of them nor see them.

I don't know how Twitter handles this, but imagine it is similar.

@ryze I agree that it could be opt-in, but if I were to opt-in I would want other people to see replies in the way I want them filtered - because honestly that's a huge problem here.

There is no way for anyone to gauge quality of replies OR for people to signal quality of replies. They just stay where they are in order, and favorite count isn't even visible by default.

I understand the hesitation in making replies ranked etc. but to be honest for someone like me that's a necessity.

@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun Not trying to deny your lived experience or anything but "some really shitty behavior is tolerated here" more aptly describes my experience with Twitter than anything on my Mastodon instance.

@JustinH @TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun Are you familiar with Twitter's quality filter? I always had it turned on and it kept a lot of the low quality chaff out of my mentions. I have no idea how it worked or how to replicate it but it's my understanding that for big accounts it was even more powerful.

@AGTMADCAT @JustinH I think this is the thing that made all the difference. Plus, I only started using Twitter in 2018 so lots of positive changes were already made, and I only ever used the first-party client

(unrelated, I still can't get my head around why so many people tagged the thread reader app all the damn time - I had no issue reading threads, so I can only assume their weird clients parsed them weirdly)

@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH I wonder also how your experience in the real world goes. A friend of mine is a YouTuber with >6m followers (you've done videos with them). Whenever we go out for a meal people come up to say hello, or asking for a photo. I have to always in a way play defence "we got a shoot to get to" or "a train to catch". Which is hard when you're just having ice-cream. People forget that people like you and them are humans, and deserve some privacy.

@quixoticgeek Heh, my jacket does wonders for people not recognizing me in public. When I'm not wearing it I look very different.

So far I've been pegged in a crowd only three times I know of for sure, and a few other times I suspect based on glances/stared.

@TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH This is a great analogy. And likely a hard problem to solve in federation. I can imagine on Twitter that the server could keep some kind of reputation score and bump up the signal / reduce the noise based on that. It seems like that’s a lot of what the nutjobs were complaining about over there before the takeover (“deplatforming”).

I’m sorry you’ve had to deal with this.

@gogobonobo @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH Thanks. And it is a tricky problem - the "deplatforming" folks may have been right depending on if the signals they gave the algorithms were unintentional, but many times they should absolutely have been sent to the basement of the comments because they couldn't help but be terrible all the time.

Broadly, I don't feel as if anyone has a right to put their thoughts in front of somebody else. A signal to noise filter just has to be there.

@TechConnectify I believe everyone should have an equal voice to the masses, introducing any signaling of "quality" of replies just makes it unfair. If you don't want to see something personally, that's fine, but it shouldn't affect others.

Even ordering by posting time isn't fair, because people who replied first get their post seen more often.

@ryze I agree with this sentiment, but it doesn't work at scale. This platform is unusable for me at the moment without some signal to noise filtering - and since everything is signal, it's all noise.

I think that has to be chewed on - if you are unwilling to implement filtering, that means people like me functionally cannot be here. And the behaviors that are pushing me away simply won't get any better. There has to be visible pushback.

@ryze And to be honest, the fact that you agree chronological ordering is also unfair tells me you understand this is a complex problem.

A decent filter will bring important signals through the noise. And truly, Twitter's filter was decent. I'm sure it sucked to be deemed noise, but right now the late replies will never be seen by anyone but the OP - and I'm begging you to understand that I desperately don't want to see everything thrown my way. It's not healthy.

@TechConnectify hadn't thought about that. Said person does wear the same hoodie or t-shirt all the time...

Back to the original topic. I hope you find a solution that allows you to remain on Mastodon. Your contributions make it a better place, and I enjoy your toots, even the ones I don't agree with (which are very rare).

@quixoticgeek I suspected I knew who you were talking about!

But thanks. And say hi for me!

@TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH it sounds like you're looking for "the algorithm" which the rest of us kept trying to escape. Which makes sense if you have an unmanageable volume and we just want to read everything our friends post in chronological order.

@stark @TechConnectify @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH Well I think that's just it -- the algorithm we got pushed outrage nazis at us all day and left us to play whack-a-mole with the block button and send ignored reports, meanwhile missing your friends' posts, but since I've left, and certainly it seems for large accounts, they maybe had some sentiment analysis tools that hid all of that. So a much nicer version of the algorithm.

@holly @stark @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH

Either we're talking about different algorithms or different things - I'm talking strictly about what I could and could not see directed *at me*

As far as I was concerned, Twitter's algorithm didn't exist as I only ever used the following tab. Sure, it influenced what the folks I followed were retweeting and that can't be denied, but it didn't have much immediate presence to me.

Then again, I didn't ever reply much to things.

@holly @stark @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH And that could be yet another difference between our experiences.

I didn't use Twitter to prod and only ever replied to friends and mutuals. Sure, I got pretty spicy in the depths of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests, but mostly it was a place to post my thoughts and engage with my audience and friends.

The fact that we may have used Twitter in very different ways surely makes this conversation difficult to navigate.

@TechConnectify Some amount of filtering will surely be needed at such scale, true. But we'll need to find a balance.

Perhaps allowing only a few replies to get "pinned", the amount of which could be configured locally?

As far as I understand right now, you want to see the most important and acceptable replies that is deemed by the majority first.

@ryze There's more nuance to it, but broadly yes.

I think people are largely so burned out by "characters of the day" and "getting ratioed" and whatnot that they're really hesitant to implement anything that even echoes those things.

But there's really no way for anybody to signal "this is a bad take" or "this is bad behavior" here. And muting/blocking, while it protects you the individual, does nothing to indicate right/wrong.

We need social cues on social media. There aren't any here.

@ryze So when designing a content filter, it doesn't necessarily even need to analyze the content in a post. It could be based on favorite (I'm not sure up/down voting a la reddit is a good idea but some sort of human inputs would help a lot).

This would also drastically cut down on the reply guy problem because the might actually see that their idea has been cosigned by other people /and they don't need to spew it out themselves/

@TechConnectify @holly @stark @cbehopkins @dysfun @JustinH out of interest, how many followers did you peak at on twitter ?

@quixoticgeek Something north of 90K I think. It's sitting at 83.5k now, but it's been shrinking since, y'know, I don't post there and people are abandoning ship.

@TechConnectify where else can someone follow you right now? BlueSky? Threads? I want to be able to keep up if you decide to not be active here.

@mrfrobozz Nowhere else yet, but I am getting closer to trying Bluesky

@AGTMADCAT @JustinH @TechConnectify @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun I think most people didn't receive this magical filter :)

@brion @AGTMADCAT @JustinH @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun This is entirely speculation on my part, but it may have just become automatically turned on for me once I passed a significant threshold. It may have been in your settings, I don't know.

But like, YouTube did the same for me - the day my channel took off, I was getting a ridiculous number of emails because I still left those alerts on. They magically just turned off, comment notifs. got thinner, etc. etc.

@brion @AGTMADCAT @JustinH @holly @cbehopkins @dysfun And I wouldn't be surprised if this behavior was mirrored on Twitter. Some features that are useful when you have 100 followers become miserable with 1,000 - and some features that are off by default may get turned on when you cross 10,000.

I never asked for anything like that to happen, and beyond turning off email notifs I don't think I ever touched account settings.

@TechConnectify This will help true, but then this will be unfair for the people who got just unlucky and their posts weren't seen by enough.

Furthermore it can do more harm than good, since the right/wrong is dependent on the audience that decides. Reminds me of Flat-Earthers, which just get stuck in an echo chamber and barely see opposing views.

There has to be a a balance, I am not against introducing the rating system, but it shouldn't be the ultimate thing that is controlling how far your voice can reach.

Thinking of simple case, interleaving regular replies with replies pushed to the top by rating system might be a good balance.

@ryze It's nice to strike a good balance, but to be honest life just isn't fair. I have no doubt in my mind that my position is 95% luck - I caught a lucky break with my video on VCRs and that snowballed into a career.

Adding to that, people don't even agree on what fair is.

So... this might very well sound callous, but at some point something is going to get prioritized that leads to others getting left behind. I think it's good to work against that, but fixating on it leads to paralysis.

@ryze This isn't exactly related, but this is my whole thing about the FOSS movement.

Y'know why I use Adobe software? Mainly because when I encounter a problem, I will know other people have encountered the same and there will be resources to help me fix it.

It's not a perfect tool, and I don't particularly like Adobe. But actually defining a framework and making some rules we can all understand is often more important than quibbling over what is perfect.

@TechConnectify it's more of a problem of adoption and use of software more than it's freedom I believe. For example, Blender is FOSS and is loved and used by many and there are a ton of resources about it.

@ryze Sure, there are successful examples - but what they have in common is just that - commonality. People are using the same software and aside from little technical hiccups it's most the same framework.

Here, we are still deep within the "everyone wants/needs different things" stage and there's an obvious undercurrent of derision towards the more popular instances. There is so little direction outside of specific pockets, and imo nobody seems to *want* cohesion.

@TechConnectify I recognize (and agree) that you believe that, bluntly put, catering to 'important people' like yourself is important to for the ecosystem to gain critical mass. It is probably hard for you to express this, running the risk sounding like an entitled, douche. Thank you for putting yourself out there nonetheless.

Would you be willing to make available resources to implement any concrete improvement that you have? That's the most pragmatic approach to getting things done.

@guusdk you're right that it's hard for me to express this delicately. I hope I've done a decent job.

To answer your question - I would, yes - on the condition that I need to believe that my concerns actually matter.

Between some of the hostility towards popular people here and the general way the platform works right now, I don't yet see it.

@holly @JustinH @cbehopkins @dysfun @TechConnectify the thing is Mastodon is like an unregulated pipe. You get everything anyone says, period. Twitter had methods that would pre-filter that for you to make it manageable.

With a smaller following that might be like opening the tap and taking a drink. With a large following I’m imaging it’s more like the UHF scene sitting in front of the firehose.

@sleeplessone @holly @JustinH @cbehopkins @dysfun That is exactly what it's like. And I'm discovering relatively few people here know about the Quality Filter Twitter had. It was apparently opt-in but for larger accounts they just turn it on.

That may explain the disconnect between my lived experience with Twitter and others here.

@TechConnectify This is rather sad. I like it here as an alternative to Twitter, and it’s great to have you and people like you here, but I keep hearing about issues like that and I fear for the longevity of this problem and it’s future outside of the very niche geeky place.

@dansilov The problem we have to reconcile is all the folks who want it to stay a niche geeky space.

Sometimes they're outwardly hostile towards ideas that would make the site easier for folks like me because the flatly don't want us here.

I don't expect that faction to ever go away, but hopefully more people see the faults in that line of thinking.

@TechConnectify @siracusa my thought is that being averse to algorithms that prioritize engagement and ads might be healthy, but the techno-Luddite-ism here around algorithms of any kind is a sure way to guarantee that your social content-generation enterprise can never scale up or gain any traction with the wider public.