Alright, we appear to have uncovered something with the help of y'all.
Twitter had a featured apparently called "Quality Filter" - this was probably turned on at some point unbeknownst to me once I crossed X-number of followers but was opt-in otherwise.
This was undoubtedly the thing that hid nasty replies and prevented them from showing up in my notifs. And if this wasn't on for you (or you didn't have access) that may explain why my lived experience Over There has been easier than here.
And my complaints are really just about that - quality and volume of replies.
I have received some ugly stuff here, but nothing that is even actionable by moderation. I don't think it's crossed that line. So people saying "just do this!" largely don't understand the scope of the problem. At least, I think that's where we're at now.
What I'm yearning for is a filter to separate signal from noise. Because now everything is signal - which means it's all noise.
@hyenagirl64 Absolutely it's a solvable problem. Because Twitter did it.
Since this was (apparently) not a widely-known feature, that's probably explaining the friction I keep running into here explaining what I want.
Now my next worry is that people will think "well, obviously, it's a bad idea because Twitter did it." Hopefully not.
@TechConnectify That is wild. Is that something that operates totally silently in the backend with “the algorithm”?
@DeltaWye That was my understanding.
Sometimes I'd have the "see more replies" button and after pressing it - nothing was even there.
Folks on the other side of the filter would probably call that shadowbanning. Hell, that might be what they mean when they say that.
But it sure helped keep my sanity.
@erincandescent I was never verified, so they probably had a size threshold, too. Or I suppose it's possible it was turned on by default when I joined - I joined in 2018.
Who knows. But now I have a name for the thing that I think needs to be here for folks like myself to have a good time here.
@TechConnectify one of my joys on Mastodon has been chatting to people who on twitter I'd have been invisible to - probably because of said filters. You had to play the system there and sort of hustle for engagement, in order to get noticed at all.
That won't have been a thing for you, because you're making quality content and people clearly like it, so of course you wouldn't have been filtered out and left unnoticed.
But I get why it evolved that way, and can now see how it saves overwhelm.
@sarajw I want to stress that, at least as far as how my experience went, I would see most replies. It was only people being dicks that were getting filtered out.
Of course there will be some collateral damage when the filter makes a mistake, but I wouldn't go so far as to say people were invisible to me. Almost all people weren't!
@TechConnectify that’s a solvable problem then. In principle that could be implemented in mastodon.
@TechConnectify That may be true, but I'm still going to celebrate that I actually get counter-replies here when I didn't over there!
Guess it's just a numbers game, in that my account here has grown alongside people I admired there, and was essentially invisible to (they had thousands of followers and I was a small drop in a huge ocean) - even if I wasn't filtered, I was probably one of a whole deluge of replies.
You obvs can't pay attention to every reply when there are hundreds.
@sarajw Oh, I've noticed that the quality of engagement here is — usually — much better than over there.
I think that's the plus side of the no-filters, all-chronological approach.
The downside of it is that with a larger following, you're exposed to a lot of stuff that's not healthy for anybody.
@hyenagirl64 @TechConnectify but it really shouldn't be. Most of us are here to get away from the algorithm driven feeds, implementing "quality" filters would likely mean smaller accounts would start getting silenced, just because they don't have enough followers to be relevant to the algorithm. And if it's not automated, then you'll just get more drama, like entire servers being blocked because of a single admins opinions.
@indirectferret @hyenagirl64 That's a bad read of what this did.
I saw stuff from small accounts *all the time* - it's was absolutely not as if you needed to have so many followers for me to notice your reply.
It was that when someone used abusive language, their reply would not get to my eyes.
Of course the filter will be imperfect and there will be collateral damage, but welcome to life.
@TechConnectify @indirectferret @hyenagirl64 Genuine question, do you want filters instance admins can apply to all accounts on the instance? Because it sounds like you are advocating to expand the filter feature into something that is on an instance by instance basis, like, everyone that signs up for this instance will have these filters applied to their accounts? The filters are pretty strong as is so maybe the filters just need to be expanded? I'm not really understanding what this quality filter thing does over there. The individual account filters are pretty robust, like, I can filter out phrases, so maybe instances need filters rather than having it just a user thing?
@weirdwriter @indirectferret @hyenagirl64 The filter was on the *content* of the post - not on the instance, or the user (though there was, I guess, a score given to users in the back-end).
Here's an example:
"Hey man, I'm not sure you're thinking of this correctly" would be fine and get through.
"Fuck off, you shitty little twit, eat rocks" probably wouldn't.
The second post would get posted as far as the person who wrote it knew, but I'd never see it and it would get no engagement.
@TechConnectify interesting - first I've heard of it tbh.
But yeah, major platforms spend a LOT of effort building super-user stuff (for both good and bad end results), and Mastodon has essentially none of that.
Do you think it's a thing that could be (mostly) solved client-side? Like filter out comments with few followers / no favorites / sentiment analysis? And just general activity-volume-management, I've had a taste of that once and yeah - Mastodon desperately needs better tools there.
@groxx It could be done client-side, but that would lose the secondary benefit of nuking the potential for engagement.
That was one way to remove the incentive for people to be dicks - if they didn't get any sort of response, they might stop. Or at least cut back. Hopefully.
@bongmaster Sadly, this is not possible.
I've worked customer service so I say that with experience.
@TechConnectify I was thinking it might be sometime like that...
Earlier I was thinking it would be really hard to add an LLM/sentiment analysis layer that beats notifications... But maybe it could be done in the client instead?
Especially given how all the phones have linear algebra coprocessors these days.
@kilpatds It's possible that it could be done client-side, but to be honest I don't just want to be protected from seeing that crap. I also want the mechanism to disincentivize people from sharing it or saying it.
Maybe hiding it is enough, but Twitter's methods kill engagement by hiding that reply for everybody - and honestly I think that's valuable (even if it sometimes causes collateral damage)
@RedstoneLP2 @Raccoon @indirectferret @hyenagirl64 That would probably be the easiest way to keep the spirit of Mastodon (entirely user-generated feedback) but it does have abuse problems. And the general HOA vibes here make me think abuse would absolutely happen under that paradigm.
But some sort of signals are necessary.
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@TechConnectify
I’ve noticed there is some kind of filtering (I’m using mammoth app, so maybe it’s the app not mastodon itself), some of your posts were identified as « critical of mastodon » or « personal opinion » and I needed to click on it to read your post. So if that filter could be tweaked somehow to filter « noise » it might be what you’re looking for.
@Esialam those are content warnings. The poster put them there. Which... is not a solution to this problem