I'm closing up shop on my Mastodon for the foreseeable future
vkc.sh
vkc.sh
If this is something that stresses you out, probably best to disable comments from anyone you do not follow.
Simple as that.
I do not think this is a problem with the tool.
I do think over-exposure to internet commentary is toxic. Like alcohol, it is a poison that is only fun if you are capable of moderation. Not everyone is, and that is okay.
For me I was addicted to reading comments from viral nonsense I did online. Giving up LTE and carrying always-accessible always-online devices meant I can only access the Internet from fixed locations that I am only willing to spend a limited amount of time in.
The internet does not follow me or summon me with notifications anymore. I visit the internet on my terms.
For me, this made me much happier with my relationship to the internet. YMMV.
You think the design of this medium inherently attracts death threats (which the author mentions, and I assume you've generalised into 'ignorant comments') - but it's not a problem with the medium?
To me it sounds like a medium that's giving undue weight to the voices of the deranged; well adjusted people do not threaten one another with murder.
F.ex. are anonymous comments allowed?
To some degree the platform defines the content it generates.
If you do not accept the potential of being in a car crash, don't get in a car. If you are not accept the potential of strangers saying mean things to you on the internet, don't talk to strangers on the internet.
That is not victim blaming. It is threat modeling.
We can opine about how nice it would be to live in a world where we could keep all dangerous drivers off the road and all mean people off the internet, but we won't see major changes here for another century, so I don't advise waiting on those to live your life.
It's often a lie and when it isn't it's a comment clearly written by a 12 year old with a Rick and Morty avatar.
You don't take the threats seriously, nothing happens: no one notices.
You don't take the threats seriously, something happens: "why didn't you take the threats seriously? It's your own fault."
Sometimes the threats are serious and something happens.
Yeah that's when you hear "we were aware of the shooter" and a dozen police officers stand outside the classroom for an hour while they go hog wild.
Since we are all dead and damned either way, why worry? Giving false threats power in aggregate probably causes more harm than ignoring them, especially since the response when paying attention is so ineffective.
As you have pointed out, there are tools and ways to mitigate this, primarily blocking replies from people you dont follow.
But the person first needs to realize they are the pattern.
People don't have to learn to like anything, especially online commentary.
This thread sounds like a bunch of men attempting to invalidate this woman's feelings.
There are 3 options to dealing with this.
1. Never go on the internet.
2. Accept that people will be rude, and develop ways to ignore/deal with it rationally.
3. Complain about it, and expect something to change.
Looks like the author is choosing option 3.
Why are you bringing sex/gender into this? It has nothing to do with it.
It's easier to victimise yourself than to accept the reality that irrespective of what class you belong to, there will be people who will not like you for what you do, say or how you say it and they will voice their opinions. While there are plenty of isms and ists in the world, everyone gets hate online.
Valid criticisms should be taken onboard, garbage hate should be discarded. If you don't have thick skin but still want to have an online presence: just disable comments or have moderators delete all comments you wouldn't like.
It might also be just me, but I fail to understand why anyone uses Twitter or anything similar, these types of platforms promote trashy conversations in my view.
> All that aside, the problem isn’t just “bad comments”, because I’m a grown woman and can take critique. The biggest problem is that a portion of those folks take screenshots and share them with unsavory folks. Not a week goes by that I don’t get some nasty email from someone I blocked on Mastodon. Some of these have been threatening, and it’s gotten to the point where before I toot, I think “will someone threaten to kill me over this?” That’s not fun.
There's a difference between strongly disagreeing with a post, toot, tweet, what-have-you and outright taking things way beyond what could be seen as proper conduct with respect for the human on the other end.
The solution isn't to just accept that under the guise of emotional maturity. It's investing in proper governance and arbitrage, promoting shared values and morals, and providing enough affordances in digital tools that help affirm all of that.
A good chunk of what I publish online doesn't have a comment section at all, but the moment someone posts a link to HN (or reddit, or...), suddenly it does.
If you hate reading comments AND you can't stop yourself from reading them, go see a therapist.
I don't mean this blithely, it's a sign of unaddressed emotional issues, it's a fixable thing and nothing to be ashamed of. It's not "who you are", it's just "a bad behavioral habit".
Imagine that for no reason you can fathom, you hear that Bob claims <bad thing> about you. You don't know why, so you seek to find out, and you feel you should let people know that Bob isn't right!
That's the sort of logic involved sometimes. Is it wrong? Well, likely in the world of "1 million strangers are reading and some are replying" it is. But it's perfectly sensible in a local community, to want to 'set the record straight'.
And this peer-pressure derived desire to not be seen as a 'bad guy', is moderately important in a cohesive society. This desire to be seen by others in our community in a positive light, is just part of how we as animals, form a society.
It's a "good thing", when locally derived. But yes, we need new ways to deal with this I guess.
It's a thousand times more taxing than a local audience because you lose all colloquialisms and points of common reference. It's more taxing than even writing for a newspaper because even in the worst case of national coverage, it's rare that an article author would have to consider the global perspective (though still required for certain types of news).
This whole article is just the author chafing at WANTING to use social media like ne has a local audience, while being FORCED to use social media with a global audience in mind. I very much empathize, in the same way I empathize with product manual writers or software documentation authors. Having to come up with every way some dickhead is going to misunderstand you is a massive undertaking. And THEN you have to come up with all the ways that some dickhead will TRY to misunderstand you. To guard against all of them is impossible, so you just have to shore up as many sides as you can and take the criticism as it comes. That is what it means to write for a global audience, and its exhausting.
So I don't blame anyone at all for saying "this isn't my job, fuck this."
Personally, I just write how I want to write and let the chips fall where they may. I don't begrudge anyone for just not writing at all, and leaving all the chips alone. But I also don't find their intention to do so particularly worth description; especially not in long form. It's not like its a binary choice. When you have the spoons to troll any troll that comes at you, and engage earnestly with anyone who is trying to engage with you - no matter how misguided - then have at it! Make your posts and enjoy or muddle through as applies. And on days when you don't want to deal with it? Just shut the fuck up. Don't say anything. Don't reply to people. Don't engage at all.
It's that "easy".
In my line of work and my position, everything I do stays in the background out of the public eye. I can appreciate that for some people; researchers, open source programmers that you need to share what you do and your thoughts on how to do it with an audience. And naturally that if there is a discussion on a topic that your work might get brought up and commented on.
Unfortunately, people are jerks, even more so online sometimes and there is no way of stopping it.
The only solution I can see is creating a walled garden that is exclusive in it's membership and had a robust moderation policy. However that creates it's own problems such as echo chambers and allows those with power to control and shape discourse.
In short, it looks like we are trying to find a technical solution to a social problem or perhaps even a human nature problem.
stop using that medium to post things.
At some point they have to realise that no matter the platform, if you put anything out the in the public domain you are going to attract negativity and wierdos.
>Giving up LTE
that's very heavily personality dependent, if I didn't want to be bothered by anyone I'd turn off my phone and leave it at home, limiting myself on other days where I do want to access internet from anywhere and be bothered by internet, it would be highly inconvenient for me.
Definitely some interesting and nuanced points being made there.
She also previously did a video about Mastodon / Fediverse: https://youtube.com/watch?v=mqocW7DUFpg - But that was before she left Mastodon.
I both agree and disagree with some of the comments. Until very recently my interactions with the internet have been fairly shallow and that has protected me in some ways. But I think some people are looking for community, and want to give a bit more of themselves to form deeper connections. I think others are trying to grow an audience - reading the comments is not much different than surveying your customers.
Veronica seems really lovely, and I hope this helps make her life happier.
But sometimes somebody puts a lot of effort on creating things for other people to enjoy. It can be a youtube video, a tutorial, a technical opinion. Or curl[^1].
Feedback provided on such an effort often takes a minuscule fraction of the work the creator put in, and they can be really nasty.
I just think that providing opinions should require some effort. An affordable amount of effort, but not too low. Maybe if I do something worth of notice someday, I'll invite feedback by creating a public Minecraft server and asking people to log in there and post their comments on the book at coordinates 1000, -58, 1000.
[^1]: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/04/22/curl-is-just-the-hobb...
It's effectively impossible to post anything or do anything online (or even IRL) where someone won't disagree with you; there will always be someone (that's me toward you in this case), and that's fine.
What's not fine is the escalation from "I disagree, here's why" to "I disagree, and I'm going to make you miserable". Add to that death threats and you've got a cocktail for being unhappy. Add to that people doxxing you and harassing your real life for their perceived justices, and it makes you very unhappy.
Self-induced outrage seems to be a popular thing now. Where no real problem exists, create one, and manufacture outrage. Find next topic, repeat.
Some think that by changing a service they can get better replies, but there will be no single service that has "sane commenters". This shouldn't be surprising, I saw in Threads complaints that replies had "Facebook vibe", or a common complaint about Mastodon that there were too many geeky reply-guys.
Services should have good filtering in place. A lot of big accounts don't have time to read replies, and they probably shouldn't for their own sanity, but they probably want to see replies from people they follow, i.e. their peers.
Another thing is that bad actors are usually more determined to subvert blocking than good actors are to correct false negatives.
It might help some people to have some automatic filtering in place but it also might not.
On the flip side I find the discourse on X a lot more varied. There are definitely big problems with the types of conversations that happen on X but I have to go out of my way to find them. On Mastodon it's not that hard, mainly down to it being a smaller pool of content.
ActivityPub/Mastodon is flawed at its core with its concept of federation. They paint a pretty utopian picture of decentralised communities but there really isn't much difference between them. They are mostly part of the same political zeitgeist and if you don't toe the line you get banned. Once you're banned that's it, you've lost your profile, sure you can recreate elsewhere but have to start from scratch.
For the problems alternatives have like Nostr at least they are truly censorship resistant.
I’ve had success with following people with pre 2015 bio’s. No flags, no politics, no pronouns. Just tell me what hobbies etc. you’re into.
I am curious what high quality non-political content you're finding on X and not Mastodon. I'm only still on X because of a few accounts that haven't jumped ship yet, but in my experience, the flood of bots and troll accounts makes it nigh unusable.
On X I mainly occupy the indie hacker space which is focused on that topic. There are definitely more political conversations that come up but it’s much easier to filter those out.
But in the past 2 years I've realized that you should just ignore the haters. They're on youtube too and I don't get involved with them there, so why do I focus on them elsewhere?
No need.
So I'm actually going to return with a personal instance, simply because I enjoy having somewhere to post random pics and stuff when I'm not by a computer, using my phone. I don't care if anyone follows.
Mastodon's big selling point during the big move away from Twitter/X was the absence of The Algorithm, it was supposed to be a friendly, geeky thing, free from monetised outrage. But I've seen it for myself, there's an undercurrent of Twitter's holier-than-thou outrage, it's just from different sources: part exclusionary crusty geeks who've always used Mastodon ('you use Windows???'), part exclusionary leftists ('you're with the Judean People's Front????').
Perhaps it's not always The Algorithm that's to blame.
Personally, I've generally had far more positive interaction on Mastodon than I used to on Twitter, but I've got about 300 followers. I think the author of the article had many thousands, and at that level you're going to be exposed to weird cranks at a much greater rate; the advantage of not having The Algorithm(TM) is likely diminished.
You can't blame made up things if people actively choose to engage with rage baits. Every time something like that has occured, I time and time again notice that people could've solved this by doing nothing.
In real social setting, when someone says an unfunny joke, literally nobody laughs, and whoever said it feels very uncomfortable. On internet, when someone writes something stupid, they might sometimes get more replies than an interesting thing...
How can something like "The Algorithm" be blamed for people laughing at incredibly bad jokes?
The lack of nuance is spot on. The web went from long content in homepages/blogs, to short posts on social medias, to "like" and "share" buttons (1-bit)... it's hard to have nuance when you only take 2 seconds to form your opinion.
It's a tough knob to dial, attention/engagement. Too much of a thing. Not even going to try to say good/bad/whatever. The internet is what we make of it. I hope they return to strengthen it.
This is something I'm working on now, in a different avenue. Work. I changed jobs last week because I was putting too much of myself in, and not getting enough out.
Huh, those are extremely contrarian reply-guys; if anything I would expect the opposite.
If you're posting short messages with a reply text box, you can expect to get replies, and the replies are going to reflect how your post was received, no matter how it was sent.
It works both ways - I replied to a post from an artist really enraged with AI and pointed out it's no different from a human artist seeing art and incorporating it into their style; that radio dealt with this in the US by legislating 'compulsory licenses' so the outcome is unclear.
The response was an immediate perma-ban from mastadon.social... this is not crypto right wing content they are unable to process anything except agreement.
For example, the artist: their livelihood is directly threatened by AI, if not now then probably in the near future, and they are responding by posting about their fear. It's transferred into enragement because that's what gets them engagement and support, but underlying that is fear. If they were to directly post about their fear there's a good chance they'd be mocked even worse so don't judge them too harshly for this.
Then along comes someone who has no skin in the game, except that they think AI is cool and something they want to be seen as an expert in. They feel it's necessary to point out to the person who is fearing for their way of life how WRONG they are. When all that person wants and needs is support.
In these types of situations, when you don't directly have skin in the game, and you don't have any support to offer, it's almost always better not to reply. Make your own post proving how right you are (without linking/tooting/screen-shotting or in any way referencing the other post), and let that other person get the social connections and support that they need. Otherwise, you are Reply Guy!
But the author and whoever deals with their complaints are not interested in any other point of view - literally, there was no reason given on the ban and when I challenged it, no response.
> Make your own post proving how right you are
It's really not like that, my wife is involved in the creative arts too, this has been discussed and considered here a lot. I was active 20 years ago and learned a lot about how 'the cancer' GPL became legally normal. Even if it was like that, how is a one-shot platform perma-ban encouraging that outcome?
Perhaps we have different concepts of what we use social media for, some use it as a para-social support system and others are as a tool to debate and examine different positions.
To flip the script a little, would this "Reply Guy" standard also apply when someone with family in Israel posts support for the Israeli government's actions and gets a bunch of replies about how Israel is committing a genocide? I kind of suspect that "Reply Guy" may just be a proxy for saying "you have the wrong politics".
I guess that's what's wrong with Twitter, and what Mastodon unfortunately copied. The discussion dynamics roughly corresponds to shouting your opinions on a town square - and getting comments from passerbys.
There is little expectation of privacy, and few means to create it (banning indiscreet commenters being one of them). That's why Mastodon is great for niche interests - the town in this case is small, and its inhabitants are well-aligned, but might get frustrating as you touch topics where many people can feel they are entitled to having an opinion about.
Speak up against the person who you see as advocating for genocide.
I don't think we need to over complicate this. Just do your best, you'll get it wrong sometimes but that's OK. It's a guideline for positive online discourse, not a law.
The hypothetical person supporting Israel has family in the country and is fearful of their family's safety. Wouldn't replying to them make you "Reply Guy"?
The parent of the conversation did not say that the artist was fearful, they said "enraged" or angry. It was posited in a child comment that the anger was out of a place of fear.
Depending on how you read the initial post, mood and priors, your reply to a comment can differ wildly.
Why not? I think discretion is needed in both cases. I, for one, am rather pro-Israel, but I wouldn't necessarily tell that to a Palestinian sharing their anger online.
A reply text box should not be an invitation to trash other the person who posted it. This notion that if you're posting in public you're submitting yourself to harassment is pretty bad.
But that's kinda the thing. As you said, the whole 'messages with reply text box' design is set up to encourage responses from whoever wants to respond, and social media services are closer to a soapbox in Speaker's Corner or maybe Times Square than a chat between friends at home or in a restaurant.
Really big boards like Something Awful were the ones known for their rudeness.
The rudeness is definitely the big issue with modern social media though, and as you said, that comes from how enormous these sites/services are now.
Even the good old forums, I recall, would have people show up and behave more poorly than was acceptable, get banned, and then you could go back to interacting with your online friends. There’s a sense that the angry person who showed up is the misanthrope, so their opinion doesn’t hurt you.
Plus you have more of a model, so-and-so is grumpy and will insult me, but it’s kind of good natured or at least I know how to calibrate their ire.
On a large social media service, you not only don't have any shared interests to go off of much of the time, but there are groups and communities on there who actively hate each other and may want the other dead. In a sense, these sites are like a giant high school.