Chaia Eran

yeah - we weren't up for a long explanation last night but we had the same thought, that the fact your thing requires so much manual work will mean it doesn't lead to people being impulsive. we think it's a good direction for experiment.

it's also the case that the worst abuse-cases of RSS are not things we have to guess at, they're things like attempting to steal a feed (and put ads on it...) by misrepresenting the authoritative source of it, or misquoting people for character assassination purposes. these are things that can already be done without your tool, and in fact the first one was part of the decline of RSS the first time around. I don't think your tool needs to actively worry about these types of threats, at least not in its present state.

so, leaving aside the active-malice stuff mentioned above, there are two negative psychological elements to reshares on social media in general.

one of them is the gambling-psychology element of it, essentially trying to tempt people into seeking fame by optimizing their writing into something that others will want to reshare a lot. (our personal view is that fame is a trap; that's not specific to social media. sometimes it may be a tool as well, but it's a dangerous one.) this gambling-psychology concern mostly applies to the authors of posts, though it's helped along by heavy UI optimization and experiments, making it as easy and good-feeling as possible for readers to reshare.

the other is that reshares, especially of short posts that weren't meant to stand alone, decontextualize the source material. on some platforms they also make it very easy for the resharer to prime readers with their own, fake context, which can be a very powerful tool of harassment. this approach has been very effective at getting people who should be allies to fight each other, and since it's such a simple pattern to imitate, we're certain that lots of people doing it don't even recognize what they're doing as harmful.

the bottom line is that sometimes people are writing stuff that they want reshared, such as a plea for a certain sort of social change, or for help with their finances, or showing off their art.... and sometimes they're not. probably most people, most of the time, are better off when their words aren't reshared. however, when you do hit one of those scenarios where you want it, you really want it!

we don't know what this means for your tool, we're just sharing our general thoughts on this topic in case they're useful to you or others. we've said all this before, but perhaps not in one place.

we're still super excited about your tool because it does feel like a piece that will make it easier to build community on an rss-centric tech stack, rather than just individualist pontificating. we are probably going to end up using it :)