Honeysizzle

Honeysizzle [parallel arc]

@Honeysizzle

💛🍎@honeysizzle

  • they/she, it/its for the culture

â—‡ Internet Person*. indefensible on main
â—‡ the brackets don't mean anything
â—‡ twitter refugee. if you intend to turn me away at the gate, be honest about it
â—‡ profile picture is not original. don't look it up

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Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle
Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle
Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle

twitter emigrant: it feels odd to me that cohost has no forms of silent assent

by "silent assent", i mean some way to acknowledge a post or comment as Good without making another publicly-visible post or comment. pretty much every other platform has visible like counters, and so appreciation for posts can be expressed in aggregate; 100 000 likes is popular, 1 000 is pretty impressive, 1 is relatively unknown or unimportant

i know a lot of people left for cohost to avoid the sort of numbers game that this creates—every post a millionaire, or you don't deserve love1—but sometimes being a statistic is nice
that and a full-size repost or comment [and i say "full-size" because site culture seems to encourage/expect long-form and high-effort posts] feels like taking a sledgehammer to a nail, and reads as rude and intrusive in my head

Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle

fitting that i only now see the @\lexyeevee + @\TalenLee interaction over a similar theme. [i won't link it or them, because i don't yet know what actions send notifications, and i don't really want to incur any more vitriol than my original post will.]

maybe the issue i'm taking with all this is that i want ways to act without Engaging, without drawing [serious, negative] attention to myself, and i would prefer others do the same for me—but the platform culture desires the opposite, funneling everything through individual direct interactions by reducing [that is, not implementing] features that don't promote them

Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle

conjecture: a microgenerational divide between

  • Social "Media": small-scale independent production by or in the pursuit of social interaction. typified by personal websites, forums, and older youtube. native users skew older
  • "Social" Media: mass entertainment using social interaction as its medium. typified by twitter, tiktok, instagram, modern youtube, and twitch. more broadly popular as a result of aggressive marketing and algorithmic optimization, but native users skew younger

new users [me] are coming to this platform, which replicates the first style, from a platform that embodies the second [because they've been inundated with messaging that it's "objectively better" by users more accustomed to the first], and, for lack of experience, expecting something roughly similar to the space they left behind. this makes existing users Incredibly Upset, despite them being the ones who encouraged the migration in the first place

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in reply to @Honeysizzle's post:

osteophage
@osteophage

It sounds like you're saying you associate making a post or leaving a comment with getting a negative reaction.

Now an ironic thing about that is that from what I've seen, asking for metrics (such as visible counters on likes) is the kind of thing to net a big negative reaction on here. I don't get it, but it's certainly an attitude I've seen around.

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Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle

[hid your comment because i didn't know what to do with it at the time, but]
...yes, i do make that association. i make that association because likes and various other social media numbers exist, and so a comment or additional post is only necessary to express things those numbers can't—which only really includes nuance and negative sentiments, neither of which i'm really trying to attract

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osteophage
@osteophage

For what it's worth, I don't share that association, and I don't think that's inherently the case.

At the same time, I know those feelings don't spring from nowhere. It's certainly something I've heard other people express before -- mostly people who use (or used) a lot of Twitter or Tumblr. I think a lot of things about how those websites are designed really lend themselves to conflict and escalation, rather than the patient back-and-forth dialogue necessary for resolution. This includes things like 1) overwhelming people with an ever-updating flood of stuff to look at, so that they feel pressed for time and like they need to respond quickly, 2) giving people limited space/limited character counts to express themselves, so that users are pushed to more condensed, curt replies and snappy retorts, and 3) reblog-additions ("quote tweets") that automatically broadcast your response to your follower base, so that people end up habitually using them to point and say "wow, get a load of this guy." A lot of little things like that come together to make for an impatient, perpetually cranky userbase where everyone's quick to snap at each other and where being spoken to a lot of times means getting attacked.

Does that match your experience?

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Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle

[alright. the block was aggressive, i'll admit. i apologize. for posterity, i won't delete my original message, but i'm cooling down.]
tl;dr: yes, but more broadly than in twitter threads.
it's probably more worth a post than a comment chain, but as far as i'm concerned, any response more in-depth than a [silent assent|Number Go Up] or a few community-specific words of endorsement is a criticism, and every criticism is an indictment. i've learned not to spend the time of day playing defense; just correct whatever you can afford to [or can't afford not to], and leave when things get too dire—or don't get involved at all. thus the reluctance to Engage, the aforementioned desire for "silent assent", and the relative asociality of social media as i understand it

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osteophage
@osteophage

Thank you for still talking with me. I think it's understandable to have reservations.

What you're describing here, is this also a way you look at conversations held in person, or is this strictly about posting comments online?

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osteophage
@osteophage

The former? Hmm... I'm not sure I really understand. You've never had a conversation where someone responds to a joke by riffing on and adding to the joke, or where someone responds to a story by telling a similar story, or anything else that couldn't just be substituted with a like button?

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Honeysizzle
@Honeysizzle

not from a stranger, and even still that's more a sentiment of "i can do your thing better than you can, you're not impressive" [and while your twenty-questions is fun i'd rather you make the point you're hinting at, or otherwise continue this conversation elsewhere—this is not a space for dialogue]

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