Honeysizzle [parallel arc]

i buried this thought in a poorly-received rant about like counters [i am learning from my mistakes, and i hope you all can find it in your hearts to forgive me], but i want to dig it out and play with it a bit more

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

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

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