Ransom

Tiny Tabby

😼 Illustrator, Graphic Designer, Tabby Cat
🖌️ Macro/micro furry artist (NSFW 🔞)
💙 Bi, enby (any pronouns)


auramgold
@auramgold

damn i wish i could like comments on here, i liked being able to do that little bit of "i acknowledge i saw this :)" on twitter


munin
@munin

It's the meta that if you want heart shaped endorphin boosts you have to increase readership actively by participating in the conversation visibly. Which kind of has me wondering what the point of the comments are, except for keeping it scoped to a specific subset of conversers?


chirasul
@chirasul

comment = i am talking to the post-maker directly

repost w/ addition = i am contributing to the idea of the post and sharing it with my friends

either way, the lack of a heart on comments is a good thing. social media has been changing not just the way we communicate, but the way we think about human interaction in general. by not allowing simple shortcuts (like pressing a heart), we get the opportunity to make slightly more meaningful connections to the person who posted it. i know even a comment with only a ❤ and nothing more in it is more meaningful to me than someone pressing the like button. cohost is actually very cool this way, it encourages people to talk with each other


SaberaMesia
@SaberaMesia

People have different levels of interaction they're comfortable with. It's fine to prefer receiving a comment reply to a like, but a lot of people are just not going to interact even with stuff they genuinely like because they don't have a level of interaction available that they're comfortable with. That's inherently a trade-off you make, and I don't think it's strictly good or bad, but something with pros and cons.

I am, however, extremely glad that we cannot "ratio" people on this webbed site.


twoscooters
@twoscooters

When someone comments on something you’ve written, it feels good / “is good manners” to respond in such a way that acknowledges you’ve seen and appreciated the person’s contribution. “Liking” takes care of this — Person A posts something, Person B makes a thoughtful response, Person A can like that response.

Without the ability to acknowledge good contributions without comments, Person A has to reply to Person B’s comment — which then puts the social pressure onto Person B to reply. It becomes incredibly easy to get stuck in a conversational loop one has no interest in. This has very much happened to me, because I am that kind of person.

I guess my big question is: yeah, I agree that a lot of things about social media have fucked the ways in which we all communicate. But why did we decide making it easy for people to show appreciation to one another in low effort and easy ways one of them? Shouldn’t appreciation be low-friction to incentivize more positive interaction? It’s not like anybody’s asking for a “dislike” button here.


nex3
@nex3

IMO the trouble is that comment-likes so easily go from "low-friction way to show appreciation" to "politeness-mandated way to show a lack of active snubbing". I've reached the point on Twitter where I like replies, at least by people I know, as a matter of course, almost like a read receipt. It barely conveys meaning, and what meaning it does isn't necessarily something I want to send.

From the other direction, if I don't receive a like on one of my replies, I start to worry that I've put my foot in my mouth accidentally (as I have been known to do more than never). The time between replying to a tweet and receiving the "I saw this" like is a regular source of microanxiety, even if 99% of the time the like does come.

I will say: I've also been in the position you describe, where I see someone reply to a copost and I feel like I should do something to acknowledge that but I don't really have anything to say. I think this is an artifact of spending so much time on Twitter and similar sites, and I hope that Cohost's explicit rejection of comment-likes will help me at least break out of the thought pattern that makes me feel obligated to acknowledge every interaction. I would like to live in a social media world that's a little bit lower-bandwidth like that.

As an aside, I think the fact that Cohost so noticeably does not support comment-likes might actually help establish a culture where people are okay with being on both ends of replies that aren't explicitly acknowledged. Since most of us come from Twitter, we all know that in a Twitter context we'd be liking one another's replies. But we also all know that's not possible here, so maybe that just lets us assume every reply is implicitly liked in a way that wouldn't make sense if we arrived without that prior shared experience.


numberonebug
@numberonebug

I don't got much to add other than the fact that it is so wild seeing like, actual discussion online haha. seeing a post with several essay long responses on it triggered a flight or fight response since on tumblr or twitter this sort of thing would've been like oh we're chasing someone outta town today. this rules. glad we can just disagree with nuance.

fwiw liking posts led to some really not great gameification dopamine loops on twitter/masto for me at least and I think really really feeds into parasocial dynamic building. makes it so that interacting has a win state of getting that +1 to relationship boost. also ohh man the pressure to like every comment even if it's one that sucks or hurts when you're the object of parasociality is so real. if someone leaves a comment you wanna like it'd probably be best to respond as you would in real life by saying thank you or "oh that's so kind/insightful/ect"


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in reply to @munin's post:

in reply to @chirasul's post:

I'm in a weird position about this because on one hand I agree it's good to be like "this is a bad habit we're trying to discourage through design" even on this...

but on a personal level I'm so terrified of somehow being a "reply guy" or something like that, I'll often psych myself out of even leaving a "like" because I'm afraid I'll show up too often in their notifs and creep the person out just by being there.

I think worrying about becoming a "reply guy" is reasonable, but I'll let you in on a secret that will hopefully put you at ease: the core philosophy of the reply guy ethos is "I'm gonna make this about me!" When you're genuinely appreciating or engaging with something in earnest, you will never do that accidentally. Also, I don't speak for everyone but for me, regular and reliable commenters are my favorite thing in the whole world.

I too need to really internalise this (appreciation =/= weird unless it's overly familiar/redirecting to me) to get out of the same worry patterns. But actually, that deprogramming is likely a healthy thing for the future in general, potentially, and I'm appreciating how Cohost is helping with that

in reply to @SaberaMesia's post:

i think that this site is doing a good job actively disincentivizing any kind of feedback at all. it feels insular. not being able to like the good posts gives equal voice to the bad posts. it disallows the system to regulate or order feedback. if anything, it will promote more hateful content being seen once the site becomes larger. sure, ratios are a thing on some less savory platforms, but hiding any and all feedback metrics (not seeing follow mutuals, not seeing growth statistics, not having pertinent replies focused to the top) is not a step forward. its a step back in fear of the possible harms. we should be focusing on the mountains of good that can come from these metrics, like giving folks a larger voice, being able to signal boost for crowd funding for friends, sharing our growth with queer folk who may use their platform to grow as a business.

the metrics should be toggleable for folks who don't want to see them, not completely hidden.

Here's a good example of why etiquette needs to develop re: posting vs. commenting. You added a post to the chain, and fair enough. Somebody else dropped a comment beneath your post in particular, and it looks like you interpreted it as 1. directed specifically toward you, 2. hostile and 3. overbearing. In reality, somebody just pressed "reply" underneath a sitewide discussion and added their thoughts.

Six months or a year from now, we'll have a better idea who (if anyone) "owns" a particular comments section, but right now, on desktop, all the comments are mashed together. The indication that I'm now commenting under your post, rather than the post above, is small and easy to miss.

i think the feeling about the necessity of metrics to weed out hate comes from a valid fear especially with how twitter moderates (barely), but here there has been a pretty explicit promise (and practice!) of proper humans-actually-reading-the-reports moderation

the punishment for posting hate is getting posts deleted and being banned, not being ratioed and the post staying up, and i think unless or until staff proves incapable of effective moderation what we have now is the better option

I don't follow how not being able to give unspoken approval to Good Posts could lead to the promotion of hateful posts. That seems more like a site culture thing; people would have to be actively choosing to circulate hateful content (and failing to report it).

In my experience a system with visible likes doesn't do much to discourage people being assholes unless there's also a negative reinforcement mechanic like Reddit downvotes, but even then what it measures is usually group social approval, and that is highly localized and can easily backfire. For example, Elon Musk's tweets usually have more likes than they do comments (which tend to be negative, at least at the top) or retweets (could be positive, negative, or neutral), or quote retweets (commonly the form a negative retweet takes). What can we conclude about a guy who everyone seems to be universally calling the world's biggest dipshit when they type text and post it, but who also has upwards of 100k likes on some of his most dipshit opinions? On a smaller scale, what can we conclude about a terf post that hasn't circulated beyond a terf subreddit and thus has hundreds of approving upvotes and comments and only a few dissenting comments, all of which have been downvoted into invisibility?

I personally think a lot of the problems with social media sites have been the direct result of building systems to order and regulate feedback; it typically means that human beings still have to manage the feedback but must do it by interacting with the system instead of with each other directly. The concept of a "ratio" is exactly what this is; if you know that an opinion's level of social acceptability is going to be judged at a glance, then a post having far more comments or quote retweets than likes is the visible-at-a-glance indicator of, "oh, a lot of people think this opinion sucks." And it's half-ironic; the only reason to play this game is to try to hit someone with enough negative feedback that they delete it, because even commenting to say it's a shitty opinion expands its reach.

I don't know if no visible likes or no likes on comments is a solution to this--I'm generally wary of any "people will do x if we prevent them from doing y" system in tech, although it doesn't seem like the Cohost staff are operating from that perspective in the way that causes major problems. But it is an opportunity to try something else for a while and see if new tools lead to better fixes.

I think the important thing here is that cohost doesn't expose the number of shares or likes something has, so you can't really number watch an individual chost without taking great pains, and I love that! But if you could generate an "ack" notification on a comment for the receiver like you can heart a post—a silent nod between you and the commenter—I think there's good merit to that

in reply to @twoscooters's post:

I also feel the itch to give a comment a like, show it's been read, do some social smoothing. I don't feel like it'd be a huge driver of metrics-chasing in the current model of like counts being hidden (just a sense of how many notifications a thing produces).

but to respond to Chirasul's post, I don't want a culture of people just replying "+1+ or "<3" to comments, because that's the only way they can agree with them. It is meaningful to receive but boring to read as a 3rd party.

That last point is a great one, IMO. If comments are the main way so see what the community at large thinks about a post (since there's no other way to see what people are saying about it), scrolling through a bunch of contentless "+1" replies will be unpleasant. From the perspective of a third-party comment reader, I'd much rather those users had the option to just click a button that signals to the commenter that they liked it without making it a part of the public record.

in reply to @nex3's post:

i also don't really enjoy the fact that my brain has developed some kind of need for a 'courtesy like'... not having them on comments at all kind of helps me approach convos in here with more closure, trying to not hold assumptions beyond "if a person wants to add something they'll comment and if not that's fine"

i've used forums, livejournal, and twitter, and as much as i do appreciate the "i saw this" button on the latter, i have been able to function without it

it is a headfuck at first, not having comment likes, but frankly, i've found things to be less anxiety driven without them

there's also the case where people drive past a popular post and just click like passive agressively through a debate. sometimes i just don't care who likes a post if it's not the person i'm speaking to. it turns a lot of conversations into performance pieces

this is why in the feature request forum post about likes on comments, i suggested that "small comments should take up a very small space'

every so often it is nice to drop a "thank you!" in reply, but it would be nice if it didn't take up so much screen space, i feel this is a nice compromise

I don't know. The anxiety you talk about feeling if you don't get a like on a comment is real— I definitely experience the opposite of that when people reply to my comments, like "oh god are you resenting me right now because my comment made you socially obligated to interact with me?" While I do agree it would be good to be freed from those kinds of social expectations, I think it's going to take some social design iteration to hit the sweet spot on the spectrum between "dopamine firehose" and "shouting into the void." I absolutely love cohost, but it's definitely closer to shouting into the void right now.

Personally I have commented more on Cohost than I have anywhere else in years, so that function is working for me. With both twitter and tumblr I found myself falling into a habit of nearly always just liking posts rather than engaging further, even with mutuals and friends I’ve known for years. That said I definitely commiserate with the voidposting feeling - I hope some of that will be mitigated as the site grows.

i actively stopped "mandate liking" on twitter except within conversations where i could tell it was expected — not because i realized it was a unpleasant thought pattern but because i was sick of giving The Algorithm signals. but it was hard, and that was connected precisely to that anxiety you talk about — not just my own experience of it, but knowing that others go through it too. i've had conversations with friends who wanted me to help them read into lack of a "like" on a reply, known people who delete reply if they don't get enough "likes" in a window of time. (tho that all relates to posts too, and not just replies.)

so i find myself agreeing with you on this one, nat. i will also note that though i shook the unpleasant thought pattern on twitter, it certainly followed me to mastodon for the time i was there. nah nope no thanks.

I have ABSOLUTELY been using like on twitter as read receipts, which then makes my likes useless as a form of bookmarking. Apparently they added bookmarking separately at some point, but that just seems silly.

in reply to @numberonebug's post:

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