full-quack webbed developer

@Webster

website duck

he / him or they / them
webster.bandcamp.com/

website duck. 32-years-old. otherkin.

full-quack webbed developer @Webster7/31/2023, 4:53 PM

i took a peek at the furry community on bluesky and there's a lot of the usual clamoring you see in new social media platforms. "we have an opportunity to reinvent ourselves! when the twitter 'main characters' arrive, do NOT engage! everyone communicate with each other in good faith! no quote dunking! no needlessly incendiary takes!" etc.

it's great that everyone recognizes and sincerely wants to treat the symptoms of twitter brain, and i'll admit i'm not the most qualified person to analyze social systems, but i struggle not to roll my eyes when the proposed solution to ANY problem involving large numbers of people is "this time everyone be on their best behavior". i don't think there's such a thing as "twitter without the consequences of twitter". i think that if you want a social space where people predominantly act in good faith it needs to be designed to disincentivize bad faith behavior. i think it's overly ambitious to go to a platform that opaquely incentivizes bad faith behavior, to acknowledge that those incentives are immutable properties of the platform itself, and then to say "please don't, though". i would love to be proven wrong.

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in reply to @Webster's post:

Snazzy the Dragon @snazzy7/31/2023, 4:57 PM

It's the same as telling someone who is making poor decisions "hey please make better decisions"

Like, yeah, it's not WRONG. But it's probably not going to work.

full-quack webbed developer @Webster7/31/2023, 4:59 PM

Yes except in this case it's asking hundreds of thousands of people to make better decisions, nearly all strangers, which is even less likely to work.

Snazzy the Dragon @snazzy7/31/2023, 5:00 PM

Nah nah nah, see Webster, this time, THIS TIME, we're gonna all collectively make massive changes to how we react to inflammatory media and content!

full-quack webbed developer @Webster7/31/2023, 5:02 PM

and by "collectively" i mean "dozens of us individually".

wet beast @Pixl7/31/2023, 5:04 PM

idk if there's any real inflammatory material right now because anyone that's posted something stupid gets shouted down so bad they go back to twitter. Right now everyone's trying to do that to Not Just Bikes

full-quack webbed developer @Webster7/31/2023, 5:08 PM

i am skeptical that this is a scalable long-term solution.

wet beast @Pixl7/31/2023, 5:09 PM

oh it definitely isn't and at some point the bluesky people need to realize their dumb little AI can't handle everything

full-quack webbed developer @Webster7/31/2023, 5:15 PM

another sentiment that's been expressed to me is that the AI moderation is bad, and the solution put forward is "if we complain about it enough they'll change it". idk, i have significant doubts!

wet beast @Pixl7/31/2023, 5:19 PM

I think in a lot of the cases it's "fine"

It's just a matter of for a lot of things it's relying entirely on ai moderation, where it should have fully manual self moderation instead.

Like people posting nudes.

Nadia Rain Chassis @softchassis8/1/2023, 2:23 PM

Hey it worked for getting things to change on Twitter, didn't it?

[touches earpiece] Oh no

Foelan @Foelan7/31/2023, 5:59 PM

Tbh, the huge response to NotJustBikes's bad take is a clear indication that ragebait and engagement farming will 100% work just fine on bsky, lmao.
Sadly, people aren't "shouted at back to twitter," they're shouted onto everybody's feed.

@SamKeeper7/31/2023, 5:01 PM

there's something fascinating about bluesky as like, the anti-cohost. every single dark pattern cohost looked at as something to avoid, bluesky has doubled down on and baked into the website on as many levels as possible. they're the goofus and gallant of the post twitter era, and yet somehow people think bluesky's not going to be a hellscape.

Damien @eramdam7/31/2023, 5:17 PM

what's funny is that I've seen this happen a few months ago when I joined with like, Terminally Online Big Accounts that were like "the vibe is chill here!! let's keep it that way!!" and we're already past the "inscrutable discourse is happening every day" point despite the site being invite-only lol

Foelan @Foelan7/31/2023, 6:06 PM

There's no doubt in my mind that it'll wind up with the same exact problems that twitter has. My hope is that twitter itself stays large, and remains as a for-profit lightning rod that is more worthwhile to engagement-farm on than bluesky.

I'm just glad that there's a little bit of a numbers reset, so I don't feel tasked with getting 8,000 followers or some shit before I feel like I can be part of a conversation.

colin @vogon7/31/2023, 6:10 PM

yep, in the later days of twitter it became pretty common to admonish people not to quote-tweet dunk or whatever with "twitter lets you do this because it drives engagement" but there's also a far more obvious reward for people who are motivated by social media exposure (for whatever reason) to do it

Scree @Screemonster8/1/2023, 3:10 PM

I've run into the concept of a "ban-trap" in game design before and whenever we remove them there's always the cries of "b-b-b-b-but you shouldn't remove features just because they're being abused! You should just ban the people that abuse it!" when the feature in question is actively encouraging people who don't normally cause problems to start causing problems because the most expedient way to win the game involves causing problems as a side-effect

you can't mechanically encourage bad behaviour and then just expect people to pinky-swear to not

katherine morayati @morayati8/2/2023, 11:15 AM

This was an interesting essay on these dynamics specifically regarding Bluesky and Mastodon

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