abandonware-prophet

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@abandonware-prophet

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abandonware-prophet
@abandonware-prophet
hephaistos
@hephaistos
kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

did y'all really bully someone all the way off of this website for encouraging people to upvote accessibility related feature requests?

This reminds me a lot of a thing I saw once on Mastodon, where somebody was essentially celebrating in unequivocally positive terms the fact that, finally, they had a clique they kick people out of.1 They were the cool kids who could tell you not to sit at their table.

This is...not a healthy vibe, and I feel like sometimes it's one of the things that Cohost shares with Mastodon.

For those who weren't following2, the text bock that people are losing their shit over is this:

Cohost is not accessible for many disabled users, and you can help by adding alt text to your images, posting in support of disabled users, and upvoting their forum requests. Please visit the bug and feature forum and make an account, then upvote accessibility features like the following: Alt text for audio posts — Volume for audio posts — Screenreader user can't use login screen — Need dark mode — "Show Posts" not navigable

Someone was putting it at the bottom of their posts like a forum signature of Carthago delenda est.

For this they were basically accused of haranguing, hostility, bad faith, not being "chill" and slandering staff, and then this weird vaguebug pile-on ensued.

And I'm like, yes, forum signatures are annoying, but also effective advocacy is often annoying. More to the point, there's nothing objectionable about the text; all it really does is encourage people to use the feature request forum, which is....what we're supposed to do?

I think the underlying principle is that if you are perceived as not being on the side of @staff and you are a little cringe about anything, people on here will drag you to shit for very little reason.

And I'm just like...please stop that. Congrats on being a cool kid but please chill the fuck out and let people live.

You don't have to be nice to people. I've never in my life encouraged people to be generically nice. Sometimes cruelty is called for, but you gotta pick your targets.

  1. Note: I literally don't remember who it was and there's no way to search for it if I wanted to.

  2. My previous post about this is gone b/c it was a rechost of something that was either deleted or the OP blocked me, either of which is fine. Here's what my post said.

slimelia
@slimelia

as the person at the centre of the LAST discourse we had on here:
a certain subset of the popular users on here are INSANELY cliquey and insufferable and clearly delight in vagueposting about people they don't know nor care to know. and these people are friends with - or at the very least in the same social circles of - the staff of cohost.

so you end up with this weird pseudo-cutesy "i'm being a cunt but also being vague enough that if you pulled me up on it there'd be reasonable doubt about my motives" shit that cycles around the website, including amongst staff members and people who are like 1st degree connections of staff members.

i stay in my lane now and just vibe with the people i vibe with on here. but some chosters clearly relish in the nasty atmosphere they've managed to create, and hide behind a paper-thin defence of "actually you're the ones telling us we're bad and wrong for doing things the way we've always done them" and like idk. maybe taking every post on here as an attack on your morals isn't a healthy way to use the internet babes x

as nick said about the accessibility posts: "there's nothing objectionable about the text". and thats true of like 99% of the shit A Certain Clique Of Cohost Users decide they are annoyed and going to vaguepost about. i think some of you just purposefully seek out shit to get upset over, intentionally twist it into something it isn't, and rally the troops to make a dozen vague cutesy-wutesy-but-still-absolutely-making-a-dig posts.

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in reply to @kukkurovaca's post:

kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

People do not have an inalienable right to be comfortable. Being made to feel discomfort is not, in itself, justification for pillorying someone.

Also, this is the microscope-scale version of when people attack activists because a protest delayed someone's commute.

Will probably do a longer-form post on this separately because this is actually an important topic.

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dante
@dante

I'm not saying "pillorying" is justified, I'm saying that if someone is performing any action that goes against the norms of a space, it's not unusual for those who are more comfortable with the norms of the space to say "hey, knock that off".

It doesn't mean the norms are good or bad necessarily, but that the response should have been expected -- the fact that it seems to have not been expected is strange to me.

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kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

with the norms of the space to say "hey, knock that off".

That's not remotely similar to what was said.

It doesn't mean the norms are good or bad necessarily

Which norms specifically do you think we are talking about and are they good or bad?

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dante
@dante

To your first point, it's clear we disagree on that, so I don't think there's anything I can say to change your view there, so whatever.

As to your second point, sure! I can answer that.

I think there is, in general, a norm on a website that has tools to request features/bugfixes to use those tools, and to funnel your requests down that direction. Broadly speaking, it has been historically proven to work (staff has actually looked at said forum). I think this is a good norm, to be clear.

I think repeating a message that claims otherwise is in bad faith to the staff, and places the onus of response in the wrong place (the feed) and on the wrong people (users who read it, not staff who are monitoring the help forums).

The posts reads to me as inherently saying that "staff aren't listening", which feels off and in weirdly bad faith to me. You can think it's worthwhile due to the severity of the goals to pursue this, that's fine, but I disagree, and I don't believe the goals warrant this sort of tactic.

It absolutely is a protest tactic, which is in and of itself neutral as far as tactics go. But when you protest, people are going to respond to that protest as they interpret it, which is what I mean when I say that people might say "hey that's weird, knock that off". I agree that no one is "entitled" to feel comfortable, but that's true of protesters as well as those witnessing a protest.

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kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

I think there is, in general, a norm on a website that has tools to request features/bugfixes to use those tools, and to funnel your requests down that direction. Broadly speaking, it has been historically proven to work (staff has actually looked at said forum). I think this is a good norm, to be clear.

I think repeating a message that claims otherwise is in bad faith to the staff, and places the onus of response in the wrong place (the feed) and on the wrong people (users who read it, not staff who are monitoring the help forums).

The message doesn't claim otherwise! It just encourages people to use the support forum! (Note: there is a real issue with folks just posting on here to complain instead of going to the forum to to make and upvote feature requests, so reminding folks that the support forum exists and to use it is important.)

The more people use the support forum, the more accurate the upvote counts there will be. This is strictly beneficial to staff.

The posts reads to me as inherently saying that "staff aren't listening", which feels off and in weirdly bad faith to me.

It doesn't say that, and it doesn't even imply that. It just notes that there is a problem and encourages folks to use the official tools available to them.

Gotta say, it feels like accusations of "bad faith" here are projection.

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noa
@noa

it's literally a message at the bottom of posts they make. from the context provided in this post, it seems completely fine

Cohost is not accessible for many disabled users, and you can help by adding alt text to your images, posting in support of disabled users, and upvoting their forum requests. Please visit the bug and feature forum and make an account, then upvote accessibility features like the following: Alt text for audio posts — Volume for audio posts — Screenreader user can't use login screen — Need dark mode — "Show Posts" not navigable

this is a completely fine and resonable message. it's a call to action highlighting specific things broken on cohost and things you can do

i have no idea what even happened though because that's how cohost works

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applecinnabun
@applecinnabun

a thing i'm starting to realize about the nature of meta-discussion on social media, and especially on cohost where there's no discoverability/way to see every single post made on this subject, is that we really need to be more specific and name names if we're going to do it.

like, what i saw on this subject, i would not characterize as bullying. i would describe what i saw as "weighing in on a discussion without singling anyone out and while citing various examples from other websites as well". and my impression was that the thing that i saw was the core of the discussion.

but while writing something about that i realized that i don't have any idea what you saw. maybe you saw some actual crossing-the-line vicious bullying shit. it's not like i'd be that surprised to see it. but there's no way for me to find it unless, i don't know, they decided to tag it #discourse i guess?

each of us on here live in similar enough worlds to think we're talking about the same thing but none of us have any way of knowing whether we actually do and i think that makes these conversations more destructive than they need to be.

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kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

The specific thing I first saw described the accessibility signature block as "haranguing" and "incredibly hostile", in "bad faith" and lacking "chill". It specifically framed it as an accusation of ableism by @staff. None of which seemed accurate or proportional.

Many subsequent posts by others were much more vague, and a lot of people want to litigate specific aspects of specific accessiblity proposals, which feels like a red herring in this context.)

The post I'm referring to was tagged as "cohost meta" and discoverable that way. I originally posted about this as a rechost of that post, but that disappeared do a deletion or block.

If the original post is still up and you browse cohost meta you'll be able to find it.

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applecinnabun
@applecinnabun

thank you! i can't seem to find that post either, so it was probably deleted. totally agree that, without more context, calling that signature block "haranguing" or "incredibly hostile" is a huge exaggeration.

the post i would have said is the center of this argument (and one i've seen other people who aren't you describe as singlehandedly "bullying" the accessibility-signature-block-person whose name i still do not know off the site) does not include any of those words or phrases and is only related to the signature block insofar as it's obviously a part of why the discussion is on the writer's mind.

i would say maybe it's just a me problem, that everyone else involved in this meta-discourse has a more complete picture than me, but i've now seen multiple different people described as being responsible for this, using similar words, by people seemingly living in totally different versions of this discussion.

so yeah, i guess that's the point i'm getting at here, for anyone down here in the comments of this post. we could all stand to remember that we probably have different context from one another.

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osteophage
@osteophage

I'd like to second what you're saying here. I've spoken with others about how difficult it is to make sense of what's going on each time there's a new mass dispute on here, and the cumulative effect of that is really inflammatory. It can easily lead to a bunch of people talking past each other, like you said.

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joXn
@joXn

One objection I have to your point here (and to places on the site where I’ve seen other people’s vagueposting discourse about @aetataureate’s signature described more strongly as “bullying” or “harassment”) is that the only place I’ve ever seen the name @aetataureate connected directly to the behaviour people found problematic is in this comment, right here.

And the reason people don’t connect names directly to criticism of behaviour is that on other sites, doing so does lead to randos who want to stir up shit making a user’s life miserable. So how, other than vagueposting, are people supposed to raise that criticism in public, or are they just supposed to keep quiet?

I happen to think that accessibility is important; I had a career in the early 2010s in which testing user interfaces for accessibility was a significant and often thankless part of my job. I think that @aetataureate’s frustration was understandable. I think having people be vocal on issues like this is important, because work on them is too often postponed indefinitely otherwise. But I also think that in this case the approach taken was encouraging the kind of brigading that everyone else has been taking pains to avoid, and it’s that norm that people were defending.

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osteophage
@osteophage

If the idea behind vagueposting is to insulate a particular person from catching flak, that doesn't seem to have worked.

To answer your question: the way other than vaugeposting is to respond by directly commenting or by making posts that specify, such as by using links. When people can see and compare to the original post, they're equipped to gauge whether someone talking about that post is strawmanning or exaggerating.

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kukkurovaca
@kukkurovaca

For this they were basically accused of haranguing, hostility, bad faith, not being "chill" and slandering staff,

If you want to find the post this refers to, you can browse the cohost meta tag for it, or I think someone linked to it in a comment above. My description of it is not exaggerated.

You've been making a lot of posts that I disagree with, are you bullying me?

I haven't accused you of anything, mocked you, or as far as I know interacted with you at all prior to this, so, no.

Anyway, if you don't like my posts, just block me and have a blessed day.

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atonal440
@atonal440

People see cohost as a social space first and foremost, and personal relationships dominate over ideological advocacy or, frankly, principles. I'm equivocal on this, obviously the personal is inseparable from the political and the realities of the site's accessibility matter, but at the scale of cohost's community and team, annoying activism just isn't viable: you can't treat four people the way you would treat 1000 and expect to have positive outcomes. We don't all have to be friends here, but it helps.

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closedcatastrophe
@closedcatastrophe

That is what caused all this? Someone saying "Hey please give support to accessibility features"? What the actual hell. If you think someone is annoying the block and mute buttons are there for a reason, you do not need to go out of your way to harass them what the hell.

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