amber🌈ammolite

thought experiment: does this qualify as a vocaloid, in the fandom sense of a vocaloid being any vocal synth with a mascot

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

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?

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

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.

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.

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.

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"

+2 +2 +2 on what Lyn said^ when you have like really Big Fans who reply or comment one every single thing you say the "courtesy like" becomes this weird thing where if I don't give it this person I don't know might actually get disproportionately upset due to how much perhaps inappropriate weight they give my opinion of them, such that I feel really anxious and guilty about not giving it, and would even make sure to read every single reply on my tweets so I didn't miss anyone and accidentally snub them. But every time I do give that courtesy like, it feeds into that parasocial relationship where they think we're friends or I really actually want them replying to every single thing I say even though I don't even follow them or know their name or anything. The other option is to be clique-ish and very actively only acknowledging replies by people I'm friends with but I like being friendly and approachable especially when someone says something I genuinely appreciated or enjoyed; which on Twitter the only way to demonstrate that I genuinely liked their reply was still to, well, actually reply to it and say "Thanks for this" "this made me laugh" etc. so then why even have the like.

If you've never been micro-famous maybe this doesn't seem that important but parasocial relationships can go to some... really... grim places. It actually gets extremely stressful.

hope i'm not having a massive brain fart, but now i'm starting to wonder if we even need a like button on posts. i mean, if you can comment "this is cool!" or "i agree" or whatever on a post, what's the like button for? cause it doesn't even function as a bookmark like it does on tumblr

for anyone who cares, i've changed my mind since posting this. i mean, not that i was super anti likes on posts to begin with, but i've now come across situations where it makes more sense for me to leave a like than comment. usually if i found a post i liked, but was too burnt out to comment

Hey all, I'm an artist. I'm really excited about Cohost, and I'd like to tell you why.

There's something about the metric-measuring of social media that I think causes art and expression to become somewhat... stifled. Instead of making what they want, artists are encouraged to make what's popular. What gets shares, what gets likes, what gets followers. That's not a bad thing per se, but I don't know if it's always a healthy thing either. I think those numbers tend to drive creators a little crazy. When you post something that doesn't get attention, it feels like you got a bad grade. When you post something that does get attention, it feels like you did something right for once. That shouldn't be what art is about; art shouldn't be something you can win or lose at. Art should encourage expression.

I draw some admittedly very niche stuff. Over time, after over a decade posting art online, I've realized that finding my audience - finding the people that are really into my work, the people who find meaning and connection in it - give me the most satisfaction and fulfillment as an artist. I think I read someone else say something like "Having 100 followers who really care about your work is better than having 10,000 followers who don't." And that's true as hell. Art in the age of social media should not be about reaching as many people as possible. It should be able reaching your people.

So, that brings me back to Cohost. Cohost is great in the sense that it has eliminated metrics and algorithms that prioritize some things, and hide others. Nothing is shown to you unless you want to see, which is very nice. But that comes with a tradeoff. Now you have a little bit of responsibility, you have power. If you like some creative content on Cohost, well, there's a pretty strong chance that someone who follows you will also like it. You can help connect a creator and their work to the people who will enjoy it the most, and you can only do that by sharing.

But, what's most important to me overall, Cohost presents a unique metric that social media has never really tried before, in the sense that the only measurable metric is also the most meaningful one: comments! We can really, truly, replace meaningless numbers with real human connections - even short and fleeting ones - and show in a meaningful way how a piece of art makes us feel. That's really cool. I don't know if you know this yet, but one comment of someone saying "I really like this!" is worth more to me than 100 shares.

So, please write a comment. It doesn't have to be complicated or deep. Hell, I'm a porn artist - I just want to know that my art made you feel something. But if you want to make the most of Cohost, comment on that post.

(and you should, too)

i really like this post- it identifies quite a few of the design decisions that went into our metrics-lite (or metrics-free) approach to social media. one thing of note, i think, is that we never want to discourage prosocial interaction; a lot of times, websites accidentally discourage these behaviors with various design patterns, dark and otherwise. i just wanted to note a bit of the philosophy that underlies our comment system:

we believe that comments and rehosts serve different social purposes.

• comments are largely between you and the OP; when you comment on a post, it is only visible within that comment section.
• it won't get served to your followers in their feed (because it's not for them!)
• it isn't recorded on your profile anywhere, and you can't go looking for a list of another user's comments (we think this encourages bad behavior)
• comments on shares with added commentary preserve the version of the post that you commented on, because context is important
• OP can lock comments at their discretion
• sharing a post and adding commentary to it, as i'm doing here, is a different mode of interaction: one that intentionally brings my followers into the conversation.
• because commenting and sharing are different behaviors, it is up to you to decide how to engage with a particular post; you get to actively choose whatever mode of engagement you want to, uh, engage in.
• all of this, in the end, goes right back to our core belief of opting in, not out

anyway. tl;dr there is no real downside to commenting on a post; you won't spam your followers unwittingly, no one can search through an archive of your comments to harass you, and context is preserved when viewing any given comment. also, like, c'mon, it's just really nice to give and receive compliments or constructive commentary!

final note: we're planning on a lot more sharing options to be shipped as soon as we can get to them- features like locking a post to prevent rehosts, a private list of likes, notification collapsing, nicer comment nesting etc. we realize that we're not feature complete yet! in addition, when we ship tipping and subscriptions, we plan to include some private metrics so artists and creators can run their businesses more effectively on cohost.

anyway, thanks for using cohost, and please don't be scared to comment

As a tangent to this excellent thread about the corporate raiding of newspapers, I think a lot of people naturally wonder: "Why do capitalists think this way? Why take something that's clearly sustainable in the long term and just gut it completely for short-term profit? Are they stupid as well as evil?"

In a few cases (see Twitter) they are indeed simply very stupid, but that's not the main reason they tear down profitable businesses for parts. In fact, it's an incentive that's inherent to capitalism itself. Capitalism is definitionally an economic system where money can purchase the ability to make more money (that is to say, "capital"), and large amounts of money can purchase ever more profit-generating capacity. So if Mr. Moneybags spends $50 million to buy a newspaper and squeezes $100 million out of it within two years, he can immediately use that money to buy something more profitable than the newspaper ever was (maybe more companies to liquidate!).

At that point, it doesn't matter that he destroyed the newspaper's long-term profitability. Mr. Moneybags will always be able to find something to invest in that'll turn a consistent profit if he wants to switch his focus from business to politics. This is not only why corporate raids are rational, it's why companies in general tend towards short-term thinking and growth at any cost.

Now, if you read this and find yourself thinking, "Well that makes sense, but it can't possibly be sustainable, right? There's no way you can always find a more profitable place to invest your money" I will direct you to the fine writings of my good friends Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin for further research.

I gave up years ago on pretending that This Shit doesn't work, for the values of work that These People want. it works. they get rich. the problem is simply that they suck ass for doing it, and generally on a long enough timeline we find out that they suck ass as people.

like many political / sociological positions, the problem with convincing the opposition that they're wrong is that we often want to argue over facts or practicality, when our real complaint is that they just suck, what they're doing sucks, and you want them to not want to do it because it sucks.

the true leftism isn't complicated, it's just looking at shit and going "that sucks. you shouldn't want to do that even if it benefits you." landlord behavior sucks. we don't need to discuss housing availability or economics, just look at a guy who's refusing to lift a finger about someone freezing to death and go "that sucks" and you have a solid political opinion