I grew up with forums. Forums were focused on an overarching topic, split into categories with threads about more specific topics. If you were interested in participating in a forum, you registered. If you were interested in reading about certain topics, you visited the right threads and checked them out. You could subscribe to threads, too.
It's a design which is centered around topics β and it's absolutely nothing like modern platforms such as Twitter, the fediverse or Cohost. These platforms put the focus on people. Well, in case of Cohost it's pages, but due to the way they're commonly used they're pretty much equal to people.
And because profiles are people, they're a mix of all sorts of content. Some I may be interested in, some I may not, and some I may dislike. Subscribing to a profile means subscribing to all of these things, and this is where the problem begins: You will rarely, extremely rarely, find people whose posts you like 100%. So when subscribing, you need to consider how much of the "I don't like this" you're willing to see in your feed in order to also see the "I like this".
I know from my own experiences that it's hard to resist being too accepting of the former. I assume this is the case for the vast majority of people using social media.
The result is that they have a feed that contains ideally a lot of interesting posts, but also uninteresting or even disliked posts.
Platforms usually provide some common possibilities to curate your feed, but they're flawed:
- Tag filters require appropriate and consistent use of tags, and that's not happening. People are lazy.
- Keyword filters can match posts that were actually fine while also missing posts that weren't. Sometimes it's outright impossible to find useful keywords, and they won't work for image-only posts either.
- Muting or blocking is the nuclear option and I understand why people don't like to use it.
In contrast, your experience with forums was easy and effective to curate. If I wasn't interested in cars, I simply wouldn't register at forums about cars. I also wouldn't check threads about cars in the forums I was registered at. If I didn't feel like reading about politics, I ignored the politics thread for a while.
All of this was possible because the inherent design of forums automatically forced people to think about where to make a post beforehand. It was simply impossible not to choose a forum and a thread within that forum, and moderators ensured that people posted in the right threads and that discussions remained on-topic and civil.
This is something modern user-focused platforms lack entirely. They're a huge global space where everyone can post anything and the moderation only exists to ensure nothing illegal is going on. Any other matter must be handled by the people among themselves.
Conflicts about things like image descriptions and tagging of specific topics are unavoidable under these circumstances.
On the one side, people are frustrated by seeing unwanted content in their feed and only having flawed options at their disposal to curate it. There is no setting to hide media posts without image descriptions, and tag filters only work if there are appropriately-used tags to begin with.
On the other side, people get irritated if someone tells them how to post. It's their personal space after all, and they're already making sure their behavior is fine for their social circles. Why care about some stranger?
It's a phenomenon you can observe on many platforms.
On Bluesky, I follow artists and some of them overdo it with their self-reposting. A per-user option to mute reposts would be perfect, but it doesn't exist, so all I can do is either unfollow and miss art I love, to endure and be annoyed, or to make them aware of how annoying it is and risk coming across as an asshole. All choices suck.
On the fediverse, a while ago I saw a post by a user on an instance for people interested in insects. They often encounter requests to put their photographs behind a content warning, but that makes no sense because they specifically joined that instance to be among like-minded people. Why care about outsiders and their expectations? But it's also true that outsiders with a phobia of insects might receive these photographs in their feed. Just one followee boosting it is enough.
No side is wrong in these disputes. It's the result of the platform's design.
forums were designed by people who wanted to chat about stuff, modern social media was designed by corporations to be profitable. it should come as no surprise zhat it's worse for chatting about stuff.
personally, a lot of zhe people i follow, i follow because i like zhe person, and zherefore most of zheir posts are inherently interesting to me. zhis isn't always zhe case, and it's only somezhing i'm aware of because i go out of my way to find people, not posts. modern social media doesn't want you to meet people or build friendships, it wants you to look at posts (and more importantly, ads). zhis kind of conflict is just one of many ways zhat "social media" fails as a social space - because it isn't designed to be one.
i do wonder what a properly modernized forum would look like. somezhing zhat's good for bozh synchronous and asynchronous communication (like cohost (mostly) is) but also somezhing zhat's topic-focused. somezhing wizh modern integrations, wizh mobile-optimized interfaces, wizh a lot of quality-of-life features. and probably a way of organizing spaces zhat isn't just topic -> zhread, because zhere's a lot of zhings zhat don't fit neatly into a simple 2-level hierarchy. im a big believer zhat tags are superior to hierarchy for most kinds of digital organization, because it means somezhing can be found in multiple places at once. maybe it doesn't need to be zhough.
i dunno. just zhinking aloud