claret

Claret/Raie

grumpy in a funny and nonserious kind of way

Additional links are on my caard, but "ClaretClarinets" is always going to be me


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claret
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twitter (mostly inactive)
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claret
@claret

sometimes when I'm hangin out here on cohost, I'll see the fringes of Big Drama(tm) that's supposedly going on, and a handful of posts will suggest it's a big, all-encompassing Thing that permeates every corner of the site that no one can avoid and Fitting Hyperbole Here if we don't do something about it.

and whenever that happens I feel like one of those characters in a movie that's sitting in the foreground just, like, eating dirt or something, completely oblivious to the protagonist and their nemesis having a fight to the death on jet skis in the background.

nothing specific is prompting this, there's just been half a dozen-ish moments in the past couple months where I'll see One Post about how prevalent such-and-such thing is and my reaction is invariably, "They did what with a jet ski??" And then I'll turn around and there's a conspicuous jet ski-shaped hole in the wall directly behind me, but it's been covered with caution tape for weeks and anyone asked about it just mumbles something about "The Incident" with no further clarification.

i'm not sure what point i was trying to make, but i'm glad people are having fun with their jet skis


belarius
@belarius

Feels like a good time to share this post, mostly because I absolutely love this tiny detail that disappears into the background of this bonkers, gargantuan painting, but also because it's helpful to remember that one person's Final Boss Music Knock-Down Drag-Out Brawl is always going to be another person's Doesn't Even Rate A Footnote. I'm not taking a shot at Big Drama™, I've just learned that no drama, no matter how justified or consequential, is so big that you can safely assume everyone knows what you're talking about.


vitia
@vitia
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in reply to @claret's post:

I'm not sure if its props to cohost for not being designed to force people into doomscrolling/hateposting/etc. or if its just our luck. Sometimes I even follow people who are involved with The Latest Incident, and still don't get the whole idea

(I also don't look for it because I'm not going to ruin my mood by looking into something uncomfortable just for the sake of gossip)

Love being a bystander tho

Yeah, that's fair. I think there's the potential to easily misrepresent situations, too. if, for example, there's two people involved and one of them has a much bigger audience/reach, it'd be harder to fact check what they're saying if you can't get the other side of the story.

and most people will form an opinion before getting all the information when it is readily available.

I think there's the potential to easily misrepresent situations

Pointing out that there's potential to easily misrepresent situations has in fact been one of the situations misrepresented, if you can believe it.

I had made some posts about what you're talking about, and.... well, what happened after that is probably too intricate to recap in the space of a comment, but I've been meaning to eventually make a post about it. Let me know if you want the link.

Oh wow that is fascinating, and also explains a lot. I definitely see how the inability to find the things/conversations/events people are talking about in turn makes it easier to assume and jump to conclusions that become more and more divorced from their original context as they proceed down the telephone line.

My biggest issue with the site's design is not being able to see alternate versions of a post that have additional content/comments unless you stumble upon it later (or are the op). if you only ever see Version A of a post, you have no way of knowing that Version B (where someone else has added important context) exists unless it makes its way back onto your timeline or someone directly points it out to you.

Which inevitably leads into (and in some ways enforces) this "vague posting culture", because there's no real way to avoid it unless you somehow followed every single person and read every single post on the site, which just isn't feasible (and most people aren't confrontational and would rather blow off steam on their own blog than directly address whatever annoyed them). So even posts that aren't about any specific person/thing (mine right here, for example) can be read as vagueposting, because there's no way to fill the Knowledge Voids for everyone who reads it.

all that is to say, i'm happy to just be out here eating dirt after breaking both my legs in an unfortunate jet skiing accident in my youth.

It was an interesting read, thanks for sharing!

Yeah the way that Cohost splits up comment sections and hides reblog additions is something I've discussed here and here. On that note, I don't think it helps that comment sections get indented so heavily (as demonstrated by this comment right here). It seems related to why people create so many new posts instead of just creating a couple posts and then holding the conversation in the comments, where you'd be able to clearly see the threading between a reply and what preceded it.

Anyway, thanks for hearing me out. I hope now you can see why that remark about the potential to misrepresent situations... jumped out at me, lol

For what it's worth, I think the posting style is a holdover from tumblr (and twitter, kinda) where people do just reblog or make additional posts rather than replying to posts. tumblr didn't have a dedicated comment section for years, and there was no way to directly respond to someone "replying" to your post other than to screenshot it and make a new post. tumblr users got used to just making commentary in tags or in reblogs.

cohost looks and functions mostly like a tumblr clone, so that's how the majority of the userbase interacts with it. contrasted with a website like pillowfort, which was intended to be an alternative to tumblr, but honestly feels more comparable to livejournal with a focus on Blog Posts with a lot of discussion in the comments.

I think the disconnect is having the Stream of Consciousness posting style of Tumblr paired with Cohost's mission statement of Meaningful Interaction without numbers. Tumblr's way of posting only works on tumblr because you can track down every possible permutation of a post through the notes. Without those numbers (the notes/interactions on a post) the system kind of falls apart.

I'm rambling a little here, but I think the solution is for cohost to prioritize one or the other. either un-collapse the comment section so it's easier to have lengthy discussions in the comments (or even just making it so you can open any part of a comment chain in a new tab like you can with reddit), OR make it so you can find all versions of a post that have been reshared with additions so that discussion added directly to the post is always accessible.

i've come across several jet-ski shaped holes and i immediately leave when i see one. i just can't handle that right now, and it's not what i came here for. there's probably jet-skis i should be on, but i usually have little to say either way. just hope people dont get too feisty with them while i eat dirt, which i do enjoy very much

100%, I saw a tweet with more than 20K likes talking about "site-wide Cohost drama" fairly recently, but like, I spend most of my social media time here and I still don't think I've actually seen any posts here about whatever they were talking about

Making a new thread as a continuation of the previous thread in order to take us out of the noodle zone:

For what it's worth, I think the posting style is a holdover from tumblr (and twitter, kinda) where people do just reblog or make additional posts rather than replying to posts.

My impression has been that the active userbase of Cohost (or at least, the folks I've seen around the most often) is disproportionately more familiar with Twitter than Tumblr, even if the site features themselves have more of a resemblance to Tumblr. But yeah. Either way, the net result is the same.

a website like pillowfort, which was intended to be an alternative to tumblr, but honestly feels more comparable to livejournal

That's intentional too! The founder has talked about being influenced by LiveJournal in terms of features like communities.

or even just making it so you can open any part of a comment chain in a new tab like you can with reddit

That would be useful, yeah. Actually, all of those ideas get my vote.

in reply to @belarius's post:

insane. utterly incomprehensible. he was light years ahead of his time. 11/10.

I had to close the giant forever zoom of the triptych or else my adhd would have me looking at details for 3 hours