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cohost patch notes vol. 34

happy wednesday, coposters! your eyes do not deceive you: we skipped patch notes last week because we needed to shift our time away from feature work and towards moderation and user support regarding the community guidelines updates.

a lot of changes over the last week were entirely behind-the-scenes, adding a lot of moderation tools that we’d punted on because they hadn’t been needed yet but became very needed over the last week. soliciting community input on a contentious topic ended up as a stress test of both our community-driven governance processes and our moderation tooling, neither of which really passed these tests. in the future, we are going to be more precise about the sort of specific feedback we are soliciting and quicker to moderate unconstructive discussions.

anyway! here’s what’s new:

  • added a “read less” button to shrink posts you’ve “read more” on back down
  • added the ability to lock comments on a given post
    • this is accessible in the meatball menu in the top right corner of any post you wrote.
    • when comments are locked, you will be able to write and edit your comments. other users will be able to delete their comments, but will not be able to write or edit comments.
    • additionally, we are going to start locking comments on staff posts that we aren’t actively monitoring anymore to avoid things getting out of hand where we aren’t seeing it.
  • lots of moderation tooling
  • minor UI improvements to the post composer
  • started filtering certain content warnings from major tags

coming up on cohost

the final community guidelines wording is obviously delayed. we’d hoped to have it finalized last week, but writing this sort of policy is immensely difficult! one of our primary goals is to reduce moderation workload by reducing the number of case-by-case decisions we need to make, as each one takes a decent amount of time away from other work. to accomplish this, we’re trying to write the policy in a way that’s clear and enables us to make consistent decisions. we’ll have more news for you here once it’s wrapped up.

customizable CW filtering is still in progress and should be out by next patch notes, barring any major interruptions.

hopefully next patch notes will be more fun than this one! thanks for using cohost :host-love:

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in reply to @staff's post:

throwaway
@throwaway

one of our primary goals is to reduce moderation workload by reducing the number of case-by-case decisions we need to make, as each one takes a decent amount of time away from other work. to accomplish this, we’re trying to write the policy in a way that’s clear and enables us to make consistent decisions.

Very happy to hear this. It would have been easy for the reaction to your previous posts to panic you into releasing a hasty policy without thinking through all the implications, and I'm very glad you've avoided that impulse, for the good of your users and moderators.

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modulusshift
@modulusshift

that read less button works exactly like I'd want it to, designed very well, good work

and I know moderation tooling isn't exactly the most fun thing to put into a changelist but I personally am glad to know a bunch of work went into that. good use of Plus! bucks if you ask me. anything that makes that portion of the job easier and quicker means tons of time saved over the long haul, and I know you'll use that time well, even if it's just spent recovering from how terrible people can be sometimes. Lots of love!

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Izvy
@Izvy

Locking comments and read less are very good features thank you!

I'm looking forward to the CW filtering. I understand waiting to get the guidelines right but I have to admit to being filled with anxiety over the security of my future on this platform that I love so much.

Of course I trust staff and will respect whatever comes. :host-love:

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YuushaRuby
@YuushaRuby

Read less works great thank you!

Also I was wondering why private messages aren’t a thing on cohost maybe this has been discussed in a previous update (you can just link me if that’s the case) but I wasn’t really checking the site until my account got activated a few weeks ago or so so I’m just curious, my assumptions are it having to do with stuff like unsolicited nudes or sexual advances amongst other things being the key problem with private messages on other social media platforms, or maybe I’m entirely off base there but yeah just curious!

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vogon
@vogon

this is a good question! it's not a philosophical thing per se, but we haven't done PMs/DMs because as a business running a social media web site with a desire to actively moderate, we think we're intrinsically worse at private messaging than an entity that's just doing that for a living -- either a centralized entity like Whisper Systems/Signal that's built to be a content-neutral communication medium that doesn't keep records, or an open-source peer-to-peer protocol.

we do definitely want to make it easier to get in touch on other services with people you've met on cohost, though! we've got a couple ideas kicking around but nothing to commit to yet.

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shel
@shel

My imho is we should never have DMs on cohost but we SHOULD have business cards and you can click a button and send a specific user your little business card of contact information :)

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lori
@lori

Two concerns:

  1. "each one takes a decent amount of time away from other work"

Honestly I think cohost needs someone focused on community management to continue to grow or even sustain the userbase there is now. Having software devs do moderation on the side doesn't help anyone, and there's no perfect set of rules you can write that won't have people finding edge cases you'll have to moderate anyway. I get that you already are operating at a massive loss, but this moderation isn't sustainable long term, and I think this phrase stuck out as why. Moderation can't be a side project on a site this large, you can't just hope everyone will behave, regardless of what rules you go with.

  1. Account deletion - This isn't me requesting my account be deleted, but I know some people have over the last week, and the response has been underwhelming to say the least. When I sign up for a site like this, I do so with the assumption I can delete my account at any time no questions asked. But what I've heard from others is that they were unable to get their accounts removed at this time if they had ever posted. That's a massive privacy issue to me (and possibly a GDPR legal issue?) and I think it needs to be prioritized over things like tagging systems. Was fixing this part of this update or is this the current state of things now?
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ring
@ring

I think there is a massive difference between a small group of people wearing multiple hats out of necessity and treating moderation as a side project. I don't know the staff personally, but one of the things that made me comfortable hanging around here was the effort they put into thinking about how the design of the site itself would shape how users behave, and how some of the community management trash fires on other sites are facilitated by their design and features. I do not at all get the impression that this is a case of devs with no community management skills thinking they can handle it and hoping it doesn't get out of hand.

Even if they had a dedicated community manager, writing a policy to reduce the need for case-by-case decision making would be a good call and will scale if the site grows. It means they have space to actually consider the individual circumstances of edge cases and come to a decision tailored to the situation.

This is not a group project, but from my experience here I would hesitate to describe Cohost as a service; they've always been straightforward about what they're working on and what might be impacting it, and nothing said about the resource tradeoffs of moderation here is unfamiliar to me as someone who's done community management and moderation professionally. It's just not the kind of thing you straight up say to Customers; not because it's a dirty secret or anything, but because Customers don't want to hear it. It kind of pisses them off when you say something's causing you stress or extra work, because are they paying you with their time and attention and money to struggle? Fuck no, shut up and come back when you've fixed it. I don't consider myself a customer of this site; they aren't profiting off me being here apart from me putting $5 in the eggbug jar, which I'm doing because I like when people can buy food. I'd rather just hear what's going on and what they're thinking about it.

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lori
@lori

I think ultimately their issue is that they grew too big too fast. There's a difference between a 200 person community and a 20,000 person public platform. And the only way it becomes financially sustainable is to grow enough to support that. The devs have been transparent about the money, and this isn't a small passion project, it's their full time jobs right now that they take salary for. I don't wish them any harm, but I have to be honest and say that what they are doing right now is not sustainable, financially or in terms of their time. I don't know that there's a good answer to this. They don't have the money to bring on more people, but they don't currently have the resources to moderate a site with this many people unless everyone gets along--which is impossible.

I know a lot of people read this and think "people are so mean to the devs, they're just three people, they're trying to do right", and I don't disagree that they're trying. But it isn't nicer to just say "great job!" when you think there's an issue, that's what asking for community feedback is supposed to be about. I think the site has a moderation bandwidth issue and I don't think trying to come up with a perfectly worded rule on lolicon will solve it. If the site has a future, and presumably the devs want it to since this is their career right now, we need to be willing to talk about this.

And I'm sorry because I know some of this is more general sentiment than what you personally said so I went on a bit of a tangent, don't take that as me accusing you of these comments, but I'm very tired of people calling posts like mine mean or bad faith because they're politely critical. There are changes that have to be made for this site to continue and the recent drama isn't the cause of this, just something that highlighted the issues. There are massive technical gaps like with account deletion that I honestly feel should have been fixed before even going public since it's a massive security concern. I am not confident in their ability to moderate this large of a space purely in terms of people power right now.

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vogon
@vogon

these are both completely valid concerns! thanks for bringing them up.

  1. as ring said, we're not doing moderation as a side job long-term -- we're just small, wearing multiple hats out of necessity, and we refuse to farm moderation out to contract labor making minimum wage like other companies on principle. if that doesn't turn out to be sustainable long-term, that sucks but we're prepared to accept it while providing people all the assistance we can moving to other places.

  2. what you've heard about those accounts not being immediately deleted is true; however, the technical work that is currently preventing us from deleting them fully is in progress, and we're leaving those support cases open for a quick resolution once it's done. we've also been happy to help with immediately removing particular PII on request if people issue a deletion request and express a concern about the privacy implications of their account.

I know these aren't great answers, but these are issues we're aware of and trying to resolve as quickly as possible.

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joewintergreen
@joewintergreen

The "read less" thing is great, but would it be possible to have an option that forces the rest of a post behind a "read more" the author didn't add if it's longer than a certain length? It's a bit arduous scrollwise at the moment if someone does a long post without a "read more" thing in it and it gets rechosted a few times.

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joewintergreen
@joewintergreen

These are single long posts with no replies.

I do absolutely want it to handle many-replied posts that show up as one giant monolith the same way though. The worst case is I follow multiple people reposting/replying to the same long post, so I have to, several times, scroll past a big tall post and its several potentially long replies. It's nuts

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mcc
@mcc

I don't know if this is a question or a "report a bug" feature request so I'm just going to post it here-- is there any way to link someone to a post on Cohost such that the "read more" section is pre-expanded? Would you consider adding such a feature? It seems like it would be pretty easy to do via like a #expand js tack-on at the URL end.

I feel like for a lot of posts it makes sense to have the cutoff early even in direct links so people can see comments, but in others it really doesn't make sense to cut off so early when someone is being sent a link directly.

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