stylo

the 'girl of steel'

  • she/her

trans dyke, 32, jazz musician, counter strike, maybe some other stuff idk

vgm ep @ bandcamp.com/stylo-v


last.fm listening
musicboard album ratings
a spinning estradiol vial with the text 'powered by estrogen'


NoelBWrites
@NoelBWrites

now that there's an even larger influx of users fleeing twitter (I say, as if I am not one of them), I've been poking around the cohost feature request forum to upvote the ones I would find useful, etc.

I've seen a good amount of feature requests that are based around what the user would prefer when in the process of using the site, because they tend to remove some sort of friction (ex. infinite scrolling, trending tags page, displaying number of likes or followers, automation tools, word search posts, etc.). Unfortunately a lot (most?) of the same features would remove the user's agency... and that's why they're so tempting.


I loved infinite scrolling on reddit, which was terrible for me

Back in the Before Times, reddit had an even worse ui design and extremely clunky functionality, so everyone would download the Reddit Enhancement Suite.

Some of the enhancements the extension gave you were things like opening an image without needing to click out of the page, tagging users, and infinite scrolling (the old reddit design was paginated).

I activated infinite scrolling and using reddit felt so much better. Faster, less annoying. My browsing sessions became three times longer. I would lose hours without even noticing.

The same reason I preferred it in the moment is why it put me less in control of my experience. It made it faster for me to access new posts if I didn't have to click the "next page" arrow, my experience became seamless. This would make it harder for me to disengage with the site and go do something else. I wouldn't even have the chance to think about disengaging, I would go on autopilot.

At some point I wasn't even slightly entertained. I was exactly as bored as if I wasn't scrolling, but somehow unable to do anything else. I know a lot of people probably relate to that feeling, if not with reddit, then with facebook, twitter, instagram or whatever.

Eventually I deactivated the infinite scroll function and reddit went back to being a place where I discussed niche interests in small subreddits or looked up specific information. It became useful again the moment I stopped feeling compelled to stay on it for hours.

Cohost is not trying to hijack your neurons, stop asking it to

I'm not saying every feature that removes friction is bad. Quality of life improvements are good! I'm just asking us to think about what actually is a quality of life improvement, and what will make your life worse, but faster.

more of my thoughts on the cohost ux/ui and agency

good post by @Bigg on why cohost is not twitter and that's good

how to discover new people without an algorithm suggesting you content


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in reply to @NoelBWrites's post:

yeah, i so much prefer the vibe and pace here as is. i guess by virtue of what i do my pictures and writing tend to attract attention and the engagement hell on twitter is overwhelming. people there just have stuff put in front of them and are incentivized to interact with it in low-effort ways. like on one hand it's nice to see a lot of eyeballs get put on your work, and then you run headlong into people trying to turn the engagement engine their way by hopping into scream at you, put their own (often wrong) take on what you're saying, or simply reposting and moving on.

the discoverability here is not exactly the best but i feel like it at least rewards effort. if i find someone i like here, i'm more likely to appreciate them because of the effort i put in to find them and interact constructively to encourage them. adding shitty bird site bells and whistles only turns this place into a shitty bird site knockoff - if i wanted that i would be a masto main

The discoverability thing is something that I've also been thinking about because whenever we talk about it we are kind of vague about it.

Like nobody defines it but the way we say it "discoverability" tends to mean a very specific kind of "discoverability". Namely, we are all talking about how easy it is for some rando to passively stumble upon your post.

And yeah, if that kind of discoverability is easier, there's the possibility of getting a lot of eyeballs on your post

But also the percentage of eyeballs that actually welcome seeing your post will necessarily be lower. And the disadvantages to this regarding discourse and context collapse and bad faith readings are things we've all talked about a lot. But there's this assumed upside of "at least you will reach people that you wouldn't have otherwise".

From a marketing perspective, that's not necessarily better, tho. If you are, for example, a comic artist that wants to get new readers, and the algorithm picks up your post and blasts it everywhere, a lot of people will see your comic. Once. Most of those people will be... absolutely indifferent to it. They're not comic readers and they have zero interest in whatever genre or topic your comic is about, they'll scroll by. A small percentage of people will be assholes trying to game the algorithm for themselves and blast your post with a bad faith reading or straight up bigoted attacks, depending on where they (and their audience) fall on the political spectrum. And then a tiny, tiny minority of people will be intrigued by your comic and maybe read more, some of them may even subscribe.

On the other hand if you post that same comic somewhere with no algorithm but a tag feature, the people that will encounter your comic will be people already self-selected to like it because they are browsing one of the relevant tags. The total number of eyeballs on your comic will be lower but the percentage of those eyeballs that will appreciate it, read more and subscribe will be higher.

Kind of like the difference between sending a sales email to your newsletter subscribers vs. sending a sales email to a bunch of random addresses.

So like you said, you are more likely to appreciate finding someone you like here because you put in the effort. That applies from the other side as well: your audience will mostly be people that found you because they were looking for you. I kind of prefer that.