folks on here often discuss how bizarre it is to reply guy your way into a conversation online when you'd not act in a similar fashion in the real world.

this weekend we were sitting outside the hotel and talking about jazz and art scenes of the past and such, and I mentioned that my dad, who was a boomer, didn't listen to Monk and Coltrane, he wasn't into that kind of jazz, he was into big band jazz like Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller, mostly because he grew up listening to his parents music, and a fucking rando boomer reply guyed into our conversation right there on the sidewalk and bitched that they did listen to Monk and Coltrane and I wasn't being fair to my parents by saying otherwise, despite him having absolutely no clue who my parents were much less having known them, and folks, that's the deal: reply guying is assuming a boomer stance. don't be that guy.

@djsundog social media platforms have an element of public performance built into their design; any platform can be construed to invite commentary by its very nature unless there are clear signals to the contrary. most face-to-face communication is not performative in that way -- the context is more salient and the social expectations are more clearly defined. maybe it would be useful to have a signal that a given post or conversation is or is not inviting participation

@trwnh@mastodon.social agreed, and I'm happy that GtS has been putting so much work into refining one of the ways that could work on this platform of platforms

@djsundog ran out of characters on the post >_< but the other half is basically that the expectations are also not universally shared. the idea of social media as a platform has somewhat gone down over time... for some people more than others. so to some people, you're holding a megaphone, but to other people, you're just having a chat on the street. i think this is partly from how replies are treated as "special", more than just metadata, no explicit Conversation/Thread.

@djsundog so ultimately we cannot express the difference between "this is my formal response to The Thing" vs "look man i'm just posting". they're both inReplyTo, no context recognized (at the moment, at least)

@trwnh@mastodon.social the semantic overlap is for sure a big part of the conflict, I agree, not to mention the "context collapse by design" features we've carried forward from the "popular" commercial implementations as though it's useful and good.