@scottjenson

the distinction we should make is re tagging others, not what you post with nobody tagged. when tagging others, be super considerate. if it might come off as nagging, don't do it.

I want us to be the social media network for everyone, but some do not want us to get bigger and most of those people are the reason this place survived the leanest years. that's tough to deal with. it's a huge conversation, esp when we're the only design that can handle that size well. ugh.

@wjmaggos I appreciate your points, we all want this to be an inclusive, safe place.

My only issue is that giving people advice they didn't ask for, is still aggressive. It doesn't matter if you use nice words.

This needs to be solved at the instance level. Police your instance all you want, get the culture you want there. But leave other instances alone. It just doesn't scale to think you can "fix" the other 10000.

If they're not doing it the way you want, then unfollow them

@scottjenson

not sure we disagree.

but I also want a place where people disagree without being disagreeable. I want people to interact here like they would IRL. I want to be corrected sometimes. I want to see stuff I think is wrong or untrue sometimes. it's harder without many of the social cues we have IRL but trying to make this a place where we never see something upsetting won't be good either. it's very much like the web + email. it should be open but not annoying or people won't use it.

Normally I wouldn't engage but I feel strongly we need to have this discussion and call out this almost entirely white male issue.

The entire Mastodon team is working really hard to add features to bring in more people, in a safe way. It doesn't do any good if these guys just chase them away!

@thibaultamartin @scottjenson people in my circles use them in all kinds of creative ways. Some people will CW stuff they know many of their followers will be bored by - I have a friend for example who is recently very into inline skating but chooses to CW those posts because they know many of their friends don't really care. I CW posts of food, both for the benefit of people with eating disorders and because some people just don't like the stereotype of feeds full of what you had for lunch. I even say whether the food has meat, etc. in the CW because I mostly eat vegan, and some vegans who follow me may not want to open those posts. People will put jokes in the CW punchlines in the body. I've seen polls or other trivia type questions where people CW the answer not to spoil it for others.

There are so, so many great uses for CWs, but they tend to form within individual sub-communities - so we are not even aware of all the ways they get used. This is, to me, a major reason not to try to bully others into using them the same way. My policy is: if something comes across my feed that isn't CWed in the way I would - well, I just don't boost it! No need to bother the author.

@ricci @thibaultamartin @scottjenson I'm tempted to remark that the main issue I'm seeing is with people wanting boost things despite it not being CW'd the way they prefer.

I'm hoping that quote-posts give us better tools here!

I've already had a few randos in my mentions trying to tell me either:

1) It's ok to correct people if done politely
Just because you use polite words doesn't mean it's polite. If you're giving people advice they didn't ask for, you're harassing them.

2) My request was a form of tone policing
Asking people to not harass others is not "tone policing", it's basic trust and safety. It's that classic sad defence that "you're intolerant too!" if you call out intolerance.

Ummmm, no

We need to talk more about reducing "tone policing" here. I understand you want people to use content warnings, but guess what? They don't have to! If they don't do it, just unfollow them.

But please, don't harass them. That's what drove away our last big wave.

Do whatever you need to feel safe, but harassing people to your standards doesn't make THEM feel safe. Stop it.

@scottjenson > If you're giving people advice they didn't ask for, you're harassing them.

this probably depends. some of the best advice i got i got unsolicited

@scottjenson Very interesting point of view. I like it.
Only because you think you are one of the "good guys" gives you the right to expect everything to be done in your way of mind.
But that is a general observation for all social media, not only the Fediverse.

@RandomMusickMayhem I find it humorous that me asking people to not dictate rules to others is somehow "expecting everything to be done in your way of mind".

I'm asking exactly the opposite: don't chase people away because you don't like what they are doing. I'm asking everyone to relax and not push "community standards" that are not agreed to by everyone.

@scottjenson That wasn't meant in a negative way, the complete opposite. I totally agree with you. The comment was about the people expecting unrealistic behaviour.

@thisismissem Thank you for this. I'd like to know how BlueSky mods have felt about their responsibility in tagging users content. it's always helpful to learn how an existing system work (or doesn't)

@thisismissem yeah I'm really just trying to get my head around this. It's clear the status quo just isn't working. I don't have any clear improvements but content labeling feels like a strong (and complementary) solution.

Especially if some of these labels could be fun and supportive? It would be nice if moderators had something positive to add and not just "do policing"

Labellers are interesting and can be useful -- including fun and supportive stuff like The Yard Crow's hand-crafted artisanal labels. And Bluesky's implementation, while interesting and useful, has some major problems -- so I think there's room for Mastodon and other fedi implementations to do a lot better. That said, I don't think labelelrs will help with tone policing here in general, or the issues around CWs in particular.

It would be nice if moderators had something positive to add and not just "do policing"

Yes! And while additional functionality could help here, this can happen now. A couple of thoughts:

• Intervene in discussions in ways that aren't policing. Most obviously, when moderators see an example of unfortunate post that's not breaking the rules, they can reply (in the thread or with DMs) to suggest alternatives -- and if somebody has been unfairly tone policed (or attacked or critiqued nastily for not including alt text etc etc etc) saying something supportive, which can in many situations really help take the sting out of it.

• Educating people on your instance (with posts, announcements, and emails if you do that kind of thing) about the norms you hope people will engage in -- and setting expectations about the challenges of cross-instance interactions where the norms are different. With CWs for example, make sure that people know (a) what the expectations are on your instance (b) what people should do and not do if they see a post from your instance that flouts the expectations and (c) what to do and what not to do if they see a post from another instance that flouts the expectations. (The "not to do" of those cases may well include "give the poster a hard time".)

• Making sure that your onboarding process lets newcomers know about the norms.

@scottjenson @thisismissem

One thing I'd add though is that some of what's described as "tone policing" is in reality call-ins or call-outs for racism, ablism, sexism, etc. So it's important to keep that in mind when trying to limit the less-helpful forms of tone policing.

@scottjenson @thisismissem

@jdp23
Excellent points, thank you for replying so thoughtfully. So if I understand you correctly, you're strongly in favor of content labeling (especially as a form of positive engagement) but you don't think it will help with call-outs for not following the rules? If so, I agree, but as you say, it could take a significant sting out of it if a moderator labels the victims post with something supportive and positive.

I assume there are FEPs on this already in progress?
@thisismissem

I'm strongly in favor of investigating approaches to content labeling and think that a well-done system could be helpful in general (and not just for positive engagement). There are also a lot of complexities here (including abuse potential, and how labels should fit in with a more general content note system) so I don't think the right answer is just to clone the Bluesky implementation. On the other hand it would be great to have something like @aendra's XBlock Screenshot Labeler here in fedi!

My intuitions are that content labels won't help much with tensions around tone policing or CWs -- they'll just displace the tensions to be about tone policing and labels. Of course I could be wrong on that front, maybe there are design approaches leading to positive impacts I haven't thought about and/or a way to use the existence new functionality to get awareness and adoption of (non-technology) best practices. So it might well be worth exploring!

In general though I feel like figuring out approaches for cultural interventions is the key question -- not jsut on this front, but also on making progress on accessibility best practices (and avoiding tensions around alt-text usage), anti-Blackness, reply-guyism, etc etc etc. So if resources are limited (and I assume they are!) my intuition is that may well be a better place to focus efforts. One of Fedi's strengths is context-aware moderation on small-to-medium size instances. How to leverage that here? How to expand to deal with cross-instance differences in norms, and larger instances where scalability problems start to kick in?

@scottjenson @thisismissem

We need to talk more about reducing "tone policing" here. I understand you want people to use content warnings, but guess what? They don't have to! If they don't do it, just unfollow them.

But please, don't harass them. That's what drove away our last big wave.

Do whatever you need to feel safe, but harassing people to your standards doesn't make THEM feel safe. Stop it.