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@heliomass

Very interesting and informative article on Quote Posting. Really appreciate that the Mastodon dev team is talking to the community and thinking this through...

"In order to mitigate these issues, we plan to include several features in our implementation:
-You will be able to choose whether your posts can be quoted at all.
-You will be notified when someone quotes you.
-You will be able to withdraw your post from the quoted context at any time."

@mastodonmigration @heliomass The ability to remove quoted posts from quoting posts is a recipe for misinformation disasters, since it removes the context of the post that did the quoting. I would strenuously and publicly object to this. I would also note that the ability to say you don't want posts quoted could open a can of worms, since anyone who really wanted to quote a public post could do so with a screen grab of the post of interest, creating the potential for new battles.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan Your mistake is thinking that the problems came from mechanisms of interaction and not from the toxicity of having the platform run and moderated by people with no interest in wellbeing of the community, only engagement and data mining metrics.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan And yes, Google has been Evil since the beginning. I'm sorry that's hard to come to terms with for people who were working there, but there's no need to project that onto communities who are building a future that's not controlled by the likes of them.

@dalias @raphaelmorgan Google was not evil from the beginning. It certainly made a lot of mistakes early on, and over the years matured into world class expertise in a bunch of important areas, especially security and privacy. Absolutely top notch. I've worked with many of the involved individuals. G+ was problematic for several reasons (it really began as more of an identity service than a standalone social media platform, and the YouTube comments integration was an absolute train wreck that was rescinded too late). In my view, it's been rapidly downhill at Google since Sundar took over, but there was a bunch of very good years of which Googlers can be very proud of their work.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan When I say Google was always evil, I don't mean the people working there weren't well meaning, but the system was evil all along because it was predicated on debt to investors who expected huge returns.

I watched for decades as people in various parts of the company believed they were doing good and it was "just a coincidence" that the things they were doing were enabling bad actors and that they somehow weren't assigned/allowed to do the obvious things to fix that.

@dalias @raphaelmorgan I am not anti-capitalism, and I do not object to the corporate model per se. Compared to many firms, Google managed a decent balance for many years. Again, I consider the atmosphere under Sundar to be very different and frankly very sad to see.

@lauren @raphaelmorgan There's a difference between not objecting to the corporate model and not objecting to the VC model. The claim that the latter necessarily produces evil is much weaker than the claim that corporate model in general produces evil.