Post #2538164

2023-01-12 11:23 UTC

...My take now? Making quoting easy is not a major vector for abuse or toxicity, and there are benefits. That’s not to say that the quote tweet can’t be abused. Every form of tweet/post can be, and is. The toxicity was already there, thriving in replies in particular, and amplified in all its forms by the algorithm, retweets, and hashtags. Did the quote tweet make it worse? If it did, it may not have been by much - and in a couple of datasets, it improved civility. 2/2

Replies (7)

@albertoacerbi@fediscience.org 2023-01-12 13:53

@hildabast@mastodon.online We found that quote tweets tend to have reduced negative valence relative to the original tweets that they are quoting https://psyarxiv.com/2jksg

Open ##2538166
@joannekelly@mastodon.ie 2023-01-12 14:13

@hildabast@mastodon.online OK but the people who built entire careers on QTing something with a thread emoji are still objectively bad, right?

Open ##2538168
@LizardSF@universeodon.com 2023-01-12 16:18

@hildabast@mastodon.online I would note that most early Internet forums relied VERY heavily on interlaced quote responses. i.e, KirkFan >>>>>Kirk is better than Picard! TNG4EVR >>>> Your an idiot. KirkFan >>> As illiterate as ever, I see. TNG4EVR >> How about you say why you think hammy acting > Shakespeare? KirkFan > Kirk doesn't surrender! TNG4EVR Except to cheescake! And so on. :) Thus, I assume quoting is value-neutral, it's how you call attention to what you're replying to, for good or ill.

Open ##2538179
@mission_europa@universeodon.com 2023-01-12 16:50

@hildabast@mastodon.online it might be hard to quantify, but it always appeared to me that QT carried a different weight in Twitter's algorithm compared to a Reply as far as displaying on your follower's timelines. At least my own experience was to see the accts I followed QTs far more than their replies (which were sometimes never on the main timeline). This seems to be different here in Mastodon which has less aggressive curation algorithm of the Home feed?

Open ##2538181
@ttpphd@mastodon.social 2023-01-12 20:02

@hildabast@mastodon.online But there are more philosophical complications: https://wandering.shop/@Quinnae_Moon/109566876870504778 Counting up tweets and online interactions misses out on lots of second order effects that may be quite large.

Open ##2538206
@rauschma@fosstodon.org 2023-01-13 17:38

@hildabast@mastodon.online Mastodon could let people opt out of quoting (for all posts and per post). If they do, there’d only be a link to the quoted post in the quoting post. That may give us the best of both worlds. #QuotePosts

Open ##2538212
@msbellows@c.im 2023-01-13 20:24

@hildabast@mastodon.online Has anyone addressed the other problem with QTs: that they break the timeline of discussions? On Twitter, we're forced to choose between replying to a tweet and thereby engaging everyone else reading it, or QTing (plus maybe sharing a link back on the OT TL). If Fedi added QTs, it would be lovely if the QT (not merely a copy of it) also auto-inserted into the original TL.

Open ##2538215