@elilla It was so weird watching the culture shift from “quote toots are a tool to dunk on people” to “quote toots are important for minorities” (for reasons I don’t understand).
Basically people who left Twitter before 2020 because of the terrible vibes were outnumbered by people who left later because of the takeover by actual nazis.
meta, QTs
@toni @elilla It's not quite that simple, and the discussion has been rather muddied, unfortunately.
The short summary is:
- QTs serve as a tool for harassment especially for privileged white folks.
- QTs also serve as an important online equivalent of certain aspects of Black culture (I can't recall the name right now, sorry).
- These two needs are (mostly) reconcilable by making QT support a choice of the person being QT'ed.
The problem is that an opt-in (or opt-out) implementation of QTs has not been forthcoming for reasons of governance failure in Mastodon, and this has created fertile ground for endless shitfights *among users* where this whole nuance of 'varying demographics and needs' is drowned out by a flattened representation of the issue where 'forced absence' and 'forced presence' of the feature are considered the only two options.
Essentially, because nobody has the power to actually fix the problem in the implementation, all the energy goes into *arguing badly about* the problem instead, even though a solution has been known for a long time by this point.
meta
@toni @elilla (This same problem of "nobody affected has the power to deploy a fix so everybody argues to the death instead" also plays out across a number of other moderation-related issues on fedi, incidentally)