Just about the worst thing you can do, if your goal is to change my opinion, is frame the discussion in a way that leaves me no choice but to comply, like claiming that if I don't agree with your demands immediately I am a monster.
I have time and time again changed my mind about things in the course of developing Mastodon, but it's a lot harder to do when you feel forced to do so "or else"
It's odd, to say the least, to see people claim I'm refusing to put emotional labour into community management when I just spent a night awake up to 6am answering & discussing user concerns about the trending hashtags feature.
It's odd, to say the least, to hear that the feature is a testament to how I ignore community feedback when the only reason I've implemented it is because it's been continuously requested by community members since November 2016.
That just seems manipulative.
@Gargron It's because the way you do it is very dismissive, because you jut want the discussions to end so you can go on with your feature that you want to make.
You don't behave like a person that actually want to listen, and I thought this was why I was hired back so I could be that buffer for you, because I genuinely want to listen to the community and find a balanced decision.
You selectively listen, instead of looking for a middle ground / compromise.
@Gargron Nor ask for the feedback BEFORE you make it into a feature and put it live on M.s, which affects the entirety of the fediverse (at least in this case).
Like. I even asked around "Had you heard a lot of requests about this, had you heard this being discussed", and some people had not. And they were as surprised as I was.
It's not necessarily that it's a bad feature, but it's a culmination of you not taking the time to listen, but only react when people try to talk with you.
@Gargron Emotional labour is about a lot more than coding the features of Mastodon.
Emotional labour is listening, and examining your own biases, or issues.
Emotional labour is taking time to listen and think about people who you don't agree with.
And it's heavy work, it's painful work at times, especially when your insides scream that it's wrong, but you still need to listen to them, and find the core of the issue.
@Gargron We, me and others, have tried so many time to ask you to just take your time.
Take your time with a feature, we don't have to push something out on 14-30 days anymore. We have robust features now.
We can look at making them fully fledged, and taking into account the most vulnerable users, who don't even want to participate in the conversation anymore because of how you've treated them.
Even I considered staying out of this one entirely, because I didn't want to "seem" antagonistic.
@Gargron I wanted to be your buffer, and I still fucking do. Because you've kind of just showed again, how you don't understand what emotional labour means, especially in community work.
You can't be the lead dev, project manager, community manager all in one.
You are Great at the lead dev stuff, but let someone else help you with project management, and community manangement.
Fuck, I even said I could come back at 0 pay over the summer while we figure stuff out.
@Gargron You need it. You need that buffer.
The community needs it
Both need it because your raw feelings and emotional pain when we criticize your baby shows, and it doesn't allow for good conversation with you, about the project. And about what's best for the community.
@Gargron What you need right now, and yes this is unsolicited advice, is to take time, proper time.
And I mean, take a week, two weeks, maybe even a month and sit with ALL THE EMOTIONS that are going to stir in you right now. Examine them. Look at them if they are rational. Dig into why you are feeling the way you are.
That's emotional labour.
@Gargron No, you can’t make everyone happy but when victims of harassment campaigns are telling you, who states they are anti-abuse, that something is bad certain people are harmful and these voices are dismissed (which it very much *seems* they have been in our eyes) it creates the anger and thus many of the comments you’re receiving.
@Gargron getting someone on your team that is an expert on abuse/harassment and internet stalking tactics should be of high priority to you, imo.
it would help with a lot of the issues you’re facing presently.
@gingerrroot @Gargron I very strongly agree! Any social network that aims to grow like Mastodon does, needs to understand that abuse will be attempted in ways that devs (as mostly cis white straight men) don't even see, let alone get targeted by. An expert you trust would be able to explain so much and in a way that is really helpful to you.
@gingerrroot I wouldn't want to reiterate the entire discussion in here, but all the comments against the feature mentioned it can be used for abuse, without specifying how, and how different that is to Mastodon's already existing functionality: For example, someone said "what if your public timeline is filled with slander about x" and I'm here thinking - are you saying without trends you would be okay with that? Nobody is acknowledging that access to trends would let admins notice abuse faster
@Gargron I have seen some people explain how, but maybe it was not in the GitHub conversations.
Creating hashtags that target others is one way, which can be exacerbated by trends. And those that choose to turn the feature off may have no way to notice the abuse faster, and thus it continues. And those who don’t want to be searched at all are / can be harmed by this.
Yes, there are good and fun things about trending hashtags. I am not denying that (& I don’t think anyone is)
@Gargron I am not a dev, so I don’t know if there is a middle ground here or a way to change the feature to be more safe and address some of the concerns raised.
but I do know that the concern is real and the possibility for abuse is real.
I understand that the feedback is not always specific and may not always answer your questions or their questions. But realize this is an emotional topic (abuse, not necessarily trends) and it can be difficult to find the right way to ...
@Gargron express everything, given high emotions, feeling silenced, and different communication styles and levels of understanding.
@gingerrroot A lot of the commenters refused to see any positive effects of the feature, and some even refused to believe that other users asked for it. That's not a balanced view & makes me distrust whoever is pushing it.
I can see the obvious risks of such a feature. But the line between it and letting people post things publicly in general seems arbitrary to me. Is it sufficiently different from having public timeline access, that existing mechanisms would fail to deal with its abuse?
@Gargron I think you may be misreading their comments. Refusing to acknowledge the good may. or actually be a refusal of it, it may be that they think the negatives outweigh the positives
and when abuse has personally impacted someone, it comes out in a way that is more emotionally “negative” and thus read by others as such.
Others may be better equipped to answer that question than me (and I hope they do). It is not arbitrary to those who have suffered from abuse online.
@Gargron again, I would like to reiterate that this isn’t exclusively about the trending hashtags. This is more about victims of online abuse and stalking feeling silenced and not feeling heard.
the previous isn’t the end all be all of mastodon, but the latter could be, given its mission.
@gingerrroot The way the discussion has progressed, made me think if we would be implementing a public timeline right now, these people would be arguing against it. But that system played a massive role in making Mastodon survive, and letting people with common interests congregate around servers. Content discovery, especially when it comes to new users, is the main pain point people bring up. So how do we know the feature wouldn't also play a massively positive role?
@gingerrroot (And yes before anyone brings that up I am aware that some people would prefer Mastodon not to grow, and preferably to become something akin to an invite-only forum or a private WhatsApp group, but forgive me for not wanting to play any part in that)
@Gargron
I think people want mastodon to grow but with features that has humans by design, and they want to stay away of anything that's promote competition or marketing for a trend hashtag.
@gingerrroot
@gingerrroot @Gargron what a startling strawman to erect
@Gargron I think finding a way to encourage the use of hashtags and searching them is great, which encourages connection and community, and I believe is what you most like about the trending tags.
Is there another way to promote this idea without trends? as I stated in my GH comment, the trending could also encourage spamming of hashtags and the like to get more publicity which would have the opposite impact that we would want.
@gingerrroot I suppose admins could just decide which hashtags to display in that widget permanently, and you could call it "Featured topics" or something like that.
The downside being that now it's most definitely a "please talk about this" message; not all admins are equally great at doing such customizations, it's a challenge to pick which tags to highlight; and it might be a lot more boring as they would only change as the often changes them.
@Gargron I think it could also encourage more admins to be more active in order to change them, but I can understand your view of the downsides.
I think this is something that may be better? but I would put that out to everyone rather than making that assumption for them myself.
@Gargron (but it obviously does not assuage some of the fears for abuse of the feature as admins could pick anything and only highlight their own preferences etc, but again we will not make everyone happy)
How about adding a role of moderators, like in slashdot? Let the instance admin pick some people with a good reputation (or maybe even community leaders who will then pick moderators) and let the moderators approve or reject trending hashtags via voting it something.
The thing with Mastodon is that the devs are given the task to not only design useful SW, but also healthy environments for communities. These things may require more features and time than you originally intended.
This is something new; social platforms are more than just software. They're the backbone of the communities of the future. Neglect and implementing a potentially dangerous feature could be equally bad.
And sometimes you didn't have the plans nor the time to add required features, so you're forced to choose between adding all or nothing.
That's why you need to let more devs join the team so you can offload all that work.
@gargron
In any case, my experience as open software developer tells me that the best approach to take is, if you're in doubt whether a feature will be useful or beneficial, is this:
Develop the feature but ALWAYS leave it up to the user (in this case the administrator) to enable and configure it.
The decision whether to use a feature or not should always depend on the instance admin. You were never meant to be god, but to let the admins be the gods. That's the difference between developer and admin.
In this case, give the admins the tools to mute a trend or even promote one and add an expiration time, or whatever. Hey that sounds good: expiration dates to trends.
So my point is: you make the tools, but it's not your responsibility to whether they'll be used for good or evil. That's up to the instance admins. And that's it!
There is no need for you to burden yourself with moral conundrums, that's EXACTLY what admins are for.
@gingerrroot @Gargron People have made proposals to use the ranking of hashtags to improve the search functionality. So instead of giving you an alphabetical list of hashtags that match your search query, it would give you a list of hashtags people are actually using.
I would much prefer this, as it promotes a culture of specialised interest instead of a culture of popularity.
It would also not display a certain hashtag for everyone, so it would greatly reduce the risk of potential abuse.
@hay @gingerrroot @Gargron I really like this trends combined with search function @hay is talking about. Has it been discussed anywhere?
@xuv @gingerrroot @Gargron Not really as far as I have seen. Some people (who I don't remember unfortunately) have brought this idea up, but that's about it.
@hay @xuv @gingerrroot @Gargron oh I posted about that idea and my gripes about the trending topics implementation so far a couple days ago if that's interesting to ya
most of my thread is about the current implementation being pretty bad UX imo and is largely indifferent to having trending topics and ignores possible abuse vectors (I'll let folks who know more than me discuss those.)
@gingerrroot @Gargron Tag cloud? Count unique users using a tag (rather than pure volume of posts) over the past day/week/month/everything.
This will surface persistently high-volume tags, rather than sudden new entrants on the scene.
@Gargron @gingerrroot People are often very averse to *any* change. I agree with your example: I'm certain lots of people would be against a public timeline if it were introduced only now. Sometimes the only way to move forward in face of such "conservative" backlash is to fill the code with "#ifdefs" and make everything optional (or move to a plugin architecture). It's more code maintenance burden, but it shifts the userbase management burden...
@gargron @gingerrroot this sounds a lot like "i don't trust people who have strong emotions about the subject at hand"
Here's a few examples:
https://pleroma.site/objects/1a150b11-caba-4853-b436-d403a87829f2
https://eldritch.cafe/@Sylvhem/100132014881531617
and bonus, because she raises a good point:
@maloki @gingerrroot Come on, please stop now, you made your point, Thank you.
@djoerd You know we saw that you said we've been dismissed right? @gingerrroot
@maloki @gingerrroot yeah, i figured that was not the point.
@maloki @gingerrroot btw, the arguments were dismissed. not you! My apologies if it sounded that way. You're doing great work for Mastodon.
@djoerd There's also an inherent problem with dismissing someone's argument, as dismissing isn't listening or taking them into account.
Which is actually partially what we're arguing. That it's an issue that we keep being dismissed when we raise these concerns.
@djoerd And this is why people are upset, because they don't feel heard, or listened to.
They genuinely feel dismissed. Which is a problem.
@maloki @gingerrroot I agree, sorry.
@djoerd hey, that doesn't need to be boosted, they apologized.
@maloki @gingerrroot @gargron as an onlooker, it strikes me that none of these remarks were addressed to Eugene.
Is it possible that some of this dialogue was not carried on in a way that he could reasonably be expected to act on it?
And that's exactly what a community manager is for.
@Gargron
what about making it optional for each instance? if some want.. just use it...
@Gargron Just remember that the critics are always the loudest. That doesn't mean they should be dismissed, but it does mean that there's usually a much larger group of people not behaving this way.
I know it's hard sometimes to keep this in mind as you don't hear from that side much, (perhaps that's a mistake), but it is there. I know because I am one of them.
@Gargron i've offered before, offering again - if you need PM or CM help I have done both and would gladly volunteer. No need for payment, would love to contribute. Sounds like your org is getting progressively more dramatic and that's good for no one.
@Gargron you can't make it right for everyone especially considering that some people seem to be driven mostly by a tendency to pester others rather than genuine interest in the matter
@Gargron
Community's big enough that catering to one part is invisible to other parts, I guess.
@gargron requested by whom?