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 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.
@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)
@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?
@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?
@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...
