Inspired by a convo on another instance, could any #mastodon savvy folk clear up something I've been wondering about: Favorites/likes/⭐...
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Inspired by a convo on another instance, could any #mastodon savvy folk clear up something I've been wondering about: Favorites/likes/
... they don't actually serve a purpose apart from notifying whoever wrote the toot you starred, right?On the olden attention economy platforms, as I understand them, a post's number of likes could decide its placement in a feed. To my knowledge Mastodon (and I believe most other #fediverse) platforms don't weight posts this way.
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Inspired by a convo on another instance, could any #mastodon savvy folk clear up something I've been wondering about: Favorites/likes/
... they don't actually serve a purpose apart from notifying whoever wrote the toot you starred, right?On the olden attention economy platforms, as I understand them, a post's number of likes could decide its placement in a feed. To my knowledge Mastodon (and I believe most other #fediverse) platforms don't weight posts this way.
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So why do we keep a non-feature around that, at best, is used as a Pavlovian reflex to note that "check, I read this"?
To some degree I'd argue the favorite button is pacifying to the point of replacing actual response. Instead of replying with a single sentence or even an emoji, it encourages you to scroll and like, scroll and like.
It seems counteractive to the social interaction that the #fediverse highlights, compared to Those Other Platforms. But what do I know.
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So why do we keep a non-feature around that, at best, is used as a Pavlovian reflex to note that "check, I read this"?
To some degree I'd argue the favorite button is pacifying to the point of replacing actual response. Instead of replying with a single sentence or even an emoji, it encourages you to scroll and like, scroll and like.
It seems counteractive to the social interaction that the #fediverse highlights, compared to Those Other Platforms. But what do I know.
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@haverholm from reading your thoughts on this, I get the impression that the meaning of the favorite button is very personal.
I personally enjoy every star I get. It shows me a personen read my post and somehow liked it enough to let me know.
To me the purpose of a social media like Mastodon, is not for my posts the reach as big an audience as possible. It’s having meaningful interaction with others, and that could just be with one other person. Favorite lets me know something was meaningful.
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@haverholm from reading your thoughts on this, I get the impression that the meaning of the favorite button is very personal.
I personally enjoy every star I get. It shows me a personen read my post and somehow liked it enough to let me know.
To me the purpose of a social media like Mastodon, is not for my posts the reach as big an audience as possible. It’s having meaningful interaction with others, and that could just be with one other person. Favorite lets me know something was meaningful.
@mosgaard Only saw this now, sorry.
Your personal experience only highlights the Pavlovian mechanisms I talked about
And we clearly have quite different definitions of "meaningful interactions". -
@mosgaard Only saw this now, sorry.
Your personal experience only highlights the Pavlovian mechanisms I talked about
And we clearly have quite different definitions of "meaningful interactions".@haverholm @mosgaard A wink of an eye or a silent nod or widening of eyes in agreement, or an intermittent "yes" in conversation are all meaningful interactions, even though they are not fully verbalised comments in sentence form. It's a simple recognition of the other without arguing or over-explaining agreement. We don't always have more to add than a quiet nod.
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@haverholm @mosgaard A wink of an eye or a silent nod or widening of eyes in agreement, or an intermittent "yes" in conversation are all meaningful interactions, even though they are not fully verbalised comments in sentence form. It's a simple recognition of the other without arguing or over-explaining agreement. We don't always have more to add than a quiet nod.
@tokeriis @mosgaard Agreed on the IRL micro-interactions. Here's a sharp sigh of resignment and an eyeroll from me
Counterpoint: if your interactions with a social media timeline is just going through it and starring all or anything you appreciate — you're not meaningfully interacting but performing an assembly line task.
Even on noncommercial social media, it is an imitation of controlled labour. I've seen it compared to marking emails read. Only meaningful if somebody tracks your quota...
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@tokeriis @mosgaard Agreed on the IRL micro-interactions. Here's a sharp sigh of resignment and an eyeroll from me
Counterpoint: if your interactions with a social media timeline is just going through it and starring all or anything you appreciate — you're not meaningfully interacting but performing an assembly line task.
Even on noncommercial social media, it is an imitation of controlled labour. I've seen it compared to marking emails read. Only meaningful if somebody tracks your quota...
@haverholm @mosgaard Valid points, *if* that was the only interactions you had. And emails marked as read are *not* meant to be signals to the email sender (hence, sane email apps block commercial attempts to track email reading), like starring on Mastodon can be, so the comparison is weak.
