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This will piss some people off but frankly, this has been in the works for years.
To those who believe quote posts are abusive, there is no data whatsoever that shows any correlation between quote posts and abuse.
And actually, platforms like #Misskey, #Akkoma, and #Friendica have had that feature for years, and hardly anyone using those platforms has ever complained.
In fact, I use quote posts every day. No one’s complained to me about my use of quote posts.
Nevertheless, Mastodon is doing the right thing—and it takes serious courage to tell the Fedi Gatekeepers that this will happen. There will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. But it’s a change that needed to happen.
https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/02/bringing-quote-posts-to-mastodon/
@atomicpoet @tchambers “A thesis includes a very detailed report of mixed methods to study tweets on abortion in 2018 and 2020, in Ireland and the US [5]. There were quantitative analyses of 7.7 million tweets, including over 5.5 million retweets and over 850,000 QTs, and a qualitative analysis of a random sample of 3,000. QTs were more common in Ireland, and replies were more common in the US. This study was an outlier in this set of studies, which may be because of the intense topic: Incivility was more common in retweets and QTs than in replies. US tweets had a higher rate of incivility (15%) than Irish ones (9%). A key finding: More than 44% of all uncivil tweets came from the top 10% of the most active users.” from Hilde Bastians review that you link to below
@atomicpoet @tchambers
“To those who believe quote posts are abusive, there is no data whatsoever that shows any correlation between quote posts and abuse. “
there is no conclusive data; that’s not the same as saying there is no data whatsoever….
Practically speaking, though, what’s your actual stance on quote posts?
@atomicpoet @tchambers I’d wager that, properly conducted (which is incredibly difficult to do) there are, in fact, connections between QTs and abuse. I think also that some of the founding Mastodon intuitions about QTs vs. replies and fostering conversation with vs. conversation about are right, and I’ve found it refreshing and interesting to be somewhere where they don’t exist to explore the affordances. I was struck on Threads and Bluesky how annoying I now find many (non-abusive) uses of QT to be. That said, they have uses, and many people want them: crucially, they are now implemented on Threads, on Bluesky, and will be here, with safeguards built in. That, more than any empirical study, illustrates that they did cause problems, and trying to address them has been constructive. ….my take in a nutshell…
@UlrikeHahn @atomicpoet @tchambers
There's been a lot of study on this, and QTs just do not contribute significantly to harassment and abuse. But even if they did, the affordances here are different. Followers-only replies are a *much* larger concern than quote posts.
https://absolutelymaybe.plos.org/2023/01/12/quote-tweeting-over-30-studies-dispel-some-myths
Is it similar to how Discord is used for pile-ons? Or is it something else entirely?
@atomicpoet @UlrikeHahn @tchambers
1. The target posts anything at all
2. The harasser replies with followers-only visibility. The reply is visible to the OP, and the crowd of other abusers that follow the first abuser, but no one else. Not even the mods on OP's server
3. The crowd of other abusers pile on, invisible
4. Everyone else gas lights OP about it, saying they've never seen this abuse and so it must be made up, and/or OP's fault.
@jenniferplusplus @UlrikeHahn @tchambers Okay, that makes a lot of sense. I’ve seen that happen, and I suspect it occurs in concert with Discord chats.
@atomicpoet @UlrikeHahn @tchambers
Yeah. The most pernicious harassment is coordinated off-platform. But it's still not great that mastodon (and many other backends) created this channel to be jerks in secret.
@jenniferplusplus @UlrikeHahn @tchambers I’ve always known Mastodon has a reply guy problem. And I knew it was worse than on other platforms but I couldn’t put my finger on why. And I think you elucidated exactly the reason.
@atomicpoet Honestly, there's so much more in this vein. This is just the worst one. There's so many affordances that invite immediate, careless replies. And so many that discourage reading or seeking context. Replies are worse here because the software supports reply guys, and hampers establishing norms against it.
@jenniferplusplus Yep, three years ago, I put in a feature request on Mastodon for comment controls. It’s pretty common sense to have since, yeah, it would cut down on abuse drastically. Haven’t heard anything back from Mastodon, but I certainly got a lot of angry people who demand that this never be implemented.
At the very least, you should be able to opt out of receiving comments. Still not here, but at least Mastodon allows you to opt out of quote posts. Now if only they would allow this for comments.
@atomicpoet Yeah, it's not great, and I'm not one to excuse any of it. But, the mastodon team's proposal for QT controls offers a pretty substantial light at the end of that tunnel. It introduces a concept of inter-actor authorization and authorization tokens. Once that's available, it's much easier to add new authorization boundaries. The kind of boundaries that can power reply controls, among other things.