@capn_pancakes @noelle It's still also the tech, at least in what it encourages and facilitates? Part of culture is imported from before joining, part of culture is developed after joining. It's how you get e.g. people who are Too Online, where "online" is a reflection of whatever culture they most often subsume themselves in.

Examples:

- Quote tweets on Twitter break the reply chain, thus are performative
- Reblog chains on Tumblr present different views of reality

@trwnh And yet, there's still a lot of human behaviors:

1) Why not use a blog/other site instead of a Tweet thread (answer: human nature of wanting visibility/"my brand")

and more importantly, independent of the service people have drifted from "let's do a nice" to the same type of behaviors that made other services unpalatable for some.
In fact, I've watched voices here drift in such a way as well.

@capn_pancakes Right, it's not wholly one or the other. What makes other services unpalatable can be imported easily. I had to make an active effort to unlearn some bad habits from Twitter.

But more to the point: Twitter encourages those bad behaviors. There's a natural desire for visibility, and then there's prioritizing visibility above all else. Even something as seemingly simple as showing reply counters is a calculated move to raise "engagement".

@trwnh I won't disagree there. At the same time, users could definitely break those cycles but not doing the thing.

Yes, it's rather foolish that we have to resist what the tech encourages, but you have to click the buttons (in theory)

@trwnh But the "Unlearning bad habits" is precisely what I'm trying to get at. Human nature is a fickle-ass thing.

So I agree with Noelle that tech can do some things, but it's the users that make a service worthwhile (or toxic).

@capn_pancakes Absolutely. What I'm trying to get at is that those users come to Mastodon from *somewhere*, probably. This isn't most people's first network. They came from Twitter, or Tumblr, or Facebook, or wherever. And they bring with them a tiny part of that culture.

@capn_pancakes It's hard to not do the thing when it's also easiest to just do the thing

To use Twitter as the perennial example of bad design: say you want to indicate that something is bad. You could previously .@ to make it show up to your followers. Now, you quote tweet it, which exclusively shows it to your followers and not the participants of the old thread. But the third and harder option is to not do a public callout at all.

@capn_pancakes Now, say you switch from Twitter to Mastodon.

You're not going to immediately disengage from callout culture.

You're also not going to immediately get into the habit of turning your reply into a direct message, because you have to discover that feature and get acclimated to it first.

It would never occur to you on Twitter, because everything is hyper-public. Mastodon offers the tools, at least... but of course, you have to use them.

@trwnh @capn_pancakes @noelle This is one of the best explanations of why quote tweets are so toxic I’ve seen.

I will make no claims about the total toxicity level of subtoot discourse culture here, but I will note that quote tweets are better at keeping the toxicity contained instead of being a general public freak out, especially since people here don’t even link the specific offending toot, so it’s all commentary on commentary.

@USBloveDog Yeah, well, that's one part of it... although it can also be said that having to click through 40 quote tweets (and backout through them) one at a time is basically removing the context, too. you can only ever see two parts at a time, and you can't see future parts *at all*.

@trwnh If nothing else, it’s a signal that the thread is a dumpster fire to be avoided instead of a general miasma infecting the fediverse for a day or two

@debugninja @noelle I don't think blocks (which are, I think, overall in the minority) have anything to do with this.

@Gargron @debugninja @noelle I think there's an effect where internet communities that are small are almost always nice just because there are too few people to sustain nastiness. Maybe mastodon was benefiting from that effect before and now it's not? :/

@Gargron @debugninja @noelle Or the effect is decreasing, I should say? :/

@Angle @debugninja @noelle The subtoot/discourse culture has been going strong since at least November 2016, it doesn't look like a new or growth-related phenomenon to me

@Gargron @Angle @noelle I guess I just hadn’t gotten a big dose of it until lately (I had to take a couple days off after the forkoff stuff)

@debugninja @Angle @noelle That one was quite big because it involved someone everybody knows, so there was no shortage of takes :P

I don't think Eternal September is quite it. This isn't a forum thing, it's a unique social media thing where everybody has needs to post an opinion to keep up and nobody thinks about being diplomatic

@Gargron @debugninja @noelle Why can't everyone just be confused and shitpost, like I do? :/

@Angle @Gargron @noelle Yeah, that could be. There is even precedent for this in older communities (I was there for it on usenet) https://www.economist.com/babbage/2012/04/09/eternal-september-lives-on

@Gargron @noelle Perhaps not but I still wonder if federated communities inevitably lead to conflict.

Alternative theory, any community that grows over a certain size develops hostile cliques.

@maloki @noelle something about sandwiches