2 months ago

As your unofficial Cohost correspondent I have scraped together an account of the global feed debate. This debate concerns a tag called The Cohost Global Feed, the many subvariants of that tag, whether these tags are bad to use, what leads people to want a global feed in the first place, and ideas for alternative solutions.

Background:

  • Cohost users largely rely on bookmarked tag searches as a means of topic subscriptions. For reasons previously explained I believe this is a bad idea.

  • Cohost preserves previously-used tags as part of a site-wide autocomplete. For an illustration of this feature, see the screenshots people have taken of very long recommended tags (and by very long I mean 10+ lines of text): example one, example two, example three.

  • Cohost user AtomicThumbs invented a tag called #The Cohost Global Feed in November 2022. When other people went on to use the tag, AtomicThumbs expressed surprise, but they subsequently made casual reference to it, advised people use it, and recommended that people browse its search page. Other users have begun recommending the tag to newbies as a way to get started.

  • People have also started using variants of the tag, placing a more specific topic between parenthesis. This includes tags such as, for instance, "The Cohost Global Feed (Gamers)" and "The Cohost Global Feed (Marxist-Leninist)." A wide variety of these have been used at this point, including redundant variations on the same theme.

Although AtomicThumbs has previously implied regret about the original tag, those posts have largely gone ignored up until November 14, 2023, when Ivy Melinda posted a complaint about subvariants. This post shows the Cohost tag autocomplete serving the tags "The Cohost Global Feed (Gamers)," "The Cohost Global Feed (Gamedev)," "The Cohost Global Feed (gaming)," "The Cohost Global Feed (Gamer)," and "The Cohost Global Feed (games)."

In the wake of Ivy Melinda's post, users began to discuss both the variants and to the main tag itself. AtomicThumbs once again expressed regret about the tag, writing that they were "wishing cohost had a way to uninvent something." Osmose, Dante, and Shel wrote reblog-additions, and AtomicThumbs continued to post about being against the tag, used the tag "anti-global feed,"  spoke about "killing my monster," speculated about how it may have adversely affected Cohost culture, and asked about comparisons to Tumblr, which prompted a reblog chain.

Soon Cohost Staff member Jae weighed in, voicing her own opposition to the tag:

it is the cause of every single unpopular decision around tag search/visibility we have had to make, and the cause of all performance issues that stemmed from those decisions. i will not elaborate on this further. i hate the cohost global feed and spend much of my time considering ways to render it fully useless since the only way to truly kill it is through irrelevance.

An edit to the post adds that "the global feed phenomenon has stunted the growth of a healthy tag culture," a phrase that has also been used by other users such as AtomicThumbs

People in the comments of this post proceeded to speculate about how to get people to stop using the tag. The ideas they floated were to "make it into an uncool thing" and call people names over it, i.e. trying to extract compliance through social shaming.

Jae's post is one of a handful to vaguely reference problems with moderation and harassment. According to ABadIdea, "people keep adding global tags to [reblogs] of other people's posts that were not intended for Wide Distribution, causing harassment storms." I don't know of a particular example of this. What came to mind for me instead was when the tag was used on an inflammatory, controversial post (cw: suicide baiting) without content warnings. 

In response to the posts about how global feed tags might be harmful, users began posting announcements about whether they would keep using #The Cohost Global Feed. Some users, such as Rahisaurus, Oak, and Samson, announced they would stop using the tag from here on out. Melody even removed it from previous posts. Others such as Xenogears, Camryn, Orsino, and Ackart (cw: violent metaphor) announced that they intended to keep using it (or even start using it).

The ensuing discussion also turned toward the overall utility/purpose of the tag and the desires behind wanting to use it. Connor, Tufted, and others defended the concept in terms of "discoverability" and as a way to "organically stumble upon things." Various users attested that they want "to look specifically for unrelated random ass content by total strangers," "a way to find people outside of your circle," "things I never even would've thought to search for," "being able to throw a post out there where anybody can see it," "a general, extremely uncurated wall from the get go as a vehicle for finding new people," and "a space where i know i am always allowed to be present." Some referred to the global feed tag as "the only way i find posts on this goddamn website" or argued that "if i don't put my posts in the global feed who the hell is ever gonna see it." Others questioned what people mean when they say the tag has discouraged a "healthy tagging culture" or asserted that such a thing doesn't exist.

Discussion of prioritizing "discoverability" also brought out certain... interpretations... of that priority, featuring various forms of us-versus-them dichotomies and black-and-white reasoning. A post by Vx. Sans Sarif pits discoverability and socializing against each other as competing priorities, where catering to one will necessarily involve sacrificing the other. Wooper made the obligatory this-is-a-small-website post, with the implication that wanting a global feed reflects a desire to make Cohost more like "the big social media sites." Going a step further, ValerieElysee speculated that discoverability complaints are a reflection on quality. Arguments like these are ostensibly why Josh felt the need to post that "There's nothing wrong with wanting to be discovered." On the other side of the debate, Lizzie also speculated that Cohost has "two sets of people" -- a modest majority which struggles to be heard, and then the bloggers with "crazily high follower count that can tag something #bloopy and make the tag come into existence overnight." This comment characterizes opponents to a global feed, such as AtomicThumbs, in terms of having an advantage over others.

As part of this debate, users have also discussed what to do apart from just keeping or ditching #The Cohost Global Feed. Other suggestions include...

See also Jack's link compilation of suggestions. I have also seen assertions that there is no technical solution to this issue and that there is "no objectively optimal answer for everyone."

I have yet to find a post in this particular discussion that suggests the addition of Dreamwidth-style communities. 

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DetectiveRascal commented 2 months ago

Coyote, I think you deserve an honorary PhD in some kind of academic study for being able to keep up with all this. 

osteophage commented 2 months ago

LOL, they don't make it easy, I'll tell you that.

amewzing commented 2 months ago

unofficial Cohost correspondent

And we thank you for your diligent work, Coyote. 🫡👍

This is another interesting peek into CH. One of my Discord servers over the wk/wkd was discussing the status of tumblr (I had been advertising for pfio last wkd), and somebody mentioned that ppl are looking at alts. These have been good resources!

The concept of the global feed, or at least how I understand it’s been implemented, is…hmm. I feel for ppl wanting to have their posts seen, but…I think that it’s difficult, no matter where you post. I deffo understand how it can be turned into a tool for harassment, tho, which is wrong. :L

Interesting to see one of their own staff actually get involved in the discussion. 👀 But I can understand the gripe if that was never an intention for the site.

This caught my attention. First, they mention the lack of an algorithm on CH—which, reading gripes across other sites, many a user appear to dislike. So do ppl want their posts to be pushed out by an algorithm with the potential for higher visibility or are they all right/satisfied with their interaction as-is?

Second, they bring up webrings in correlation to “twitter-style lists,” and alarm bells went off. When tumblr announced that they planned to do smthg similar in Labs and were looking for volunteers, users were curious but warned staff that this is a product that could easily be abused…like those very Xitter lists. (Would it be proper to use “Xitter lists”? Does Xitter still have lists in its current iteration? 🤔 *asking as a non-user*)

Honestly, reading this person’s thoughts and skimming thru a lot of these, I genuinely believe that what CH users want most is…smthg v much like pfio’s communities, without a doubt. Everything is opt-in. Tag your stuff and it can be searched (when Search is behaving 😅). Our closest thing to a “global feed” is Active_Users, perhaps? But a) again, it’s opt-in bc you hafta join and b) you don’t have to see every post if you don’t wanna, nor do you need to rb all your posts there.

Edit: Added link for the Labs thing; sry, but all of Labs is in that blog-view only. 😓

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osteophage commented 2 months ago

And we thank you for your diligent work, Coyote. 🫡👍

Thank you. I'm glad other people are interested in these. 

So do ppl want their posts to be pushed out by an algorithm with the potential for higher visibility or are they all right/satisfied with their interaction as-is?

It varies from user to user, I guess. 

In the discussion as a whole, what I'm hearing is that some folks are having a hard time finding posts, finding people, or getting their posts in front of people who'd be interested in them. Admittedly some of this may be because they're used to automated "recommendations," but I wouldn't chalk it up to just that.

There are also some Cohost-specific factors that are worth pointing out. For instance, Cohost has a "likes" feature and a "reblogs" feature, like Tumblr and PF, but unlike Tumblr and PF, visiting a post does not reveal to you any usernames of those who liked or reblogged the post (unless you are already viewing a reblog). This means you can't use the method of crawling the likes on stuff you're interested in as a way to find people with similar interests. The only visible stuff is the comment section.... which people on Cohost don't use a lot. Unlike on Dreamwidth, your followers or following lists aren't visible either. So by hiding follower/following lists, reblog lists, and likes lists, Cohost is hiding a lot of social information that might otherwise be used to expand your circle. 

So there's that, and then there's the fact that you're expected to manually check many bookmarked tags instead of adding stuff directly to your feed via communities, [edit: see below] and then there's the fact that there's just not many people on there to begin with. 

Honestly, reading this person’s thoughts and skimming thru a lot of these, I genuinely believe that what CH users want most is…smthg v much like pfio’s communities, without a doubt.

Given how clearly what they want is communities, I'm baffled at how people managed to suggest almost everything but communities.

Our closest thing to a “global feed” is Active_Users, perhaps?

Yes, that was also my thought. Something like Active_Users really needs a team of active mods, but at least the infrastructure for that is all there.

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amewzing commented 2 months ago

There are also some Cohost-specific factors that are worth pointing out.

These are v stark differences! D: Yeah, your prev post on comment culture on CH was enlightening, but how differently likes and rbs work there is…wow. Altho on the point of hiding followers/following lists—with that decision I actually agree. I’m glad that that’s a toggle on the hellsite and I’m glad that that’s not smthg done here; no shame on anyone who wants to share those numbers, but I have seen it cause a lot more trouble and anxiety than positivity tbqh. :L

But needing to check bkmk’d tags is—well, that sounds like a hassle, ngl. 😥

And yeah! Have you seen not a single post yet bring up communities? In a pfio sense or otherwise.

Agreed. Even tho A_U is big, BetaUsers is bigger twice over, and there are mods in action. And…wait, didn’t we previously discuss the lack of moderation on CH? Or did I only read one of your threads on it?? 🤔🤔🤔😅😂

osteophage commented 2 months ago

Altho on the point of hiding followers/following lists—with that decision I actually agree.

Oh sure, I agree too, I'm just naming that as another factor.

But needing to check bkmk’d tags is—well, that sounds like a hassle, ngl.

On PF I have joined over 200 communities. 

If I needed to check each of those manually I just wouldn't. [Edit: see below.]

Have you seen not a single post yet bring up communities? In a pfio sense or otherwise.

I saw the feature mentioned once five months ago

And…wait, didn’t we previously discuss the lack of moderation on CH?

All Cohost moderation is site staff/site-level moderation. You might be thinking of A Tag Search is Not a Fan Convention.

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amewzing commented 2 months ago

That’s a good point! V academic of you, ty. ☺️

Whoa! Yeah, I’m in 70. That’s… Ngl, I do not check the tags in most. Rn I just do searches for things for the ones I run. 😓

Five months ago!!! Wow. I feel for that person bc that is a good idea that seems to have been buried. :c

Gotcha. Oh, it wasn’t that post—I found it in my email notifs. It was this thread about bluesky, actually.

fatalism-and-villainy commented 2 months ago

On PF I have joined over 200 communities. 

If I needed to check each of those manually I just wouldn't.

This is interesting, because I feel the exact opposite - I would actually love an interface where I had to manually check communities. I've been thinking I'd ideally want a sort of sidebar list of communities I'd joined, and then see notifications next to them when there was a new post - kind of the same layout as Discord channels. I'd like to be able to more deliberately choose and click on which interest I'm going to read about at this moment - having all community posts just tossed onto the dash/feed in chronological order and mingled with people's individual blog posts just stresses me out and feels disorganized. (I really wish reddit worked this way - there's a reason I pretty much only open up subreddits directly, and never look at my home feed there).

What a_random_fox brought up below about Cohost's separate tab feed for bookmarked tags actually sounds a lot better as a setup than putting everything on the same feed - looking at new content from people you don't follow can be a bit like wading into the weeds, and I want to pick and choose when I do it.

osteophage commented 2 months ago

Theoretically you could join comms, unwatch them, and then manually visit them from the Communities page. With that said, the Communities page does feel kind of... out of the way, for lack of a better term. It would be neat if we could customize our own sidebar menu in that respect.

PC commented 2 months ago

I wonder if having lists of likes and reblogs without showing the numbers could be the best of both worlds there, hmm...

amewzing commented 2 months ago

Hmm, that’s an interesting concept. In what way do you mean? When I first saw your comment, my initial imagining was smthg like tumblr’s archive page on a blog or those endlessly scrolling pgs on *shudders* Pinterest (the site’s too much for me 😅), where you see a lot of liked posts or a lot of rb’d posts but perhaps don’t see the numbers attached… Anyway, a way to serve up a selection of posts by themselves! But I can’t envision it another way. :s

PC commented 2 months ago

Just what Pillowfort has under each post, the liked and reblogged tabs, but without showing the numbers in the post footer.

amewzing commented 2 months ago

Ah, of course! 😅 It was so obvious, oops.

I wonder if this sorta thing could be an easy toggle, too—hide numbers vs show numbers strikes me as smthg that would make good use of a toggle.

a_random_fox commented 2 months ago

While bookmarked tags don't get added to the main feed, there is a feed for viewing posts in your bookmarked tags: https://cohost.org/rc/bookmarks

Accessible through this toggle on the top of your regular feed: 

osteophage commented 2 months ago

Oh, I see. That's what I get for remarking on something without using it first.

fatalism-and-villainy commented 2 months ago

For instance, Cohost has a "likes" feature and a "reblogs" feature, like Tumblr and PF, but unlike Tumblr and PF, visiting a post does not reveal to you any usernames of those who liked or reblogged the post (unless you are already viewing a reblog). This means you can't use the method of crawling the likes on stuff you're interested in as a way to find people with similar interests.

Yeah, that would be a huge deterrent to discovering new people for me - a lot of how I've found people on tumblr to follow, historically, has been the notes on the posts of people I already follow - and especially people who've added interesting reblog commentary. Not being able to see who's talking on whose posts makes it hard to get integrated into any particular social circle (especially if people don't use comments much).

fatalism-and-villainy commented 2 months ago

Am I the only one who finds it weird that their staff seems to weigh in on a lot of these topics?

osteophage commented 2 months ago

Their staff have frequently made eyebrow-raising decisions about when and how to speak to users. Stuff like publicly complaining about some of their users not trusting them, writing very personal information into their financial update posts, posting seemingly-official speaking-as-a-staff-member posts from a personal blog while speaking in a jokey casual tone... a whole lot of blurring the line around when the admin hat is on or off.

ArcFlash commented 2 months ago

I find it to be off putting and I can't see it going well in the future if they choose to continue cultivating the type of behavior they have been in relation to their userbase. 

At times I wonder if I'm going to wake up and find cohost gone because staff got caught up in a 'moment' or became stressed and decided to take it out on the site.

There are also times I wonder if they're even enjoying what they're doing or if they're regretting it. I understand running and maintaining a site is stressful and difficult, but coming at it at certain angles and making comments about it can lead one to question whether or not this endeavor is something they really wanted. But maybe I'm overthinking it.

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TechnoToast commented 2 months ago

I'm glad I'm not the only one who was weirded out by that 👀

On the one hand, it's good that they're listening to their userbase, they seem to use the site, and they maybe have ideas of what they want the site to develop into

But like.......... it feels really weird to know how much they're listening to the debate and see them have a very casual "heeeeeeeeyyyyy it's me (admin) hanging out with my buddies (users) and we're out here talking shit about what these doofuses (other users) have done to our hangout (website that admin is in charge of)"

idk, some comments just feel better suited for the secret dev discord server rather than raw and out in front of everybody

osteophage commented 2 months ago

"heeeeeeeeyyyyy it's me (admin) hanging out with my buddies (users) and we're out here talking shit about what these doofuses (other users) have done to our hangout (website that admin is in charge of)"

*snort*

DetectiveRascal commented 2 months ago

Soon Cohost Staff member Jae weighed in, voicing her own opposition to the tag:

This is probably unrelated to the topic as a whole, but it's something that I've noticed a couple of times now in these reports. Why do staff members disparage users/the community in their individual posts? Something similar to this happened 6 months ago, when a staff member personally escalated a situation over a moderation decision. 

A community developing a 'discoverability algorithm' on its own accord, even if staff doesn't like it, is still community action and users using the site. You could argue, even, using the site correctly because there are no alternatives like communities in order to fulfil the wants and needs of the user base. And for the moderation decision, it's very normal for a large group to be split on something that's controversial, and I believe in that instance, the staff member in question was just mad at users' attempts to praise them. 

It feels unprofessional and a lil' weird for staff of Chost to be venting so publicly, on the profiles they have on the platform, about their own users and community. Surely the anger of users developing a global feed should stay hidden in dev or moderation chats, and not used to shame users? 


And in looking for examples of staff speaking out against situations/users in the past, I discovered the same staff member (Jae) from above fielding information from former/current tag wranglers from AO3. So I assume that one of the avenues Cohost is investigating is tag-wrangling. 

osteophage commented 2 months ago

Something similar to this happened 6 months ago,

Man, has it really only been six months?

It feels unprofessional and a lil' weird for staff of Chost to be venting so publicly, on the profiles they have on the platform, about their own users and community.

Can you imagine if Julia went onto her personal blog and posted something like "I hate Active_Users. I spend much of my time thinking about how to kill it."

DetectiveRascal commented 2 months ago

Man, has it really only been six months?

It feels like both forever ago and just last week that happened 😔 But the Cohost drama never stops.  

fatalism-and-villainy commented 2 months ago

A community developing a 'discoverability algorithm' on its own accord, even if staff doesn't like it, is still community action and users using the site.

Yeah, I had the same thought. How is it appropriate for a staff member to weigh in on the site culture like that?

(I will admit I found Jae's post extremely hard to parse - not sure if that's the fault of the writing or if I'm just not clear on the site features they're referencing there.)

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DetectiveRascal commented 2 months ago

Especially to comment on it with such venom! It seems arbitrarily mean to post it publicly, where both regular users who don't intend to piss off staff, and the source of the tag who absolutely regrets creating the trend, can see it and be shamed by it. 

I know the cohort on Cohost want to shame users out of using the tag, but I don't think that staff should be spearheading the campaign. It feels way too inappropriate for a staff member to participate in what's essentially a bullying culture. (And obvs that isn't a great ad for me join the site as a potential user, you know?) 

osteophage commented 2 months ago

For what it's worth Jae did end up locking comments on the post and renouncing that whole idea with this edit note: 

i am locking comments on this post because it became mad unconstructive overnight. the correct read of "render it fully useless" is "make it so that it's not necessary", not "force everyone off of it."

DetectiveRascal commented 2 months ago

Is it possible for a post to be deleted on Cohost? The source of the trend posted their apology 3 minutes after the staff member posted, so I think the shaming/bullying/damage has already been done before any of the edits went through, and I can only think of removing the post outright would fix the figurehead of shaming it's unfortunately become.  

osteophage commented 2 months ago

Is it possible for a post to be deleted on Cohost?

Yes. Sometimes I've collected Cohost links and later checked them only to find that the post was gone. 

The source of the trend posted their apology 3 minutes after the staff member posted

I think AtomicThumbs was referring to the 2022 post inventing the tag, not any kind of attack on people using the tag.

pahein commented 2 months ago

Not to be dismissive of the discoverability problem, because finding things to engage with can be a really thorny thing! But I feel like maybe a good 80% of the things that I enjoy come to me via people I know or well-moderated community/subbreddit/discords. Or, in other words, I find specific people that curate suggestions for specific communities leagues more effective than most algorithms. And the most effective suggestions are from people who know me in particular and want to show me things I would like. But of course that takes work, on both the curator’s part and the creator’s— the creator having to tag and share appropriately and the curator having to sift through the chaff…

Likes and reblogs really do help me find people who I can click with. Cohost seems ill-suited to the sorting part of the reaching-people equation right now, with no algorithm and less options to effectively find people to follow. 

vela commented 2 months ago

it is the cause of every single unpopular decision around tag search/visibility we have had to make, and the cause of all performance issues that stemmed from those decisions. i will not elaborate on this further.  

Okay, that's valid to decline to elaborate I guess, but I feel like this doesn't give me a very good picture of what's actually going on. Also, I feel like this is kind of an oddly cranky tone for a post by a staff member (though it's probably not that big a deal in the scheme of things). In any case, "This thing definitely sucks but I will not give you the information you need to come to that conclusion" is not a very compelling rhetorical tack.

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osteophage commented 2 months ago

Okay, that's valid to decline to elaborate I guess

I actually don't think that's valid here. Or rather, it's fine to not get into it.... but then don't bring it up in the first place. Don't go "it's Harming the site. Not gonna explain what I mean by that." And then end up elaborating anyway. Folks are clearly interested in discussing this issue, and if they don't have an accurate understanding of the problem, that's necessarily going to inhibit an effective approach to solutions -- as evidenced by people going full "all we have is a hammer" in the comments there by suggesting they try shame tactics. 

Also, I feel like this is kind of an oddly cranky tone for a post by a staff member

Yeah, see above comments by Alpha and DetectiveRascal.

fatalism-and-villainy commented 2 months ago

"This thing definitely sucks but I will not give you the information you need to come to that conclusion" is not a very compelling rhetorical tack.

I associate that kind of rhetoric with tumblr, lol.

vela commented 2 months ago

It feels very much like "I'm just so frazzled and under siege, you should defer to me". And I'm suspicious of people leaning that hard on emotions as a tool for gaining agreement, rather than more explicit reasoning that people can agree or disagree with.

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DoktorHobo commented 2 months ago

!!!

This was the exact thing that made me realise how much less likely I'd be to discuss the situation On Cohost than here.

I also thought it was weird that Jae mentioned the Global Users tag being used for harassment and then (in a post edit) said they weren't considering getting rid of it.

Because from my perspective, that sounds like a reasonable reason to get rid of something.  Particularly if the staff, y'know, actually elaborate and properly explain.

I was also intensely frustrated by the people in comments who seemed entirely convinced that it was either Organizational Tags Like This or NOTHING.

My guess is that we might be seeing folks who are so steeped in Tumblr As Internet that they don't have points of comparison for things like "you want communities. What you're describing is communities."

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osteophage commented 2 months ago

My guess is that we might be seeing folks who are so steeped in Tumblr As Internet that they don't have points of comparison for things like "you want communities. What you're describing is communities."

See, you would think, but I actually have seen people on Cohost reference LiveJournal community features before. 

...Granted, that user and the ones in the comments aren't the same ones as have been involved in this discussion, as far as I know, and thanks to Cohost hiding likes and reblogs information I can't check those either. So maybe there's no overlap and LiveJournal is simply unknown to all these other users in the global feed debate. 

On the other hand, even if people don't know community features by that name, I know they know about Reddit.

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vela commented 2 months ago

My guess is that we might be seeing folks who are so steeped in Tumblr As Internet that they don't have points of comparison for things like "you want communities. What you're describing is communities."

Possibly, though I agree with Coyote's response.

I wonder if Cohost wouldn't benefit from a culture of single-topic, potentially submission-based, blogs? That was one way that Tumblr coped with a lack of community-esque features. 

Also, tbh-- and maybe this is getting into the weeds-- I feel like communities on here have their own problems (lack of moderation/curation, generally). I know different communities vary a lot in that respect, but I've talked to Jas(leh) about this before and we seemingly agree. In any case, I usually find content from people I follow.

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unspeakablehorror commented 2 months ago

The way I find people and posts on cohost is to look up tags on topics specifically of interest to me either general tags like Star Wars, science, or politics, or more specific ones like Andor, astronomy, or climate change. The idea of a 'general tag' seems worse to me than a general comm like Active_Users for some reason.

c-t- commented 2 months ago

This controvery feels custom built to make a Pillowfort Design Supremacist point to it and laugh.

"Tags are too free and inconsistent a way to handle post classification and browsing-" Make a community.

"I want a free-for-all way to discover random whtever content-" Follow and share to a community.

"I don't want this post to enter wide circulation-" Notify the community moderator and have it removed, or change the visibility settings.

Pillowfort has its own discoverability issues - it puts a lot of control on the user's hands, but also a lot of the responsibility. And there are potentially cool equivalents to cohost features that are clunky or missing here, like community recs in place of tag recs. But come on, this is basically the "just build a train" argument for social media design.

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PC commented 2 months ago

"I don't want this post to enter wide circulation-" Notify the community moderator and have it removed, or change the visibility settings.

I'm reminded of my wish for the ability to delete reblogs of your posts from communities (and potentially users? hmm).

Communities good.

Nepeta commented 2 months ago

I'm a little bit sick to make this a fully formed thought but one of my favorite features of tumblr back in the day was curated tags. A select group of tags were curated and whoever was doing the curation would select posts from the community to highlight and share. I really enjoyed the curated poetry tag because I discovered a lot of great poets that way.

osteophage commented 2 months ago

o.o I don't think I'd ever heard of that.

Nepeta commented 2 months ago

Tag curation stopped in 2015, so this was awhile ago.

PC commented 2 months ago

From the suggestion for the webrings feature:

also, it might be difficult if there's twenty "photography" webrings. should the groups share the same namespace as account names? should they be free form text entries? again, i'm unsure

The latter suggestion sounds like Dreamwidth interests!

really sounds like they could use DW/PF-style communities and maybe DW-style interests

fatalism-and-villainy commented 2 months ago

+1 on the interests thing. I've been kind of wishing that feature were possible on other sites. It might seem redundant with sites like tumblr that use an algorithm to recommend stuff, but even there, I think there's value in people explicitly flagging themselves as being interested in/blogging about something, rather than an algorithm amassing that information. It has a sense of intentionality and desire to actively connect with others that kind of separates out the content from the noise. And since Cohost doesn't have an algorithm, it sounds like that would be a good way of fixing their discoverability problem.

ArcFlash commented 2 months ago

You know, personally the most ironic part of all of this is that in my experience with sharing my work on different platforms, cohost, without any inherent 'discoverability' function, is the platform I have the most people actively following and seeing my work on. One of the platforms without an algorithm. 

and so now I'm wondering if an implementation of anything of that sort will ruin it for me, or if it's just a matter of the platform being more focused in on community and organic interaction that just works out better for what I do. 

I honestly wonder, too, if it will turn into another "buy my stuff/tip me/subscribe platform once they release those functions for the users...

I like cohost, but there is a specific kind of 'noise' that interrupts what I feel could be an otherwise solid site. I hardly use the global feed and don't follow any tags because it's not how I want to use the site, i don't want things pushed in front of me, necessarily. 

I do struggle with the splintering of tags and it really bugs me that there are case sensitive variants of tags that can make a post look like tag vomit if I don't discern which to use.


osteophage commented 2 months ago

Black box algorithms are notorious for their ability to suppress views and hurt artists who don't adhere to a platform's preferred schedule and priorities. I expect Cohost staff shares my views in that respect, so I don't think the site is at risk of that. From DectiveRascal's comment above it sounds like they might be looking into tag wrangling, which... would not resolve the unmoderated tags problem, but could be worse I guess.

I like cohost, but there is a specific kind of 'noise' that interrupts what I feel could be an otherwise solid site.

Can you explain more what you mean by that?

ArcFlash commented 2 months ago

Can you explain more what you mean by that?


Sure, I think I could do that briefly.

It's the fragmentation of the userbase, there are functions, mainly tagging, that are like this, but also it seems like everyone's post is a bit of its own island more than it feeling like an open forum or general space (since there really are none). 

You demonstrate this functionality in the way you link several posts for context. All of them are the same topic, only linked by, you would hope, is the same tag. It's easy to fall through the cracks. It can be good or bad but overall you have to really dial in what you're looking for if it's a specific topic. I guess it all also depends on whether or not the user wants their post to even be seen or relevant to the topic at large.

What I can say though, is that I appreciate posts like these that give a general rundown on what's happening and I can't say that can be done as efficiently on cohost if I'm trying to delve into a certain topic. 

In between trying to find the throughline of discussion is a lot of irrelevant noise.  I hope that clarifies?

osteophage commented 2 months ago

Oh. That sounds similar to what I've been saying about the high number of posts, rare links, and rare comments. I don't know if this is the same as what you meant, but to me that adds up to that "everyone's post is a bit of its own island" effect... Very fragmentary, very disconnected from a sense of presence from other users.

TechnoToast commented 2 months ago

😌I love being able to keep up with the very niche drama of cohost without ever having to log on thanks to your diligent observations lol 

it looks like ultimately; people seem to feel there's no good ways to discover new blogs/people/interests on cohost.

I thought that they had a communities feature like pifo does or a way to follow feeds like bluesky does, or maybe they follow tags like tumblr does??? (I genuinely have no idea what they're doing over there bc cohost doesn't hold my attention as much as pifo or bluesky atm so I just,,, don't spend time over there 🤷🏾‍♀️)

I personally feel like the chaos of having a global feed on social media where you see every single post being made in real time is actually insane. That shit would give me a jolt of excitement for 2 minutes and then immediately drain me as that would just be too much info to take in, even if cohost is a small site right now. (Mastodon has something like this and it gives me anxiety every time I look into it 😅)

I respect the interest people have in wanting to find new things they haven't seen before though. But at the same time, in my non-web-dev opinion, it sounds like something that might have to involve an algorithm to sort it out and assemble people's personalized For You Pages™, then people start making it their life's mission to game the cohost algo and be discovered faster/easier/better and ehhhhh.... sounds exhausting.

Last edited 2 months ago.
osteophage commented 2 months ago

I love being able to keep up with the very niche drama of cohost without ever having to log on thanks to your diligent observations lol  

*salutes*

I thought that they had a communities feature like pifo does or a way to follow feeds like bluesky does, or maybe they follow tags like tumblr does?

Yeah it's the "follow tags" route. That's it.

Mastodon has something like this and it gives me anxiety every time I look into it  

Yeah, Mastodon was the initial point of comparison

I respect the interest people have in wanting to find new things they haven't seen before though. But at the same time, in my non-web-dev opinion, it sounds like something that might have to involve an algorithm to sort it out and assemble people's personalized For You Pages™

It wouldn't necessarily have to be like that. Like I mentioned above to mew, besides the idea of adding communities, they could also quit hiding the likes and reblogs lists. On PF that's one of the go-to pieces of advice for how to find other people around the site -- if you know one account, you can find other accounts just by checking other usernames attached to the posts you see. Cohost's current UI prevents you from doing this, so the place ends up feeling a lot emptier than it is.

TechnoToast commented 2 months ago

Ohhhh I didn't realize reblogs worked like that over there! I will say that does seem a bit weird to hide that because to me it feels like a natural way to look through people's blogs by clicking on their name from that page and then going down a rabbit hole of people with similar themes/vibes/interests.

I'm also guessing that following tags on cohost does not work the same as it does here where you can let the community posts show up on your feed lol

osteophage commented 2 months ago

According to Sam (a_random_fox), bookmarked tags are a separate second feed.

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