An assortment of thoughts about Cohost and comment culture: ( Read More... )
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An assortment of thoughts about Cohost and comment culture:
My experience with commenting on Cohost is one that I would describe as, overall, discouraging. It feels like there's more friction and disinclination toward commenting than I'm used to on other websites, and the social atmosphere feels bristly and standoffish. I think there are multiple factors at play, and I'll talk about some of those in a minute, but first I feel obligated to establish that it's not just me.
I am not the only Cohost user who has found the atmosphere on Cohost to be... aloof. I've had conversations about this with Bee and Julian, and when we compared notes, we've found that we share the experience of generally being ignored or treated coldly. While I'm willing to believe that I personally am doing something wrong, that wouldn't explain why the same thing is happening to people nicer than me. So at this point, I am willing to broach the possibility that there are bigger issues at play.
Based on my experience of using the site, I have some theories about some factors that discourage the habit of commenting. If you can think of other factors, you can add them in the comments below, but for now I'll just highlight these two: 1) the comment nesting on Cohost is way too heavily indented, and 2) users gravitate to the reblog-addition feature instead, which introduces its own slew of antisocial effects.
The comments nesting on Cohost indents each new reply so heavily that continuing a conversation can quickly become intolerable. This can happen on other websites too, but it happens quicker on Cohost because of the placement of the avatar, the narrow starting size on first comments, and the overall indent size -- and there's no reasonable stopping point where it maxes out. You just get intended into oblivion. The resulting effect has been described by various users as "squished," "unreadable," and "forcing you to end your conversation." Others have even described it like some kind of race to the finish line: "if you can't make an argument before your reply gets squished to the right, you lose." This design-level conversation-ender creates a disincentive against commenting more, instead encouraging a habit of ending conversations often and early.
On top of that, the site also scatters conversations by diverting users toward another feature: the reblog-addition feature. This feature invites the habit of reblogging-to-disagree, which leads to suspenseful scrolling, hostile reblogging practices, more circulation of worse stuff, and more escalation without de-escalation. The overall effect adds up to a more antagonistic site culture where agreement is associated with silence and talking is associated with confrontation.
When a reblog-addition feature is combined with an unwieldy comment section, I expect that to generally push users away from comment sections and toward reblog-additions. The reblog-addition feature gives you more space to work with and doesn't get horizontally squished, giving you plenty of breathing room compared to the pinched feeling of the comment section. The net result is that Cohost culture does not prioritize replying to comments as much as making new posts and parking your attention on the feed. Or at least, that's my best working theory for how come I've seen Cohost users put screenshots-of-comments in new posts/reblog-additions in order to take a conversation out of the comments.
So you might understand why I laughed out loud when I saw a reblog-addition (not a comment) saying "Cohost loves comments."
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I hadn't thought about how much the design of comment threads sucks until you pointed it out.
I wonder if there's also the element of unpredictability from interactions with strangers that reduces people's willingness to reply to comments they get from people they don't know, especially comments that might lead to emotionally and/or intellectually costly conflict.*
With that said, though, I have made my share of AO3-style "I really liked x about your post!" comments on CH, which seem to signal straightforward friendliness and elicit a fairly easy "Thanks! :)" response. In those instances I genuinely don't know that someone has ever replied to me.
Terse replies might also reflect a lack of investment in investing more energy into talking to someone. (You made a good point that this varies by person, but I think it's still a common enough subtext, especially from people using NT communication strategies, that it's worth pointing out.)
Anyway, the friendliest handful of interactions I've had on CH happened with someone who was like "Oh, you're friends with [mutual] on Twitter? You must be cool!". So like, as much as I think there are some cool and interesting people on the platform, I've found it rather barren socially.
* Conflict is not a bad thing, but it's costly and people often budget their energy accordingly.
I keep going "Well, if PF goes down, maybe I can move to Cohost?" but it actually seems like unless we can get a cluster of people who are PF levels of friendly/responsive to comments, I will enjoy it a hell of a lot less. (And the design of the site is, like you said, part of the problem.)
Maybe? It sounds like a conceivable mentality someone might have, but not one that's familiar to me in this context. I mean, meeting strangers through comments on Wordpress, Dreamwidth, and Pillowfort seems perfectly normal. That's how you become not-strangers in the first place. You talk.
While composing this post, I worried (and still worry) that someone will think that my experience with Cohost can be entirely chalked up to my own social failures, writing dull comments that don't warrant a reply, or just generally having a disagreeable personality. So I went and combed through some of my saved links, which I have a lot of because I'm in the habit of saving stuff for hitching posts.
Here are some examples of places where I left comments (of varying lengths) which I thought were adequately reply-worthy:
If a few individuals don't care to answer me, whatever, nothing against them personally, but when enough of those experiences accumulate, it starts to feel very weird.
On that note, here are some posts where my comments did get replied to, for comparison:
So I don't think it's the topics or the content of comments that makes the difference.
Yeah, those comments look fine to me. I can't see any way you were legibly violating norms, and the questions you were asking don't seem super complicated to answer. I'd feel neutral-to-positive about receiving any of those replies.
To be clear, I didn't mean to imply you were especially confrontational in your commenting habits (and even if you were, I think these comments are often valuable). I mentioned potentially confrontational comments because I've made them.
Come to think of it, "costly to answer" and "confrontational" are overlapping categories of comments, but not the same. If I asked you to explain a concept from your research to me, that might take a lot of effort you didn't want to expend, but not because I disagreed with you. Though, like I said, the questions you asked didn't seem super complex.
Lol, no worries, that wasn't how interpreted it. I was just sharing some other thoughts passing through my head.
That makes sense, yeah.
I don’t habitually use cohost, so I don’t have much to add other than that I find reading it confusing and difficult, but this is just emblematic of everything I think about cohost culture—unnecessarily aggressive, mean-spirited for no reason, while also being very I’m-more-left-than-you posturing. Which just sounds like an exhausting community to be in.
I'm ambivalent about that one. I can sympathize to some degree with.... frustrations around that whole... strain of talk. At the same time, that level of intensity -- and choice of insults -- in how to object to it.... is not what I would have chosen, I guess.
I don't know if that particular post is representative, but. Yeah. Not really an outlier, either.
'socially barren' is an excellent way to put it: even at its most peaceful, CH doesn't promote or incentivize comments in spite of what site runners may claim. i don't think this is entirely their fault, of course, but it does seem incongruent with how people actually use the site (and how users off-site present CH to outsiders).
This is interesting. As someone without Cohost, everything I have seen on that site itself in addition to others’ musings on it have left me feeling comfortable in my decision not to have one. This latest post of yours further adds to that…!
All the links you supplied were great evidence, and I had a bit of a chuckle myself at the last one. However, smthg else caught my eye in all the replies to OP’s post there—skimming replies, with the one stray mention of LiveJournal…all anyone else mentions is mostly Twitter or Instagram and those platforms’ passive engagement. A few bring up Discord and TikTok, and…that’s it.
None mention AO3, tumblr, FFN, Dreamwidth, hell even Wattpad.
I highlight this disparity bc the latter are places where commenting is a main feature. Do ppl always comment? No. But the features are there and somewhat prominent. And I think it better highlights why, perhaps, certain demographics are on Cohost and others are here on pillowfort. …actually, now I’m hella curious and wish we could have some statistics on that. 🧐 Anywho.
Thanks for sharing!
Experience with other sites could play a role, yeah. I don't want to put too much weight on that though. A lot of Pillowfort users have used Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, and Discord (and make reference to those often enough for me to notice). There are also Cohost users besides me and Julian who've used Dreamwidth before (see the Dreamwidth tag). Not sure what the overall proportions are, though.
Ah, no, it's just us.
I’m not on Cohost, so I’m going to go off on a tangent here...
I really like the way that Pillowfort comments make it possible to discuss and disagree without things getting ugly. (I know there are conflicts between people here, but in other places the conflict is so central to interactions that I hesitate to engage with most people.)
Yeah I feel like I've been able to explore contentious topics on here in a way that I wouldn't even try on Cohost.
That's odd, it hasn't really been my experience at all, at least not the userbase part.
As for the comment section issue, I use a Userscript to fix that. While I agree that needing userscripts to fix things on a site isn't the greatest. It does seem that the developers are receptive to feedback on things. (Though they do seem to have their hands full lately which could also explain the delay in a comment section rework). It is also possible that they have stated they didn't intend to fix it but I have not seen anything that would imply that.
But yeah, you are correct that their current comment formatting isn't great, but as for things like hostile reposting and escalation, I just have not experienced that at all. Cohost has been my primary social media for about 6 months now and the experience has been pleasant for me. It seems the way folks use the comments vs reposts are: Comments are meant to be a direct statement back to the original poster, not necessarily a "Public" comment, but more of direct feedback. While, reposts are used more as public continuations of the conversation. They are meant for continuing bits, adding more context, or otherwise comments that are intended to be seen and added onto by other users.
This has pros and cons, but isn't the worst system imho.
To be clear, this is not to discredit anything you said, more just that it hasn't been my experience with these features. My hope is that these features are addressed in a way that makes the website more friendly for you to use and that you can get enjoy.
I'm glad for you, then. Any advice?
They do seem to intend to fix it... sort of.
In that last post I linked, Aidan actually said "we're planning on a lot more sharing options to be shipped as soon as we can get to them [like] nicer comment nesting etc." So the idea has been broached.
With that said, that statement was from nearly a year ago, and in the meantime staff has prioritized stuff like ask messages and redesigning the following page.
The cons outweigh the pros for reasons I detailed at this post, under the section labeled "Some reasons." I condensed my summary here because I was referring to ideas that are already familiar to a lot of my circle here, but if these ideas aren't immediately clicking for you, that's the place where I explain what I mean.
I am not sure what I'd be doing differently to have a different experience. It could be possible that I have a decently quick mute finger when it comes to stuff I don't care to see, so if an account says something I'd not want to see and it's not someone I would have reason to want to interact with, I typically just mute the account and move on (I don't tend to block unless it's something, like, really shitty). This could end up just curating out any of the more negative folks in the userbase.
As for the cons of that kind of system, like, you are correct but they are more of a side effect of social media in general than being a specific issue of being able to do additive reposting. Like, those are specific issues, but that kind of behavior is going to be omnipresent regardless of the tools given to do so. In the example post for "I have to beg people to tag" there were users acting hostile in your comment section and arguing to argue. With a specific example of someone posting a screenshot of a post to proxy "Reblogging to disagree". Not to comment whatsoever on the contents of those posts or the reasons for them existing, but it does show that alternatives to that behavior will exist regardless of tools available.
Hm, maybe. I browse logged-out a lot and haven't used that feature yet. I also wondered if it's a difference of which topics/conversations we pay attention to.
I'm disagreeing with you about that because there are effects this specific feature creates and amplifies. Reblogging-to-disagree doesn't make as much sense on a site whose reblog feature doesn't allow reblog-additions, and on sites without reblog features, it can't happen at all.
Yes, the difference I'm describing is not a matter of "there will be fighting" vs. "there will be no fighting at all." The difference I'm describing is a matter of how fights happen when they happen.
Thanks for pointing us towards a tool to address the comment section. :)
Yeah, I am going to say as a more casual user/lurker, I haven't seen much of this at all, either. +1
And I do frequently see people use reblog-additions to expand upon the OP's points in agreement. So I don't think I share Coy's impressions of CH here, even if I do have similar experiences around commenting.
i haven't personally been victim to any antagonistic or toxic behavior, but i've seen it enough times to make me hesitate when posting things that aren't just art. you'll find a lot of this has taken place in tags like #cohost meta, but there is also a standard in which - if you want to talk mad shit about people - you just simply leave the post untagged, as this essentially makes your post followers-only unless someone has stumbled across your page.
imo, as long as you're quick on the block button and keep your head down, CH is relatively peaceful and a solid microblogging choice. you could argue that this advice can work on any platform, but in contrast, i find pillowfort has been a place where i can speak more openly without wondering what the hell my notifications are gonna look like in 12 hours lol. still, i wouldn't say CH is all bad - but given the size of the site, the conflicts i've seen definitely make me raise an eyebrow.
Is there not an actual followers-only posting option on Cohost? I thought there was.
to my understanding you can privatize your entire page, but you can't individually privatize posts, so it's all-or-nothing on that front.
Oh god, is that why people public-post so much? That recasts things in a new light.
honestly, i really think CH's problem is that it is swollen to the gills with people who are trained to shoot first, ask questions later. i think of a conflict i saw a few days back (and i'm reporting on this as neutrally as possible because i don't personally know anyone involved, but i DID watch it happen).
in fact, i actually see you on this post, coy! but i'm not sure if you saw the background on it, in which lizardguy64 and noescape had a terse conversation in the comments, which lead to noescape blocking him and then posting his comments in a separate post for others to see. this lead to other users chiming in about how they felt about him. of course, given that LG was blocked by NE, there was no way he could possibly defend himself or clarify anything. (obviously that's NE's right to block him, but the nature of CH blocking does mean that there's no way for LG to respond.)
this kind of dynamic is endemic on CH: fighting hotly in the comments and then reposting screenshots of said comments - frequently without censoring names - while blocking the offending party so they have no recourse to defend themselves. this is a major cultural issue on CH and nobody wants to acknowledge what an utterly toxic and useless form of interaction it is.
and yet, bizarrely, CH users are also routinely guilty of vagueposting, of which i wrote a whole blog post about it here which had been inspired by my post in WebDiscussions here. maybe i sound difficult to please because i object to both of these habits, but what it truly is is the fact that no one thinks that the third option (in which you stay polite but disengage either by no longer replying or blocking the other party) is viable... which just seems fucking nuts to me.
CH culture is formed on a bedrock of amped up twitter and tumblr users who have had the last drops of their empathy drained of them, thus leading them to assume malice in others out of instinct. i get that. but this kind of behavior is sincerely antisocial and not conducive to a healthy community, and unless staff stops ignoring it as a repeating offense, i don't see CH evolving into anything greater than a tumblr clone thunder dome lol
Yep, that's me. And yep, I encountered it decontextualized. Maybe this is on me, but I interpreted it just generally in relation to bristly/low comment culture (which then led to me discussing that thread with Julian while we were talking about Cohost on Discord, which then led to me writing this post we're speaking on now).
...Oh, wait, yeah, that would explain Eevee's comment there.
Honestly when you started to introduce an example, I thought it was going to be a completely different recent example.
(Not linking here because I'd feel obligated to provide content warnings, and to provide adequate content warnings I'd have to fully read the dang thing, and from what I already skimmed of it, I do not want to do that.)
That, or
no worries about linking the other post - i'm not sure which one you're alluding to, but the fact that there have been multiple recent incidents to the point where we can bring separate events to the table that still both apply just further proves my point about how this keeps happening.
i also find the linking stuff curious, because 1) screenshots can be doctored, and 2) it's not as if NOT linking back to posts keeps things more peaceful. cynically, i'd assume the absence of it is to keep users from catching on when they're being openly roasted on a chestnut fire (and then retaliating), but i don't feel confident to say that's the only reason. i also wonder if it's just that pingback culture as a whole is more of a pre-algorithmic relic. with more platforms experimenting with ridding themselves of algorithm, pingbacks should come back into style, especially as a way to encourage users to find more people to follow and more communities to enmesh themselves in.
A bit off topic from the discussion in this particular thread, but a look at that linked conversation with Lizardguy I think paints an... illustrative picture of the problems with comment threading on Cohost.
Coyote:
Coyote's next comment reply:
LOL. I guess our screens are rendering it differently, because for me it doesn't look quite that bad yet, but the fact that it can even do that at all is exactly the thing I'm talking about.
Oh, this screenshot gave me a horrific flashback to old Tumblr. Though somehow, in Tumblr's defence, I don't think there was ever that much wasted space between reblog lines.
Haha yeah, it brought to mind the old tumblr layout for me too. At least there you could (theoretically, if they hadn't changed their url) click on people's additions to read it on their blogs, which you can't really do in a comment section like this.
As someone who’s not on Cohost, I think the part that would confuse me is that the reblogs with additions have their own separate comments sections like it’s a quote tweet, despite looking much more like tumblr’s system with one single comments section. Ironically, I saw a Cohost post where someone said Pillowfort has a less effective design since from their perspective, only being able to interact in comments sections is too restrictive. However, that doesn’t take into account the communities feature, which IMO works pretty well for inviting interactions (as long as it’s active). I don’t have anything against either system, but obviously it can be a very split consensus like with the whole thing on mastodon not having quote posts. Not sure what the happy medium is or if it exists, but having a UI that doesn’t crush comments would be a good start 😛
Having a single comment section grouped by which addition to the post they are replying to makes sense to me, as it both shows the context in which the comment was made and allows one to discover comments on other versions of the post.
For the other thing, i don't think they serve the same use-case. Reblog-additions are for when i wrote something in the context of another post and want to show that to my followers while communities are for when i have a post that i want to show to people who are interested in a certain thing.
This only works in reverse chronological order, as explained in this post. Otherwise the other comment sections are hidden.
The problems with reblog-additions are explained in this post.
Yes, having the comment section consistent between versions of the post would be better.
I don't deny that reblog-additions can have problems, but that doesn't change that communities don't really cover what people use those for, as communities increase the discoverability of the original post and its comments as a whole rather than any specific comment.
Hitching posts and posts that link back to other posts do cover that however and are therefore in my opinion a better counter to that felt restriction mentioned further up.
I can see how some of this could be a problem (especially the squished comments) but at least for me those haven't turned up much in practice. Like sure, some of my comments have been ignored, but not noticably more than on other sites and most comment chains i have seen reached a natural endpoint before indentation became a real problem.
Though i admit that i only follow a few blogs on there, so it might just be that those have those problems less than average.
If they're not turning up much, that's a testament to how rare it is for people to have an extended conversation on there. While I don't expect every comment thread to go five or more comments deep, it should at least be a thinkable option.
Pingback: taking the Cohost dark mode debate as another case study.
Until now, I didn't realise Cohost had a commenting option. Granted, I haven't been on Cohost for long (only a few months) but it's still something I didn't know was an option.
haha oh no.