Hello all,
I have been badly burned on social media by yet an additional storm of stupidity and hate over something rather innocuous I have been posting (I post about the art of writing fiction and offer numerous articles for free, but it seems some people have to find outrage in everything)
I have decided to take a firm step back from social media. I still need it for work but nothing is worth that much hassle and, frankly, pain. Still, I love the discussion aspect and interesting exchanges of ideas between kind and thoughtful people. I know micro.blog is advertised, among other things, as a safe environment where hate and harassment are not tolerated. Is that the case? Could someone outline briefly how, mechanically, this has been engineered in the system and how it scales with the growth of the platform? (Something Twitter spectacularly failed at)
A bit of disclaimer here, I have been on Micro.blog on Day 1. I backed the project on Kickstarter.
There is no social media that is 100% safe, the social nature of humans is not safe. That being mentioned, Micro.blog is way better than Twitter and Facebook. For many reasons:
It’s still smaller in size, hence, easier to moderate.
People fleeing from mainstream social media land there. This reminds of the old days of App.net.
How that will scale is hard to imagine at the moment. Micro.blog is running by two people at the moment, but we are hoping that same values hold as it gets better.
Finally that brings us to the last point, is it the best place to get the interaction you are looking for? Yes and No.
Yes; you will get quality interaction.
No; you are leaving behind the amount of the interactions from mainstream social networks.
Will that change in the future? I highly doubt, as it’s a paid model service, where there is no place for advertising, this is deterring a lot of people from the entry, and it will remain small sized.
I am actually looking at reducing my interactions on the mainstream commercial networks anyway, since they turn too toxic too often for my personal sensitivity (looking to increase the signal to noise ratio, so to speak), so that would not really be an issue. Thank you very much for that detailed answer, much appreciated !
I pay for a micro.blog account. I really enjoy the friendly interactions on the site. It is a small community, so take that into account if you are looking for diversity, but people are friendly. I have not experienced any toxicity.
Thank you again for your answers. I guess if the platform was to grow more it would bring more revenue and possibly then allowing for more hires the fact that you pay for it is indeed an important factor, thanks for pointing that out. Looks interesting!
