Micro.blog suggestion for @manton and crew – consider adding emoji tags for discovering women, people of color, etc. to follow!

@cleverdevil Oh wow. This is a bad idea. Assuming white male is the default person and that everybody else needs a special icon to even be found.

This complicated subject inevitably inspired a longer post: Diversity on Micro.blog. I think there's a lot we can do but we need to make sure we're not falling into bad, if unintentional, behaviour.

@cleverdevil I love this idea!

@simonwoods I fail to see how making it easier to find women, people of color, etc., is a bad idea. But, hey, you do you! ¯_(ツ)_/¯

@cleverdevil @simonwoods I've found from having some very good (and brilliant) friends in the UK for a couple of decades, it is not uncommon to find myself rather shocked by some of the statements of fact that they are willing to put into writing, some stuff that most folks here in the colonies might not dare to write. I got in the habit of not responding to them right away, but to let what they wrote sink in a bit, so I could consider it with the objectivity of a bit more distance in time.

I must confess that when I first read Jonathan's proposal, I thought to myself, "Aw ohhhh, this is gonna be a problem." For the very reasons that Simon had the nerve to point out. I agree it is a subject worthy of discussion among the fine folks here.

@Ron look past the specific suggestion and consider the spirit! I trust @manton and @macgenie to implement wonderful discovery tools to surface more viewpoints and diversity. It doesn’t have to get contentious 😉 I also respect @simonwoods viewpoint. Just happy to have a good place to have a conversation. That said, using strong language about “bad idea” and referring to my suggestion is “typically shallow” isn’t a particularly productive approach.

@cleverdevil @simonwoods Jonathan, I have no concern whatsoever about the spirit of your suggestion, as I suspect Simon did not or does not either. I'm positive your intentions for the platform are only good. Ditto for Simon.

@Ron no question. I’ve got nothing but positive appreciative thoughts here for both you and @simonwoods 😀 Let’s just be careful about the language we use! I assume positive intent by default here, because it’s almost always true. ❤️

@cleverdevil The Discover feed is the best way to find new people to follow. We intentionally include new voices for our current users to discover, in addition to showcasing the best of Micro.blog's current members so that new users can find people to follow.

@macgenie indeed! Y’all do a great job with it. Looking forward to more discovery tools in the future.

@fiona love all of those ideas! I also like the idea of a 🏳️‍🌈 tagmoji, and something more generically focused on underrepresented groups.

@fiona 🍳 is active as part of Discover breakfast—which seems to be entirely male right now :-(

I know when the year’s new/forthcoming emoji were announced, @modernlittleme was excited for more craft-related ones, which could then make their way into tagmoji. And I don’t want to jump to the conclusion that women don’t like sports (especially since Discover only collects posts, not replies, and I didn’t open any Conversations), but there are 7 sports Discover categories right now and I counted 2 women, each with 1 post, out of 7x40 (or whatever) posts, so

But, looking at the tagmoji list, maybe there should be more that reflect interests that are conventionally thought of as feminine?

seems like a good step forward. (Of course, people need to be using the emoji in their posts, too, in order for Discover to surface them, but first things first.) // cc @cleverdevil

@simonwoods Your point about better moderation tools is a good one. I worry (with my “We can do this, but should we” software-interrogating hat on) about making it too easy to find people who meet any specificity without ensuring that they’ll be safe from misuse of that discoverability. It hasn’t happened here, and hopefully never will, but all too often we have seen on the Interent that discovery is the key to harassment.

I also like your point at the end about making sure we do the work.

@smokey Thanks. Moderation tools are vital, whereas discovery can be self-made in a lot of ways. Right now there are a lot of people for whom I would not recommend Micro.blog because of the relative lack of tools for what amounts to basic survival on the web. It's even more important to me than cross-platform parity, site-wide search, and further improvements to IndieWeb and open web mechanisms; all of which could improve Micro.blog's reputation in a big way yet do nothing to substantially contribute to the safety of individuals on the platform itself..

@simonwoods @smokey What tools are missing? I think it helps to talk about specific feature requests here. The current design is around muting, reporting, and curation of the various sections of Discover.

@manton I don’t know what @simonwoods might have been thinking about (and never used Twitter, so I have no idea what tools comparison he’s trying to make :-) ), but my concern is around the ability to scale—and it’s more of a worry than a problem now, of course—human moderation is always going to be at a disadvantage to automated or semi-automated discovery tools that can be harnessed by attackers, and you can’t spin up another Jean like you can a new server to handle the load :-)

That said, I did notice the other day that muted users are still visible in Discover when signed in.

And, just a question of curiosity: has Safe Replies filtered anything yet? (I don’t know that there’s necessarily been anything to catch, so it exists like a magical firewall that provides a lot of protection that we can’t see happening.)

@manton In a shocking twist I wrote too much for a comment.