Beware people who like to dress as “serious thinkers” or “academics”, when their real desire is to hurt other people. There’s something particularly nasty about a person who reacts to disagreement with insults, the facade of their appearance disappearing in a moment of ill temper.
@simonwoods I think I found the conversation. If I did, said account was my first unfollow for idealogical reasons, too.
I'm glad that most people’s posts around here are not like that account.
@JohnPhilpin @rnv @kitt The API still doesn't allow images in replies. It started as a technical limitation, but whenever I look to expand it, I wonder if we're better off with simple replies. Images can be fun, but too many memes can also sidetrack or clutter a conversation. I feel like postponing that feature is best. (I could be wrong.)
@manton This is the kind of thing I'm glad you're willing to push back on instead of blindly copying Twitter
@manton I wonder if a middle ground might be allowing an image attachment but not showing it inline. E.g. for the screenshots I sent you earlier. Most people probably won’t go to the trouble to upload to an external site. Not showing them inline might dampen the “reaction GIF” use cases.
@manton Though maybe a middle ground isn't really needed. Attaching an image in a reply is probably a pretty rare use case beyond the memes and reaction GIFs, and if people care enough, they can figure out a workaround like I did...
@sharding I’ve seen it come up “a lot” for a feature that doesn’t exist, mostly for things like you had, where you’re describing a problem or something and need also to show it. The usual work-around is to make a new post with the photo, because that way you get the ease-of-use of the Micro.blog apps, but that then breaks up the conversation :-( I think inline image Markdown does work, because a few people had done images-in-replies pre-Icro, but I’ve never bothered to decipher the syntax to test.
That said, it it’s going to lead to an epidemic of the plague of animated GIFs and other nonesense images as the platform grows, perhaps continuing to hold off on supporting images-in-replies on the platform is the right call.
@kitt Oh yeah, this is very much out of the ordinary for me here. Even now I think this kind of thing is less likely to be much trouble or anything like that but even if that changed -- probably inevitable if MB numbers grow and grow -- I'm more than happy to trust the team to develop the platform in such a way to maintain that relative ease of avoiding trouble.
@kitt @simonwoods I just found it as well. How disappointing. Like you, Kitt, that was my first — and so far only — “ideological” unfollow, too. (I’ve unfollowed others before and since, but almost always out of a practical need to control/curate the flow and bandwidth of my timeline, and almost never due to open antipathy to the person.)
Actually, now that I think about it, it wasn’t this person’s views but the manner of expressing those views that I had a problem with... I know a lot of people here at MB (and out in the so-called real world) whose views/beliefs are, let’s say, orthogonal to my own. But for some strange reason, I can almost always engage with them — and they with me — with curiosity, generosity, respect. Is it possible that it’s because, no matter how divergent our views are otherwise, the curiosity, generosity, and respect is mutual? 🤔
@manton I actually (at least for now) support this. Every time I think to add an image/gif and realize I can't, I ultimatley come to the conclusion that I wasn't adding anything but snark any way.
@sharding That could be helpful. It allows people who are trying to relpy with something like a screenshot or something to add benefit, while limiting the shallow nature of gifs
@sethdrebitko Thanks for the feedback. There's something about Twitter that seems to encourage snark and being the first to a joke (trying to get likes) so would be nice to de-emphasize that here.
