Just five posts from three women in the last week? @manton
It's been awhile but I poked my head in to have a look at Micro.blog's Discover page and I'm so glad that there is a safe space for mostly white upper middle class men to share about their lives.
A carefully curated timeline with no harsh reality intruding. Why concern yourself with a climate emergency, genocide, fascism?
Talk about a sanitized version of reality.
@jasonekratz I’m fairly sure one of the features of micro.blog is that you can control what you see in your timeline. Just don’t follow, mute or block?
@davidmarsden Discover has been a little bit neglected but we just finished a new admin interface that is going to make this easier. Diversity has always been really important to me. Denny is looking for a different product. I don’t want Discover to constantly raise our users’ blood pressure! People can always find and follow Mastodon or Bluesky users to get that.
Well, I will say this. It’s hard to find people to interact with in MB, regardless of viewpoint. Discover was one place we’re you might find someone you thought was interesting. But not anymore. It is the same stuff and people over and over gain. If I leave MB for the 2nd or 3rd time, that will be why
@manton I will say again that I’m very happy with micro.blog as a service. It offers me everything I want - blog, microblog, timeline, syndication, social interaction mostly under my control - and am even thinking of upgrading. Only justifying the extra expense put me off, and as paying customers we are all in a self-selecting bubble of people who can afford to pay, as well as see the value of paying for this service.
I have used Discover for finding interesting new people, and I do think this is an opportunity actually to make it more interesting by including and showcasing a wider range of voices. Jason seems to have nuked his account? I suggested to him that muting or blocking a user would remove their content from what he sees on the Discover timeline. Not sure that is the case? But a “simple” filter on the Discover page would put people in control of what content they see, and let people choose their comfort level while still giving everyone access to diverse perspectives?
(I put simple in quotes because it sounds simple in principle, but I have no idea how that would work in practice).
@davidmarsden I think I’m in a similar situation as you David, I’m happy with micro.blog overall as a service. I strongly agree with all of the things @manton has done to avoid toxic virality (no likes, follower-counts etc). I’m also considering upgrading my account, adding another blog, adding audio. I have no intention of leaving.
I also (respectfully) disagree with the framing of Denny’s original post, in point of fact it was easy for me (as a newcomer) to “discover” Denny back when he was on micro.blog. he was impossible to miss. and i follow and read him (through my micro.blog) to this day, a demonstration of the platform’s functional openness.
but there remains the micro.blog Discover feed problem, and it blurs into a “micro.blog and women” problem. if discovery were a priority for me, it might upset me more. (for discovery I place myself in the hands of Allah) BUT maybe it should upset me anyway. This is bound to impact the kinds of writers and readers that micro.blog attracts and supports. it’s also embarrassing, and it prevents me from recommending the platform wholeheartedly to others, who may not share my quirks.
Discover does feel like a vestigial limb. It shrinks in importance once people spend some time on the platform, because the platform is so small (as far as I can tell). After that, it doesn’t create a “silo” or echo chamber. but to outsiders and newcomers, it signals that micro.blog is the opposite of punk.
If it were a coffeeshop, (like @jsonbecker ’s example from the other thread), right now Discover feels like a Starbucks in the basement of the corporate compound where everybody works. If it were up to me, I would aim more for an indie coffeeshop in Dupont Circle circa 1996. Good coffeeshops feature local riffraff, including expressions of intense emotion, political opinion, various counter-cultures, amateur creativity, zines etc. In indie establishments, which micro.blog purports to be, casual conversations often do begin with hard, controversial, strongly-felt feelings.
But it’s not up to me. Manton has his own feelings regarding toxicity and he seems pretty fixed on them. I guess women raise his blood pressure too much? (one is left to assume.) sometimes i just think about all the hidden wives. (omg David, can you create an AI band called “the hidden wives of Discover”??)
not every criticism comes from an enemy. I don’t envy Manton’s job, being a platform boss turns people crazy for reasons, having the blast of social media vitriol constantly pointed at them. but I think that’s why he (still) needs to delegate “community” management. Not to solve the problem (it might be unsolvable), but to prevent its maddening absurdity. this too is terrible for users’ mental health.
I’m still not about to leave over this, everywhere is absurd these days and there are far worse fates than being un-Discovered.
@lzbth Thanks for your thoughts and support! You’re completely right that we need to hire a community manager again. This year has been particularly overwhelming and there are so many competing priorities just on the software side alone. I also want to broaden Discover so that it sometimes features people from other parts of the web, for example from WordPress blogs, Mastodon, or Bluesky. That could help make it much more diverse.
@lzbth yes, to be “Undiscovered” was one of the reasons I moved here, tbf. I suspect that the Discover timeline actually probably does accurately reflect the composition of the micro.blog community. Which in itself many would consider to be problematic, but maybe in Manton’s case, with the setup he envisioned and has to run almost alone, is for the best. Claude set me up with a clunky “Hidden wives” Discover hack, although the principle is sound. Not as nice as waiting for Allah, for sure.
@davidmarsden wooow this is clunky but interesting. Yeah. I don’t want to create stress, I think pretty much “it is what it is”… but it also seems right to point out the representation problem on a regular basis, like once a year?
Being confronted with jarring search suggestions and results, i’m reminded how much worse the “real” problems are, compared to the Discover feed. It seems trivial in comparison.
