12 votes

De-escalating social media conflict: Admitting mistakes

4 comments

  1. [3]
    skybrian
    Link
    The blog post imagines a change to Twitter: It seems like this might be a good addition to Tildes?

    The blog post imagines a change to Twitter:

    Twitter Mea Culpa is a way for a poster to flag their tweet as a mistake and de-escalate a situation, using the same action menu that deleting a post uses, and the same visual design as flagged tweets.

    It seems like this might be a good addition to Tildes?

    6 votes
    1. [3]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. [2]
        skybrian
        Link Parent
        Yes, good point, it's certainly less urgent here. But sometimes we talk about what to do as things scale up. Having something like this in the UI for corrections might encourage corrections? I...

        Yes, good point, it's certainly less urgent here. But sometimes we talk about what to do as things scale up. Having something like this in the UI for corrections might encourage corrections?

        I have a bad habit of continuing to edit after posting. I'm not always as careful as I should to call out edits and sometimes that leads to confusion. There might be something else that could be done, like saving the original.

        3 votes
        1. Wes
          Link Parent
          I'm a big fan of Github showing edit history. I think that would be a nice feature on Tildes as well. Possibly it would clash with the "collect the minimum amount of information" goal, but a...

          I'm not always as careful as I should to call out edits and sometimes that leads to confusion.

          I'm a big fan of Github showing edit history. I think that would be a nice feature on Tildes as well. Possibly it would clash with the "collect the minimum amount of information" goal, but a compromise might be possible.

          3 votes
  2. kfwyre
    Link
    I like this for Twitter, though we'd need to do a lot of reconfiguring to make something comparable work for Tildes. Twitter's posts are short enough that generally flagging the whole thing makes...

    I like this for Twitter, though we'd need to do a lot of reconfiguring to make something comparable work for Tildes. Twitter's posts are short enough that generally flagging the whole thing makes sense, but here posts are often much longer, which gives all-or-nothing mistake tagging the potential for significant overkill (e.g. in a five paragraph response, only one paragraph is in error). Furthermore, Twitter is built for decontextualized amplification so that any given mistake can propagate far and wide, while Tildes doesn't have any such mechanisms at present.

    To me, I think the more relevant part for Tildes is the forgiveness portion of the article. I actually don't like its inclusion as a UX element as proposed, but I think the idea behind it is important. Users need to feel comfortable to make mistakes and that others in the community are collaborators rather than adversaries, otherwise they'll undoubtedly comment with their shields up in the first place and likely double down if confronted. I think so much of social interactions online has been poisoned by tribalism and bad faith actors that the idea of vulnerability and collaboration in online discussions is foreign to us.

    When I started commenting on Tildes I found that it took me a long time to let my guard down. I had been habituated from past internet experiences to expect a fight, callous dismissals, or pithy retorts about seemingly anything and everything. I would cringe every time I saw I had comment notifications because I anticipated the worst. It took a lot of instances of me coming back to an inbox of neutral and supportive comments to realize that not everyone here is itching to escalate. Consequently, I'm not longer wired to expect that, and I now love seeing that I have new responses to read, but that has only come after a long period of having my deeply-set expectations for online discourse positively reconfigured through experience here and a lack of experience elsewhere (I'm not active on any other social media, so I'm no longer exposed to the constant escalation threat).

    I don't know if there's a way we can structurally incorporate this kind of thing into Tildes' UX (though I'd love to hear any ideas!). To me, it's more of a cultural thing -- something we cultivate through how we talk to one another.

    6 votes