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1. Kara Dreamer ⚧ (kara@occult.camp)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 17:51:38 UTC Kara Dreamer ⚧

   #trending #hashtags #are #a #stupid #fucking #idea

   • Laurelai Bailey repeated this.
   • Kara Dreamer ⚧ (kara@occult.camp)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 18:03:37 UTC Kara Dreamer ⚧

     in reply to

     they're the typical refuge of the computer programmer who wants to implement a feature without taking any real risk of _making a decision_ as to how that feature should work

     it's true, it's hard to find pertinent toots about a topic. search doesn't really work on Mastodon (why, I don't know) so instead people want to be able to tag their posts so they can be found. that much, so far, is sensible

     a few minutes' thought suffices to provide real-life examples in such things as concordances to books. if you want to find all the passages in Shakespeare referring to drink, for example, look in a concordance

     Laurelai Bailey repeated this.
   • Kara Dreamer ⚧ (kara@occult.camp)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 18:07:15 UTC Kara Dreamer ⚧

     in reply to

     but clearly such a scheme only works _if the tags can be relied on_

     what's needed is _standardization_, coming up with a reliable system for concise description of all the subject matters that might conceivably turn up in a Mastodon post

     that sounds scary but really it shouldn't be. library scientists have been at work on this matter for thousands of years now. coming up with a scheme for classifying posts by their subjects shouldn't be that hard

     BUT...it requires thought and care and, most importantly of all, it requires the will to make decisions about infrastructure that are attuned to the common good

     Laurelai Bailey repeated this.
   • Kara Dreamer ⚧ (kara@occult.camp)'s status on Saturday, 02-Jun-2018 18:11:16 UTC Kara Dreamer ⚧

     in reply to

     hardly any FOSS programmer, however, is good at making thoughtful, careful decisions about infrastructure that are attuned to the common good

     unwilling to make hard decisions about design, they instead seek refuge in crowdsourcing and making everything infinitely configurable, hoping that maybe if enough people poke away that the amorphous slithering mass that they've created, it'll eventually acquire some sort of structure by some nebulous evolutionary process

     deciding that _trends_, not a rigorous system, should decide how material is organized is a perfect example of this spinelessness

     Laurelai Bailey repeated this.