@mattblaze some people require the world to be paved in semaphore
@mattblaze Mastodon HOA are some serious content police. I forgot to alt-tag a picture once. Holy mackerel! You’d think I just punched a baby.
@mattblaze For some reason people see it as some social contract. Like with the spoiler tags and alt text and such. I do not understand what the big deal is.
@mattblaze Uh-oh! Now you’re going to have the hashtag police seething 🧐
You finally cracked the code! 🤣
@mattblaze @dezz There actually is a reason to make every word a hashtag like that: it makes your post searchable, bypassing the Mastodon anti-search mob. The ransom note effect is admittedly a downside.
@mattblaze @jef @dezz Maybe the hashtag mob wouldn't be after you if the anti-search mob wasn't prevailing. #Mastodon #search
@mattblaze @jef @dezz
Entertaining as all this is, it's time to mention Spaf's commentary from 1987 (skip down to "3 axioms of Usenet"):
https://danflood.com/cs-content/cshistory/csh_spaf.html
I know you think I'm ruining this place for you. Let me offer some solutions that work better than telling me how, or about what topics, I should post (which works very poorly):
- Don't follow me
- Mute me
- Block me
These also work if you replace "me" with any other accounts you find irritating or uninteresting.
@mattblaze Hashtags and the ability to subscribe to them are one of those social contract things. Yes, you can piss in the communal pool, there's no law against it but don't expect people to sympathise with you when someone points out you're spoiling it for everyone else.
@woe2you @mattblaze as someone who regularly uses the hashtag subscription feature, I don’t feel that my experience is at all spoiled by someone not using hashtags.
Whose experience has been spoiled, exactly?
@mattblaze Illegitimi non carborundum.
If these fail, you can always complain to my dean, who definitely wants to hear your thoughts about how faculty use social media.
That's George Mason University. Operators are standing by.
Correction: George Washington University. I always get those confused.
@mattblaze Would you have made that kind of mistake when you were at Penn State?
@mattblaze for over ten years I didn’t realize that Matt Blaze and Matt Green were different people 🤷
Another weird complaint I frequently get here (in addition to not using enough hashtags, failing to content warn about ordinary, innocuous comments, and posting insufficiently chromatic art) is that I have too many followers.
This is cited as evidence that I must be some kind of parasitic Mastodon billionaire, cavalierly flying around social media on my private Internet jet using up followers that needier users should have instead.
I’m serious. I don’t get it either.
@mattblaze
That's hilarious.
@mattblaze I've been waiting to unleash my righteous indignation upon you!
- You don't post quite enough radars/radar sites. This is my personal interest, and I wish you'd do a better job catering to it 😤
- Your posts are too informative, beautiful (photos), and interesting, which causes me to pause my quick-scrolling through the feed and actually learn things at times. Very inconvenient, and quite presumptive of you to assume I want to see thought-provoking content.
@mattblaze “Mastodon Billionaire” is pretty hilarious, actually.
If you’re the kind of person who thinks that followers = status, I can see insecure people trying to gain status by going after a high-status person. The practice is as old as primates.
@mattblaze Man you get your fair(?) share of nonsense…
I'm sorry this stuff is happening to you.
Glad you're still not fed up with the bunch here, I really like what you share with us.
@mattblaze I’ll have you know had to unfollow an unnatural number* of other, lesser accounts just to follow you! ;)
(Zero is, according to many sources, not one of the Natural Numbers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_number )
@mattblaze I see Mastodon as being very similar to linux in some ways...
They are both great but also have some of the most insufferable of users.
I think human activity on the net is driven by two major drives: porn and righteous indignation.
@mattblaze What does John Mastodon say?
@SteveBellovin I'll ask him next time I see him in the VIP lounge at the private Internet jet terminal.
@mattblaze ugh Matt. hugs. sorry some squeaky wheels are being a pain. i don't understand why people don't just unfollow? moar hugs.
@mattblaze I wonder if trolling the dean qualifies you as a faculty at George Mason University too.
If they won't start sending you paychecks, I'd ask at least for a joint appointment 😜
@mattblaze now that’s just trolling
or de-trolling for his dean. ;)