Fascinating morning reads.
I stumbled on a thread about ableistic behaviour this morning, which was, let's say, not awesome. In my (unsuccessful) attempt to find the post triggering the thread, I came across a paper on moderation issues on mastodon, which is undoubtedly correct, but... le sigh
It frames the problem as both technical and social, but it misses - as most such discourses seem to - a simple psychological root cause.
I'll explain. I keep explaining this.
People are social animals. We each have our different needs when it comes to social interaction, but the fundamentals are the same: we all need the safety of groups. And we all need privacy.
This seems like two contradictory requirements, and a lot of moderation discussions focus on balancing those two, and for good reason. The underlying commonality here are visibility and control.
We enjoy visibility, because being visible in an accepting environment is affirmation that it's OK to be who we are. An extreme instance of this, in the sense that it maximalises this affirmation, is intimacy.
But being visible in an unaccepting environment conversely is terrifying. I read a paper about torture once (in the wake of 9/11) which highlit that torture is fundamentally about forced exposure without feelings of safety. The specific techniques all aim to achieve this combination.
So on the one hand we can build a matrix here and put visibility or exposure on one axis, and perceived safety on the other, and e.g. place intimacy or torture in various corners, and do the same with other social interactions and so forth. Fine.
And to reiterate: the specifics of this are highly individual. But we'll all be able to make such a personalized matrix, and so can generalize that the extremes on the matrix exist in some form for everyone.
So what this comes down to is that we...
... seek to be able to control where on this matrix we exist.
The paper is quite correct in that mastodon's "blocking" as in blocking out what you see of others essentially misses the point; what people need is the ability to control our visibility or exposure, i.e. what others see of us.
But this isn't about moderation or that paper or anything else. This is about what I like to nickname "the sofa model".
Technical details notwithstanding, all social media fucks with our heads.
Jens Finkhäuser