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Please feel free to tell me to pound sand. I don't need to be here, and "successful YouTubers" is hardly a marginalized group.

But also understand that I *want* to be here. I'm not leveraging this platform to spread my videos, I'm here to offer a way for people to connect with me. And I'm here to have fun.

At this point I need to self-censor a /lot/ to keep it fun. I'll try that for a while, but it's a damn shame I need to do it.

@TechConnectify I can’t imagine how much of a pain in the ass toxic people can be when you start getting even a little success on YouTube. You must feel like you wish you could hire someone to screen your comments.

@mos_8502 This is the thing though! This is the thing that I feel like nobody understands.

Despite the fact that I'm sure my YouTube comments are so much more toxic on the whole than what I get here on Mastodon, /I don't see them/

I have to go into my YouTube studio and look at comments in chronological order if I want to even notice that drivel. Otherwise, it gets filtered way down low and I never have to see it.

To be honest, that's what I want here. Some automatic ranking of quality

@mos_8502 but a lot of people are fundamentally against that here, admittedly for some good reasons.

On the other hand though, I don't think it should be thought of as a right to get your thoughts in front of somebody else. When someone is actually being problematic, enough signal makes it through the noise for that person to hear it.

Here though, everything is signal and nothing is noise. Which means it's all noise.

@TechConnectify It might be possible to make this opt-in and local for your account. That is you enable the filter algorithm on your side by opting in.

Filtered posts will still there and shown to other people, but you don't get notified of them nor see them.

I don't know how Twitter handles this, but imagine it is similar.

@TechConnectify I believe everyone should have an equal voice to the masses, introducing any signaling of "quality" of replies just makes it unfair. If you don't want to see something personally, that's fine, but it shouldn't affect others.

Even ordering by posting time isn't fair, because people who replied first get their post seen more often.

@ryze I agree with this sentiment, but it doesn't work at scale. This platform is unusable for me at the moment without some signal to noise filtering - and since everything is signal, it's all noise.

I think that has to be chewed on - if you are unwilling to implement filtering, that means people like me functionally cannot be here. And the behaviors that are pushing me away simply won't get any better. There has to be visible pushback.

@ryze And to be honest, the fact that you agree chronological ordering is also unfair tells me you understand this is a complex problem.

A decent filter will bring important signals through the noise. And truly, Twitter's filter was decent. I'm sure it sucked to be deemed noise, but right now the late replies will never be seen by anyone but the OP - and I'm begging you to understand that I desperately don't want to see everything thrown my way. It's not healthy.

@sxpert @TechConnectify AI is quite unstable at times and can get things wrong. Furthermore it will be biased depending on what dataset it was trained on.

@sxpert @TechConnectify In case of adaptive AI, this will surely help a ton, but it should be implemented properly.

@ryze There's more nuance to it, but broadly yes.

I think people are largely so burned out by "characters of the day" and "getting ratioed" and whatnot that they're really hesitant to implement anything that even echoes those things.

But there's really no way for anybody to signal "this is a bad take" or "this is bad behavior" here. And muting/blocking, while it protects you the individual, does nothing to indicate right/wrong.

We need social cues on social media. There aren't any here.

@ryze So when designing a content filter, it doesn't necessarily even need to analyze the content in a post. It could be based on favorite (I'm not sure up/down voting a la reddit is a good idea but some sort of human inputs would help a lot).

This would also drastically cut down on the reply guy problem because the might actually see that their idea has been cosigned by other people /and they don't need to spew it out themselves/

@TechConnectify This will help true, but then this will be unfair for the people who got just unlucky and their posts weren't seen by enough.

Furthermore it can do more harm than good, since the right/wrong is dependent on the audience that decides. Reminds me of Flat-Earthers, which just get stuck in an echo chamber and barely see opposing views.

There has to be a a balance, I am not against introducing the rating system, but it shouldn't be the ultimate thing that is controlling how far your voice can reach.

Thinking of simple case, interleaving regular replies with replies pushed to the top by rating system might be a good balance.

@ryze It's nice to strike a good balance, but to be honest life just isn't fair. I have no doubt in my mind that my position is 95% luck - I caught a lucky break with my video on VCRs and that snowballed into a career.

Adding to that, people don't even agree on what fair is.

So... this might very well sound callous, but at some point something is going to get prioritized that leads to others getting left behind. I think it's good to work against that, but fixating on it leads to paralysis.

@ryze This isn't exactly related, but this is my whole thing about the FOSS movement.

Y'know why I use Adobe software? Mainly because when I encounter a problem, I will know other people have encountered the same and there will be resources to help me fix it.

It's not a perfect tool, and I don't particularly like Adobe. But actually defining a framework and making some rules we can all understand is often more important than quibbling over what is perfect.

@TechConnectify it's more of a problem of adoption and use of software more than it's freedom I believe. For example, Blender is FOSS and is loved and used by many and there are a ton of resources about it.

@ryze Sure, there are successful examples - but what they have in common is just that - commonality. People are using the same software and aside from little technical hiccups it's most the same framework.

Here, we are still deep within the "everyone wants/needs different things" stage and there's an obvious undercurrent of derision towards the more popular instances. There is so little direction outside of specific pockets, and imo nobody seems to *want* cohesion.