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"Lock replies" to control unwelcome replies

Currently, one can hide comments that are unwanted, but there's no ability to do this for unwanted shares or replies. Blocking a user who makes an unwelcome reply prevents further interaction, but doesn't hide the reply; this is somewhat expected, due to a reply's characteristic of being a freestanding post instead of being subordinate to someone else's post.  


Unfortunately, this means that there's no ability to control unwanted replies without restricting shares entirely. It would be nice to be able to nip them in the bud; a potential application here would be sharing art of one's characters without the risk of people replying to that art with weird shit about the characters that makes you uncomfortable, in a way you can't control.


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I'm definitely behind some finer-grained ability to moderate reblog-replies, though one point I want to bring up is how this would affect reblog-replies to that reblog-reply. If I remove a reblog-reply that already has other reblog-replies to it, would that...

  • ...remove all those other reblog-replies that have been made in response to that specific reblog-reply, and all the reblog-replies that have been made in response to the reblog-replies made in response to that reblog-reply, and so on and so forth down the chain? 
  • ...or would it leave those reblog-replies intact (along with copies of the specific reblog-reply)?
I can see pros and cons to both - on one hand, it can help a lot with keeping things from getting out of hand to have all chained reblog-replies removed as well, and save you from having to hunt up and down the chain for any stragglers. On the other hand, it poses the risk of removing context/tangential conversations that might have sprung up on the same thread.

Some other possibilities:
  • some kind of toggle that allows people to reblog your posts, but not reblog them with replies (I think I've brought this up in a standalone feature request before?)
  • some way to approve individual reblog-replies before they go live? but this could be wrangled into a pseudo-DM system, which staff have been trying to avoid, and also suffers from the chaining issue - if someone wants to reblog-reply to a reblog-reply that has been approved, do you also have to approve that one? or does the person who did the original reblog-reply approve it? what if there's multiple people in that chain? it very quickly scales out of control in practice
  • some kind of whitelist you can add people to, which will allow them to reblog otherwise reblog-locked posts - but this would make permission management for posts a tangle


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It would not allow reblog-replies from the point it's enabled. Ideally this would be selectable on the post creation page, along with the other lock options.
Ah! I think I misunderstood, then - what you're describing isn't the ability to nuke individual reblog-replies, but to turn off the ability to reblog-reply without turning off regular reblogs? I'm very in favor of that!

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How would this handle tagging? If I'm understanding your suggestion right, this would create a toggle that would let other users share the post, but not add anything to it. Would this also disable tags? If it did, it would prevent people from organizing their own pages as they see fit, but if you did not, you may run into issues where people just add their unwanted commentary directly in the tags.

Good question; I hadn't considered tags. worth figuring out!

I do want to say that it might not even be necessary to moderate tags - I feel like there's substantial enough friction to writing extensive thoughts in tags that it'd deter most people from doing it, and it also prevents people from like... being able to make their thoughts about your post into a Standalone Post that others can then pick up and pass around? So it goes a long way towards curtailing wildfire-like spread of unwanted comments. You also don't see people's tags on reblogs in your notifications, so it's significantly less in-your-face, and you don't have to deal with the awkwardness of being notified of people liking someone's Weird Reblog With Reply of your post. It doesn't stop smaller annoyances like people reblogging your platonic art and tagging it with a romantic ship, but I think that's something that can be offset by other means, like attaching a "this is platonic, please don't tag it with a romantic relationship" note in the post body.

voicing support for this feature! occasionally someone will share one of my art posts with something goofy or jokey in the caption field, and whenever this happens it feels like it takes focus away from the post as a showcase of art and turns it into someone else's funny post. being able to disable replies/captions on post shares would eliminate this issue entirely for me.


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I would like to dissent, but I don't want to invalidate others' feelings here, so please allow me to share my thoughts about ways to address at least some of the underlying concerns here, but still explain why I think this would be a low-utility feature with moderate to high potential for creating toxicity.


Much like how twitter never got rid of QRTs because people could just screenshot others' posts to add their own commentary, be it for "dunking" or "turning it into their own funny post" or just "being a big ol' weirdo," a feature like this is ultimately not going to solve the problem of people using your publications for content fodder. Furthermore, trying to control how people interpret your expressed thoughts (be they in art, writing, or otherwise), or just what they have to express in response or in general, is not a good way to foster a healthy community where people are free to express themselves as long as it does not hurt others, even when it comes from a place of good intentions such as trying to prevent post hijacking. In fact, this feature would be a micro-implementation of intellectual property rights, which are nonsense ideas based on a false concept of reality (because information cannot be owned) and which are a major cause of cultural stagnation and hegemony, and really just another way that private property makes living under capitalism miserable. Any attempt you make to control others' speech is going to be circumvented through either technical (e.g., screenshots) or social (e.g., refusing to engage with you and/or the publishing platform) means. At best, you will just cause friction and/or reduce people's willingness to engage with you, and at worst, you will contribute to a culture that ultimately creates a digital ghost town. Asking people politely not to interpret your posts in certain ways is, of course, completely fine. Letting people know authorial intent is part of your own right to express yourself. And you can and should continue to do that! But that can and should only go as far as your own expression.


Not wanting to see people's weird additions to your post, however, is completely valid and should definitely be a feature! IMO, it should be both a global (i.e., never see additions in your reblog notifications) and a per-post override (i.e., set whether you see additions in the reblog notifications for any given post, much like how you can disable shares entirely for certain posts) option. Although, that last example, I am not entirely happy with, since it suffers from the same problems that I just talked about with restricting how people can share your post; I would like for there to be options for "moots only" posts instead, which I'll request if it hasn't already been done. Along with the existing privacy-protecting features of blocking and having entirely private blogs, as well as blogs that aren't visible to people who aren't logged in, it would go a long way to giving people additional control over their privacy and address some of the concerns expressed here without introducing IP microaggressions.


Of course, as I stated in the beginning, this is just my opinion, and isn't meant to make others feel bad for wanting to avoid uncomfortable interactions online; I just needed to voice my dissent since I can't do so with a simple "downvote" and even if I could, a vague "no" gesture would probably be less considerate towards the feelings you all are expressing than actually giving my thoughts on the matter. I hope I don't cause any ill will.

this particular post was inspired by someone being moderately weird and horny in an unwanted fashion about someone else's art of their fursona they posted, and i don't think letting them do it invisibly is a good solution to that problem


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 I think this is a straightforward "yes" and the fact that twitter has QRTs "therefore you can't stop this" is a poor argument - friction is useful in social media spaces and a lack of friction has the effect of making a feature more casually useable. Does preventing replies/reblogs on a post stop people from screenshotting it to reply? No. But

1. It's more effort.

2. There is a fundamentally different social dynamic to it.


I think these two things in combination make it worth implementing. An imperfect solution still influences behaviour. (For the record, I'd like the ability to restrict shares/comments separately, because there are definite use cases for times when you want just one or the other)


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You make a good point, Aura, that adding friction still influences behavior, so I'll concede that point. I also don't want to trample on OP's feelings of discomfort. I respect everyone's feelings on the matter and if people generally disagree with my stance, especially if the staff disagrees, I won't have any hard feelings. Thanks for responding politely to my post, both of you.

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