(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]
“Dunking” & “Revenge Porn” vs: the Open Web
2024-02-29 10:14:11+00:00
Word of the week on les platforms appears to be “dunking” or “dunk”; this appears to be a confused synonym for “quote-tweeting”, where one quote-tweets a second party without adding value other than to mock them. This is apparently meant to be a surreptitious act, where the second-party does not see that you quoted them… even though (at least on Twitter) you actually get notifications about that sort of thing.
The weird thing to me is seeing people compare platforms on the basis that they “do not support” — or perhaps “do not encourage” — dunking, by lacking a “Quote-Response” button.
And I am like: “WTF? Are people confusing ‘user-interface friction’ with a lack of capability?”
Back in the days before I invented the Twitter Reply button (cough, kinda) to merely reply to someone required typing out their username in full; and to quote them required… quoting them, and pasting-in a URL which (later, when the technology was invented) would be rendered as a “card” object in the browser.
It turns out that this still works, and has never not-worked.
So here’s a hot tip: if you want to quote or dunk on someone in Mastodon or Bluesky, just copy the URL to their content (see the Share dialogue, or your browser bar) and paste it into your content; it’ll do what you intend, it’s even cross-platform (important in this increasingly diverse world of platforms) and it’s neither the open web’s nor the platform’s fault if you’re going to be a dick… not least because being a dick is subjective.
The bigger challenge of the internet remains the dual myths — supported by misplaced legislation — that:
information and commentary which is about you, is your information that you should be enabled with — beyond the access-controls and threat models which a platform offers to fulfil for you — any degree of digital rights management and capability to suppress communications that are about you, rather than with you
Of course this latter sounds understandably wonderful from a “safety” perspective — because if a person is being abused by an abuser, who would not want to gag that abuser from communicating about the abused person? e.g. suppression of NCII or so-misnamed “revenge porn” — but the problem is that such a general capability of suppression cannot exist without being itself appropriated by the state to do Orwellian things.
Go look at China for infinitely varied examples.
The cure is worse than the disease, and there are other ways to combat NCII and other abusive content — including but not limited to: teaching people how to avoid creating such content in the first place — and therefore we should pursue those options, rather than the big-brother ones.
[END]
[1] URL:
https://alecmuffett.com/article/109288
[2] URL:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
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