@hq @prof_goldberg I'll file that for later reading -- I'm obviously nowhere near ready to actually implement anything.
Just on the face of it, though... his argument bothers me in a couple of ways.
It's of the "if people ever abuse a tool, it's better not to let them have the tool than to figure out how to prevent its abuse" mentality. If we did that for every possible feature in social media, there would be no social media.
It's already easy enough to quote posts when replying (and without even linking to them in any way, which seems to me it can offer its own avenues of abuse); the proposal as I understand it would just help make it a little easier to keep the responses connected to the original, and for others to follow the thread of responding.
Is he arguing that quoting exactly what you're responding to is somehow bad? In all the political discussions I've been involved with, it was when people didn't do this that things tended to get out of hand the most quickly, because people will make their own assumptions about what is being responded to. At best, responses can be ambiguous and the logic harder to follow. This only benefits the trolling mentality.
I will of course reread the post again more carefully when I have time to really focus on it; social network design is, you might say, a special interest of mine.
I believe a lot of it has to do with the bird app's specific implementation too - when you quote a tweet, your comment on it appears *above* the quote you're tweeting. So it lets you frame the reader's view of the quoted tweet, before you've even read it. That little detail makes a big psychological (and en masse, sociological) difference.
#quotetweets
@woozle @prof_goldberg
And while not linking to the original has its problems, linking to it can be an easy way of saying "go brigade this person and harass them". This is still possible without an explicit feature, but having a button for it is another psychological nudge that makes it much more likely that people will do it.
#quotetweets #armchairpsychology
@woozle @prof_goldberg
All that said, I'm not heavily in favour of one side or the other in this argument, just steelmanning the position of those who don't like QTs. I haven't used the bird app enough to say whether the feature overall has a positive or negative impact.