You know what else I like about masto, how thumbnails are v small and deemphasized. Looking at birbsite, I'm realizing now how much graphics have taken it over.
@chris_martin Stuff on the bird site is very media heavy (preview images, thumbnails), while stuff on mastodon is very text heavy (large character limits). I think the behavior of the site influences its culture.
@chris_martin yes there's so much noise with what I recently described as giant lollipop hero images everywhere designed to zap straight into our lizard brains.
Here on Mastodon the post length and text emphasis gives me room to breathe and incentivizes more discussion and interaction. Not just snarky one liners with quotes tweets or carefully crafted viral headlines with an army of hashtags.
@pseudomichael Yes "snark" is the word I've been scratching around for. Twitter encourages it. So does Facebook, I think, although I haven't been there recently enough to offer opinions why that is.
@pseudomichael @chris_martin i had the weirdest realization yesterday when i was typing something to someone about a relatively technical thing that took all 500 characters twice and that it would have taken literally five twotes to express it on the birdsite
"i have room to actually communicate whole ideas and context instead of shouting fragments of thoughts into the void"
@r4v5 @chris_martin it's like having a whole note card for passing messages around instead of just tiny strips of paper.
@chris_martin that's something that irritated me to no end, and I'm really appreciative of here. I relate much better to text.
It's representative to me of how much of that site is shouting for attention. The brands' cards all include stock photos just to take up more space.