An assortment of thoughts by Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine on #Mastodon moderation and policy
A few days ago Medium announced that they have started their own mastodon instance at me.dm. In their announcement post CEO Tony Stubblebine stated that “Like all new platforms, there is a learning curve. We are especially cognizant that we are joining an existing Mastodon ecosystem which already has 9 million people. This ecosystem has existing community norms that are especially focused on avoiding the toxicity that have plagued other social media platforms.”
Over the last few days, Tony Stubblebine has engaged via his public Mastodon profile with the community, to have some conversation about public policy. While this is explicitly not an official announcement of the official Medium policies for Mastodon, it does provide some insight in how the organisation thinks, and takes their first steps toward formulating a policy.
Towards that end, below there are some relevant posts that shed some light on Medium and Tony Stubblebine’s thinking.
First of is the placeholder policy on content warnings (CW):
The whole thread that leads to this placeholder policy is worth a read. Medium has rules that mainly focus on area’s that are more well-known, such as bans on hateful content and restrictions on pornographic and erotic content. Mastodon has community standards that go beyond that, with people often being more proactive with adding content warnings for things like addiction triggers, or warnings for direct eye contact. It is fascinating to see these different approaches to content warnings and restrictions come into contact with each other in the thread.
Another example of the learning curve that was mentioned in the introductory post; Medium is learning by doing how to interact with copycat accounts.
On current politics:
Posted seperately, an interesting open question worth pondering.