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Seeing discourse on cohost design from people coming in from tumblr and a lot of it is like "Ah, but you see, cohost is designed this way on purpose! You gotta ask why you want those features to begin with!" and like that's great that's GENUINELY great I think cohost did a good job pushing things the other way with website design trends. There are some great decisions they've made to reduce harassment and keep posting healthy. But... no offense, but the cool Cohosters over on Cohost drink the cohostaid sometimes and it's worth interrogating how some very reasonable initial assumptions have played out.

Notifications are kinda the Worst of Both Worlds

I like that you don't see how many likes or reposts some else's post gets. I like that you can't go fishing in the reposts to find people to argue with. I like that you can't judge someone's worth by their follower count. I like all that stuff. I like that cohost says it doesn't want people to be motivated by engagement farming but... they kinda are? By still having likes and the little +1 bubbles, you're giving the dopamine without giving the info that, imo, is less addictive but more informative. If I can go on a post and see how many likes it has, I might check it a few times if it was a high effort post. If you give me a badge on my notification tab I'M GOING TO CLICK IT when it lights up. We got the pavlovian bell, without any of the utility of getting fed. It's a weird middle ground. What type of posts does this middle ground encourage?

... Jokes, mostly?

And like, they're funny jokes. Chosters are very funny. Some of my best friends are Jokhosters (?????)! But you get so many jokes and posts about cohost itself that they practically needed to make whole other view to help you make sure you didn't miss your friend's more personal or high effort posts. These jokes also don't really create any real meaningful engagement either.

And I want to be clear, no one is doing wrong by joking, but... systems encourage certain kinds of posting and behavior. This behavior, compared to most of the internet, is down right pleasant, but still, at least in my mind, falls short of what they want to encourage.

Cohost feels Half Right for Notifications for other people's posts, but it IS Social Interaction

I'm glad I don't get a little badge over stuff I didn't write, but part of me misses kinda seeing what the people around me dig? I get the impression you don't get notifications because they didn't... want... people reblogging stuff just to get likes, but I'm not even sure how much of a real problem that even is. I know a lot of people I met, especially through tumblr, came from seeing their names pop up a lot with stuff I reblog, seeing the stuff they're into and kinda quietly bonded. I will reblog something, say, a yugioh pic, because I know I have friends who are into it who follow me and it makes me happy when I see they enjoyed it. This isn't a "dark pattern" or anything, this is a very real form of digital interaction. This isn't doing something for a number, it's for a person. For once, the number is doing it's job and merely serving as a receipt.

(I would, personally, like those notifications to be their own sub tab with no badge or anything)

A lot of people talk about cohost feeling lonely and people assume they're just not INVOLVED enough or w/e but this is part of it. And it's not just people who never really 'settled in'. I'm pretty settled in and I agree. I've met cool people on here, but I mostly learn their real vibes later on other sites. People will dismiss this like "Well other sites trained you wrong", but that's kinda... non falsifiable? Is that wrong? Especially on a platform where you (very understandably) can't message something?

Honestly for me this place is something I mostly use to repost stuff from my blog (which blissfully gives me no real analytics) as a way to get comments. You can surely find cozy spots here, I can see people on my timeline who have, but the isolating nature of cohost seems pretty real.

My Tumblr might be Bugged, but in a way that's actually Based? Hiding information doesn't mean you need to Remove it.

Honestly the best experience I have, which might be a bug is... tumblr doesn't give me a badge for activity??? I swear it's not xkit, I just... never get any badges???

I have a tab, I can check, and I will only check it when I care. That feels... really civilized. It's how I treat my phone. My phone doesn't make noises at me (unless you're one of a handful of people in my personal life). It exists at my leisure. I check it when I care to check it.

It makes me think of follower counts on twitter. The most civilized thing they ever did on that hellsite was move your follower count to your profile where you don't see it all the time. It's a useful number to have though, especially as a creative. The number has problems, obviously, but it's better than nothing. Or maybe absolutely nothing would be better. I like that I can't see easily if someone follows me back still, but if I'm a psycho I can scroll through a huge list until I find something.

People will say "but then people will post to try and get more followers!!!" but they already do, they already will do things to make the little magenta badge dance and go higher. The behavior there isn't that different. But it's a weird nnow when a bunch of people suddenly follow you because of a good post. You get so many notifications they blend together and it's like... what does this mean? What does this translate into? What kind of audience am I even talking to here? And I mean I know because for the hell of it I loaded up all my followers and did a search for "follow" just now and it didn't jokerfy me. I was just like "Hey, good to know".

Numbers are not the problem. The positioning and facing of those numbers are the problem. Who sees the numbers is also the problem, but cohost got that one right. The weird incomplete info of cohost is just... maddeningly pointless. It still encourages most of the behavior it claims to try and avoid, while making it harder to just glance at things. The only way to really get a read on somethings reach is to be a bored psychopath. My blog won't even LET me do that. I'd have to do a double psychopath and idk like dig through my apache logs, the worst possible thing to do for your mental health (you will think you're being hacked RIGHT NOW).

Cohost should either give slightly more info (intelligently placed) or take some away. This middle ground just makes no sense. NO follower notification, don't be a coward! No follower list at all! Or idk gimme a number down some menus I can check every few months,

Infinite Scrolling and Missing the Target

Similar to Numbers are not the problem, infinite scrolling gets a lot of hate it shouldn't get. The real problem is.... endlessly algorithmic content. I'm going to scroll the fuck down and catch up to where I left off regardless of pagination, all you're doing is annoying me. This is a much smaller issue than the other ones -- cohost doesn't go so fast that I usually need to go to page 2, but it more... represents to me how the philosophy here sometimes over focuses on the superficial aspects of a problem and not the real cause. Maybe you can argue some tags are active enough that they're practically infinite but... are they? Is the type of content on here the type of content meant to hook people? The type of content that has financial rewards for generating?

No. With the same logic, would pagination stop tiktok from being addictive? It'd certainly be a speedbump for sure, but speedbumps aren't by themselves a solution. The content itself is the problem and the platform rewards you for making it. Under those conditions, infinite scrolling becomes a fast lane. Under those conditions.

Reasonable Expectations

I don't think anything here will save cohost, or that cohost needs saving, or that people here who like it here don't enjoy it. All the annoying things here are small annoyances that are only going to effect a handful of people. But when I see people from tumblr complaining and other people being like "Nah you see, we figured it out" like... nah, not really. Cohost to me comes off as a very strong first draft and dismissing their concerns talking about dark patterns and the evils of other social media platforms kinda does a disservice to everyone. The Cohost team has done a great job and no one is perfect and no one even agrees on what perfect is. This is my take. I myself am already an unusual user. Like artists, who are going to be one of the better fits for this site will have another take. But you should still be going "Is this actually working how we want it to?" and listening to other peoples response to that same question.

Edit I just want all you Pagination lovers to know I see you and I respect you sayin' you like it and you still find the need for something to stop you, even on cohost. Didn't expect that to be the thing the most people would stand up for. 😌

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