So the topic of reply gates is being discussed yet again. It seems like something that’s been around forever. Pre-internet, all media was reply gated. The people running newspapers, radio, and television stations decided who got to talk and who didn’t. That carried over to the early days of the internet. We created websites made up of static html pages. The closest to being able to comment was sending an email to the author (or webmaster as they used to say).
Then along came Web 2.0 and everything changed. You could post comments in response to the stuff that was getting attention. This served an important purpose, too. As more questionable content was getting posted by more people, it was harder to know what you could believe, even if it was posted by what would have been a reputable source a decade earlier. If someone posted a pile of bullshit, you could post links to sources showing that it was bullshit. Sure, comments weren’t read anywhere as often as the original post, but some people would be saved from misinformation if the author was confused or just a run-of-the-mill liar.
This system wasn’t perfect by any means. One common trick was to selectively block comments on your blog. I remember one incident in particular that someone had posted a load of nonsense. A claim about Linux being a command-line OS or something along those lines. I posted a reply with a couple of links that disproved the claim. My comment never showed up. There were other comments, but since for some reason nobody had debunked the claim, I assumed it was a network problem and reposted. Still didn’t appear. Other comments supporting the author or that were fact-free posts claiming the author was wrong continued to show up. Welcome to the world of intentional misinformation.
Although it felt like I was late to the party at the time, I joined Twitter in what turned out to be the early days, all the way back in 2010. It was so refreshing - you could read posts by others, but you could also post replies letting them know your opinion. One of the best things was that you could check the replies of wild claims going viral to see why the author was full of crap. There was lots of misinformation, but it was easy to learn the true story from the replies.
The latest version of this argument looks like this (no source given, but you can find it quite easily if you want):
Believing you are morally entitled to reply directly to someone because they speak in public is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think being able to specify how you want to be interacted with is deeply humane. (And being able to do it after a thread starts to go sour is so important.)
The author of that post is clearly in favor of being able to say anything they want without being challenged. No matter the lie, it should be possible to dump it into the Fediverse without anyone being able to challenge it. Mastodon has enough problems with misinformation the way it is. The last thing it needs is to accelerate the process. Twitter had the same complaints. People with large follower counts didn’t like getting challenged when they bent the truth in the name of building their interaction numbers. One could take the post that’s floating around today and rephrase it thusly:
Believing you are morally entitled to post without regard for the truth in order to build your brand is…definitely a position, I guess, but I think letting people know a post is false is deeply humane.