I've seen a bit of talk about interaction control today, mostly about being able to choose who can and can't reply to specific posts, so let's take a look at it, shall we

Interaction control is a set of social media features that let people choose a group of other users who are able to interact with a post. An example of this is Twitter having a feature that lets the writer of a tweet choose whether anyone can reply to it, only people they follow can, or only people mentioned in the post are able to reply. In this way, a user can have more control over what kinds of interactions they will get, and they can avoid unwanted interactions

At first glance this might sounds pretty useful or at least harmless, but really it's neither

There are some ways this feature can have bad results. Someone can post misinformation without allowing replies and then there is no good way to let others know. It's also a tool for strengthening echo chambers, something that's already a problem on social media (and especially on the fediverse because of how blocks work in the federated model)

But these things really aren't my main concern because these posts will probably not even use the feature most of the time. My biggest problem with this feature is that not only will it not solve the main problem it's trying to fix, it will actually make it worse

The main use for this feature is surely to prevent harassment. If someone is scared of getting harassed in the replies to a post, they can turn off replies to avoid it. Except things aren't this simple

If we look back to see how it was done on Twitter, anyone who has used it will know that it didn't work at all. Everyone would simply quote tweet instead, and that is even worse than bad replies because it's then also spread to the harasser's followers

Then the obvious solution to this is to extend the interaction control to quote posts, and then all is fixed, right? This too, however, has the exact same problem: It will only make people do the interaction in a worse way

If someone sees a post and wants to harass the author by quoting the post, being told that they can't do that won't stop them. Instead they will find a different way to do the same thing, and this way can only be worse

One of these ways would be by linking to the post instead of using a built in quoting feature. In this way the harassers would have the exact same gain, but the original author won't get notified meaning they won't know where the harassment originates from. Even worse, the harassers might post a screenshot of the original post, and then the author can't even delete it to make it stop. While the target may not see where it originates, the harassers will still make sure that they get their message to their target by other means (messaging the target, going after their other posts, etc)

This is just another one of those cases where people try to come up with a quick and simple solution to a more complicated problem

People don't like driving because of traffic, so let's give them an extra lane. People are getting harassed in the replies to posts, so let's ask the harassers not to harass