As I become more and more sour on social media engagement indicators versus ways to increase interaction or context, I keep coming back to something I’ve thought should have existed awhile ago when it comes to thinks like retweets on Twitter: automatic “via” indicators.
As it is, often when I see one person quote-tweet another, I feel compelled to give the original poster the retweet, which leaves the quote-tweeter who brought it to my attention shit out of luck on engagement. Typically, I’ll make sure to “like” the quote-tweet. Is this considerate, or just me being trapped by engagement madness?
When it comes to regular retweets, however, Twitter should be able to tell whose retweet brought the original tweet to my attention, and include that information in a “via” tag on my retweet of their retweet. Substitute “boosts” for the same notion using Mastodon.
These are the sorts of things I think social media should consider rather than engagement counts.
It doesn’t solve my cognitive difficulty making decisions about how to pass along and/or credit quote-tweets, but, still, it would do something a bit more contextual. I keep arguing for more interaction and less indication, more context and less empty content (e.g. “likes”), and I feel like native “via” tags in retweets could be part of that.