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I no longer feel comfortable boosting posts from pure meme accounts unless they’re exceptionally well known or have authenticated themselves somehow, e.g. with a two-way link to the memer’s personal account.
In this day and age it’s just too easy fully automate this type of account as a bad actor with the intention of posting misinformation somewhere down the line, once the account looks legit enough.
@erlend Was this triggered by something specific that happened here?
@db0 lately I’ve boosted some memes/quips that I liked, only to click through to the poster profile to find that it feels too anonymous for my liking.
@erlend I’m not someone who cares for memes in general, as I find them a poor substitute for nuance. Most complex things cannot be served well by a few lines of pithy text slapped atop an image.
That’s on top of the engagement-farming you refer to.
That said, I think as an “algorithm-light” platform Mastodon is far less susceptible to the kind of gaming you refer to than other networks (which I agree are often subject to it). I’m much less worried about it here.
Personally, I got rather uncomfortable with boosting in general and the need/push here to use it liberally as the “algorithm”. For kinda similar reasons … I don’t know the account or their history or whether those who follow me want to see what I want to boost.
Unless it’s someone I know and can sorta vouch for, I’m not interested in boosting. I’m happy to like, and I think a better feed generator could help with this sort of thing.