[This post commenting on Cohost originally appeared on Cohost. I’ve included it here as a record of my thoughts about Cohost.]

Cohost is a great example of “adding by subtracting”: enhancing the social media experience by stripping out features that are supposedly essential to social media.

  • No algorithm. This reduces the serendipity of finding some interesting things published by random people, in order to make room for the serendipity of finding interesting things published or shared by the people one follows. It also limits virality—and virality is almost always bad (as in biology).
  • No view counts, public or otherwise. This reduces the rewards of “posting for clout.” It also helps reduce the likelihood of a post being viewed based primarily on the number of other people who’ve already viewed it—the “famous for being famous” phenomenon that drives quasi-power-law distributions of user attention.
  • No public “follower” counts. This discourages invidious comparisons of one’s self to other people and (again) reduces the rewards of posting for clout.
  • No public “following” lists. This reduces a person’s vulnerability to being criticized or attacked based their following the “wrong people” (for anyone’s definition of “wrong people”).
  • No public “followers” list. This also reduces a person’s vulnerability to being criticized or attacked based on their following a particular person.
  • No full-text search. This reduces the vulnerability to attacks based on brute-force searches for controversial terms or topics.
  • No notification on “unfollows.” This means that a person can follow someone on a whim and then stop doing so without feeling guilty.
  • No built-in “direct message” function. This removes a potential channel for harassment, while still allowing a person to advertise ways for others to contact them using a mechanism of the person’s choice.

Now, this all has to do with trying to reduce certain unwanted phenomena, not eliminate them entirely. For example, half a minute’s thought supplies an easy way to bypass the lack of full-text search on Cohost itself, and someone with a “security mindset” could figure out ways to get other information not directly exposed in the Cohost UI.

But the fact that Cohost does not provide these affordances means that someone trying to find out things not found in the Cohost UI is in a sense violating norms around what it’s like to be a good Cohost user. For those inclined to respect norms, this encourages doing so. For those inclined to violate norms (or at least test their limits), this reduces the overall “attack surface” of Cohost and Cohost users.

Allowing sharing of posts and commenting on posts are interesting corner cases where there are trade-offs. Allowing sharing permits one form of virality where posts can be shared and reshared ad infinitum, which can clog timelines and (from a security point of view) allow an attacker to reconstruct parts of the Cohost social graph. But on the flip side it encourages the organic growth of one’s audience based on other people’s genuine interest in what one has to say.

Similarly, allowing comments on a post provides a channel for harassment and more benign forms of abuse (like wasting the time of the original poster and other commenters). On the other hand, it allows for direct personal feedback, among the most gratifying things for a writer (even when the feedback is not totally positive).

Overall I think Cohost @staff have struck a nice balance in terms of the features they’ve implemented. It’s one of the reasons why pretty much all of my writing is done on Cohost nowadays.

PS. I have deliberately omitted my thoughts on other features like muting, blocking, reporting, content warnings, etc., because I don’t use them and have no experience with them. Others can chime in if they’d like.