@hq @prof_goldberg I'll file that for later reading -- I'm obviously nowhere near ready to actually implement anything.
Just on the face of it, though... his argument bothers me in a couple of ways.
It's of the "if people ever abuse a tool, it's better not to let them have the tool than to figure out how to prevent its abuse" mentality. If we did that for every possible feature in social media, there would be no social media.
It's already easy enough to quote posts when replying (and without even linking to them in any way, which seems to me it can offer its own avenues of abuse); the proposal as I understand it would just help make it a little easier to keep the responses connected to the original, and for others to follow the thread of responding.
Is he arguing that quoting exactly what you're responding to is somehow bad? In all the political discussions I've been involved with, it was when people didn't do this that things tended to get out of hand the most quickly, because people will make their own assumptions about what is being responded to. At best, responses can be ambiguous and the logic harder to follow. This only benefits the trolling mentality.
I will of course reread the post again more carefully when I have time to really focus on it; social network design is, you might say, a special interest of mine.
Side note: my comments are enumerated as I typed them, but on mastodon.social they show up without that formatting. That's kinda trunk Masto in a nutshell, if you ask me...
