

To my understanding (please take with several grains of salt), some folks felt like it would encourage toxicity since you can essentially mock something someone said without saying it to them directly, while sending your audience to the original post, and I believe for quite some time the plan was intentionally not to add it
On the other hand, I’ve heard folks suggest that by allowing people to have their own isolated conversation about an idea you can potentially limit some of the harmful consequences of people with large audiences or something, but I don’t remember the exact explanation
Personally I’m happy to get quote posts and I’m happy that mastodon is cautious about implementing features that facilitate hostile interactions in the way that major platforms do for engagement
Hopefully someone can chime in with a more informed/detailed explanation, but I thought I’d share what I know in case I’m the only one to reply :)
Frankly I think it’s also an intense reflection on the effectiveness of propaganda. I talk to my grandpa, a man I do not consider to be, in terms of his individual views, a racist hateful man, and the facts of the world he’s working with are just 100% divorced from the reality I live in. They bare almost no substantive similarity.
It requires a painful amount of cognitive dissonance to talk to him, but at least the conversations usually aren’t shitty (aside from the backdrop of him voting for a man who is amassing political power by promising to persecute people like me and the folks I love 🙃)