Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides… And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.
I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it’s depressing when that’s all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn’t. It’s just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It’s the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?
It’s no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can’t be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.
Fucking YES
You are so on point. I come here mainly for chuckles, some light hearted discussion and memes but what do is see most? Rage, rage and more rage.
To be fair, I wasn’t seeing mostly rage until this US election cycle spun up.
I don’t have that problem, especially on lemmy. My feed here is mostly about taking action, not doomerism.
I was going to say subscribe to more creative or hobbiest communities, but then there’s still news about Adobe or something fucking shit up in those spaces too… 😅😢
That’s a risk of reading the news in general. For many people, it’s helpful to log in less frequently. Remember, people write about things important to them, and that includes bad situations, of which there were and will always be tons of.
Find the communities you like. There will be communities based around wholesome memes and positivity if that’s what you want.
The other thing is to use filter lists extensively. I use Lemmy in the Boost Android app. My filter list is constantly being added to (Elon, Biden, Trump, Superbowl, Covid, etc). You’re in charge of making or finding the experience you want.
If the content is affecting you then find something else entirely. If detached from the live news cycle and watch science based YouTube channels, listen to podcasts of interest, read books and follow websites via RSS. If you don’t like it here then you don’t have to be here.
What do you expect? You’re on lemmy. Half the userbase is doomers, dude.
let’s look at this in a positive way: “half of them are not!”
So you’re a “glass half empty” kind of person, which now means you’re a positive thinker.
There’s something about social networks and doom-porn. I have no idea which causes the other, but those tend to walk together.
At least lemmy isn’t heavy editorialized into increased doomerism.
Have you tried unplugging capitalism, and then not plugging it back in?
I think while some of this may be people being people (i.e. tendency to only discuss issues/problems vs accomplishments/solutions), I think there’s also a technical element to it as well in Lemmy’s case.
Up to the latest release of Lemmy (as of writing this is v0.19.4), admins couldn’t adjust the default sort setting, which was Active. Read the docs on the sort setting and Active does what it says, surfaces those posts with recent commenting activity (taking into account score as well).
So you get this unfortunate mix of: people gravitate to discussing negative stuff, people tend not to change default settings (since despite defaults being Active, we can change these if so inclined), and the default sort settings surface whatever is being most discussed/commented on, resulting in this sort of negativity feedback loop you’ve observed.
I noticed and posted about this a few months ago, have tried to upvote and comment on less negatively-focused posts occasionally, but I think this may be an interesting example of a small scale systemic issue as it takes more of us doing similar to address what’s being encountered. However, as more instances update to v0.19.4, I’ll be interested in seeing if admins decide to switch away from the Active sort setting to try to address this in their own way.
I don’t know what sort setting may be better for instances to run with instead, but I’m glad they now have the option. In the meantime I think it’s worth reminding people that they currently have the option to change their default sort settings to something different to try to see different kinds of posts. Personally I switch between New and Scaled to see a variety of posts beyond many of the regular doom and gloom posts.
Good post. Cheers.
I dont want to read or see negative news, but it feels i have to be aware of them so things dont hit me blindsided. I’m so tired of this world
The world is depressing, and if we just stick our heads in the sand and ignore it all because that feels better nothing’s going to fucking change.
Sure, focus on positivity so you don’t collapse into a depressive blob, but the idea that we should ignore the state of the world because it’s unpleasant is terrible.
There’s probably a healthy middle ground somewhere between the two extreme ends. “Sticking your head in the sand” is harder than you’d think. I go out of my way to try and avoid seeing these articles but I bet you couldn’t name a single current event I haven’t heard of.
I think it’s fair to say that the world was on a steady course of getting better for decades since WWII, but then had quite a strong dip after 2016. I think things have been picking up again lately, but the reason we see so much negativity is kust because there is more of it.
Don’t forget though, the “best” news is negative news that is what people always talk about. Good things are simply expected and so not really talked about.
It’ll all be fine, try to indeed focus on the more positive elements for now
When people are content what is there to say? People tend to post about topics that anger or frustrate them. The quality of the post varies on the sincerity of the user. Anything from shitposting to actually articulate arguments. You’re unlikely to find the latter on any form of social media. Most constructive conversation happens face to face. It’s just too easy to derail an online conversation and there are powers that be that are literally troll farms because it works.
There was a message yesterday about the game werewolf. An informed minority will generally control the uninformed majority. You get a small number of people to troll and that’s all it takes to derail conversation around any topic they don’t like.
I try to remind myself that social media, and yes, that includes Lemmy, does not reflect the rest of the aspects of my life - which is overall positive.
Subscribe to the communities you like, and stick to your subscriptions’ newsfeed. Much, much better experience.
I block tons of subs and I have a lot of words on my ban list as well.
A ban list? For words? So I can ban ‘literally’ forever? Don’t tempt me with a good day!
I use boost and it has a block/ban list of words in titles of posts. I have maybe 50 or 60 words in there and it really helps.
Only 45 here but adding more almost daily
Based on this list, maybe you need a niche and cozier community instead of a link aggregator. Have you considered starting your own community? Or maybe only subbing to communities which match your hobbies?
Lemmy has such a small user base that the niche communities I do sub to get almost no new content at all. Lemmy is literally the only platform I can browse on my phone when I’m bored. I don’t have any other social media, games or anything. It takes about 3 minutes for me to scroll thru my subscribed feed after which I start browsing all where I’m blocking several uninteresting communities a day to make my feed even remotely interesting.
I have created a community on another account but it quiets down immediately when I stop posting. The equivalent one on reddit gets probably 30 new threads each day.
I gotta ask what’s with the Kermit, Sailor Moon, Heathcliff filters?
People were posting a ton of Kermit and Sailor Moon AI content a while back and I wasn’t interested in seeing it. Same applies to the Heathcliff comic.
Why helldivers? I haven’t even heard that game talked about in like, over a month.
Many of the filters are outdated but I just don’t remove them. Lemmy has these certain topics that start trending and then there’s constant articles being posted about them because people notice it’s a popular topic. If it’s something I’m not interested in I’ll just pre-emptively block it after seeing few similar threads in a row. Same as with the Kermit/Sailor moon AI content for example.
