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.

  • Lucidlethargy
    3·
    7 months ago

    I find this to be an interesting take.

    I feel like Reddit had significantly more negativity if you compare now to the 2016 election cycle.

    There is a major difference, though… Reddit also had stronger niche communities (at the time). Those communities are largely marginalized now, but I guess they are likely still larger than here.

    So you’d see the political stuff, but then you’d see your favorite game got an update. Those distractions are admittedly less numerous here.

    This said, the astro-turfing on Reddit was insane. Way, way worse than anything I’ve seen here. The worse thing we have here is Lemmy.ml. They are far worse than astro-turfers, since they just straight up delete comments and ban people that dissent from their propaganda.

    But if you block them, or join an insurance that has defederated them, then you’re alright. Fair warning, my instance has not done this… yet.