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.
That’s why I post pictures of opossums, bats, and raccoons…
Thank you for your service!
Thank you for your posts. I love them in my feed.
And suddenly I found several more communities to sub to.
Thank you sir…
Your work is appreciated
And weed…
This is the way. I personally don’t really resonate with OPs problem but the solution is definitely to become the poster you want to see on Lemmy. Most of us are here for scrolling and maybe dropping a comment here or there, theres tonnnnns of space for more link posting.
Tenth person to say it… but thank you :)
Hey! We talked on your scarf post the other day, but I didn’t notice that you’re the one posting all those opossums and raccoons. Thank you!
I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.
Nobody is making the world a better place by paying daily attention to every possible thing that’s wrong with it.
This sounds like the “don’t make everything political” rhetoric which is naively hilarious. If you’re encouraging moderation for the sake of mental well-being, sure - but that is just that, like many other things.
Information is a well; people will come and go. How much any one person consumes, like food and drink, is their choice regardless of consequence. You can argue diet, drugs, alcohol, entertainment, masturbation all the same.
Personally, I’d rather take on the mental burden of being informed over being as clueless as some. Ignorance leads to many problems, higher costs when you’re not much of a problem solver etc.
Seriously. I wonder how many of those doomers actually volunteer in their community, or are active in their local politics. If the answer was any more than “basically none,” I don’t think we would have most of these issues.
It almost seems like people want to feel enraged. There’s a difference between activism and slacktivism. Complaining about things on social media has next to none effect on the real world. If one wants to make the world a better place, then choosing an issue and actually doings something concrete about it seems more productive.
The idea is that you spread the knowledge to others and occasionally do something about some of them, even if it’s only a small contribution.
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Agree. Lemmy seems to have like… Some sort of progressive LGBTQ friendly black pill folks or something. Completely resigned to doom posting, always negative. Always looking to kneecap. Always bringing up macro scale issues on micro scale events. Calling for violence, saying society is guaranteed toast.
Same here. I don’t know if I could in good conscience go back to Reddit, but the constant doomposting makes Lemmy seem more and more unattractive by the day - and that’s after applying a hefty amount of post filters.
I keep telling myself that if I just stick it out, we’ll eventually get enough users to drown out the negativity, but some days I wonder if we’ll ever get there when that’s like 95% of the feed.
Can we not create the communities we wish to see on Lemmy ourselves? I know it might not be full of people at first, but if it at least exists, people who want to interact about said topic in said community can find it eventually and do so, and it can grow over time. Or is this not how it works? Is my logic flawed in any way?
There is not enough activity to sustain niche communities.
Is there nothing that can be done about it? Maybe have some sort of community to find smaller communities. Maybe people just don’t know (and maybe don’t look for or find) there’s a community they might like
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Is the audience for it not here or does the audience not find smaller communities? I for one just browse whatever loads up on Jerboa, and created an account mainly to have some control over what I see (i.e., blocking stuff I’m not interested in). I don’t know that I’d find smaller communities if they don’t get more popular or popular communities get less active to the point of these smaller communities showing up. I don’t know that I can search for anything but communities (on Jerboa, at least). Is there even a search for general, idk, posts and stuff? Not denying maybe the audience isn’t here. Just think maybe finding smaller communities isn’t as easy (or maybe it’s just me, idk. I’m not even looking for specific communities, tbh. Lemmy is my “eh, I’m not doing nothing right now. Imma just check this app on my phone”)
I’ve checked it out again recently. It has gone way downhill. Once vibrant communities are now full of themed variations of Ask Reddit questions. The posts are such obvious trivialities created for nothing more than to drive meaningless engagement.
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.
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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.
I think the cgp grey video about thought germs gives a high level overview
IMO the issue isn’t that there’s too much negative content, but that there isn’t enough of everything else. I’d encourage people to post, engage with and signal boost other kinds of content they’re interested in. May just be that politics and social issues are some of the most popular interests in the community.
Yes! I agree, and I just stated a similar point of view. I think we need more positive distractions during this US election cycle.
Politics are dumb but very, very important. I’m exhausted, but I can’t let that stop me.
What is consuming everything actually doing for you? Like, how is it benefiting? What positive actions does it inspire that lead you to creating a better world?
If you aren’t informed, your choices are more likely to cause harm
Personal insecurity comes from lack of understanding of systems that impact you.
Everyone has different needs and wants out of their society, but we all have the same axioms. Learning how to connect your axioms to your political identity is a very strong way to feel more connected to your community and the people you care about. Learning how the world works can help guide choices and support others who may also be struggling. Understanding how politics and sociology work gives you a window into how people are motivated and you will make better decisions.
And more than anything, the MOST important part of learning how the world functions and how science, politics, religion, emotion and relationships are all tied to each other, is that it defends you against bullshit and lies.
You and I are very vulnerable to the way others can trigger emotional responses and then use those feelings to explain an agenda. People do this all day long, every day, on every side of the political spectrum, and it’s VERY easy to get pulled into these clubs and communities, most of which are either scams or grifts trying to sell you something or trying to get you to become a walking advertisement for what they’re selling.
Politics are dumb but very, very important
I know that saying well.
And I agree. You are not learning to understand politics because you think you’re going to run for office and change the world, you learn so you understand what’s actually going on and so you can help educate others.
Seriously, everyone out there who rather just block out anything to do with politics and society and are overwhelmed by the idea of finding the path to least harm, you are only going to make your insecurity and anxiety around politics worse by ignoring it or condemning it when you see it. Forming strong values around your axioms is politics, and when you find a confident stance like “Do good things, don’t do bad things” and learn what consequences are of different attitudes and actions, you become a LOT more complete and confident and less likely to be absolutely railroaded by the very real forces out there who will exploit your apathy. It doesn’t mean you have to preach or lecture anyone, just know how things work.
Sitting it out, ignoring it, hiding from it… that feels like you’re escaping, but you are just playing into the plans of those who need you to be apathetic. You don’t get out of taking a side here, so start learning.
The problem with politics on lemmy is that it isn’t a discussion at all, but a one-sided circle jerk. Almost every post is some flavor of Right Wing Bad, and any attempt at nuance or calling out hypocrisy results in a sea of downvotes and what appears to be shadow bans. There are no dissenting opinions allowed. If you spend your time consuming heavily moderated and filters content, it’s going to produce anxiety. But more importantly, it isn’t even reality.
Thank you for putting how I feel browsing Lemmy into words. I really hope that more wholesome communities can gain more traction soon.
We talk about positive things.
Like Linux.
I don’t mind when bad news is posted. It’s important to know these things. What bothers me is how the top comment is always some low-effort defeatest bullshit like “and there will never be consequences.”
YES good point. This is truly where I feel the most disgust.
Honestly if you wanted to demoralize a nation and had either some GPT bots or rooms full of foreign operatives, this kind of defeatist top comment would be a pretty effective way of doing it.
You can just influence the culture of their people. Make them think through social proof that the right way to act is to be defeatist and pessimistic and negative.
I’m finding that some really bizarre ideas around persecution are embraced on lemmy.
In some other thread someone is trying to convince me that wealthy people hate e-bikes because they don’t want poor people to be free.
There is some evidence for the bizarre ideas: Social dominance theory - Wikipedia
People who score high in hierarchical world belief see the world as full of differences that matter because they usually reflect something real, inherent and significant. Such individuals often separate things of greater value from things of lesser value.
Holy shit why have I not been reading sociology all these years?
Does anyone know of a good intro to sociology textbook I can read to get started?
In short: Yes. It’s dragging me down, too.
I’d like to focus on positivity. I mean negativity comes with strong emotions and I don’t want to get rid of it. But I’d like to see more positive things, too. People sharing side projects and nice things they’ve done and created. There needs to be a better balance. Because this doesn’t depict life or the entire perspective.
I’ve unsubscribed from worldnews and technology yesterday. I couldn’t bare to read yet another scareporn article pretending to be tech news.
The posts and comments were making me feel worse faster than the interesting information were making me happier.
I’ll probably take a short brake and try to sort the news from clickbate and propaganda later, possibly creating a new, properly moderated community.
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I’ve got a blocklist over 600 users long here and it’s growing every day. If I see a person make even one mean comment I block them immediately. Same applies to the people commenting stuff like “acab” or “fuck x” and similar. Doesn’t matter wether I agree with them or not. That single comment is all I need to know about how they behave online. I’m not interested in hearing more from them. I know they’re being perfectly nice on another thread, but I don’t care. There’s a near-infinite number of content available online. If I’m in a room with 100 people, I don’t want to talk with all of them. The few percent of intellectually honest and not-mean people are all I need for an interesting and enjoyable conversation.
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Sane approach, good suggestion
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
One of Lemmy’s most toxic communities are the Linux people. I’m actually a huge fan of Linux, but the simple fact I use Windows as well constantly earns me personal attacks and extremely negative responses.
My solution (to this and many other issues you describe) is honestly to not read the replies any longer… I just say my bit, and I leave.
I’ve also taken to watching comedy shows that touch upon numerous topics of all the crazy shit going on. The Daily show has been a great outlet for me, and I’m not even a Democrat (I’m independent). It’s just nice to see a popular form of media clearly states “yes, this is crazy. You’re not crazy, THIS is just f*king crazy.”
Edit: For example, Trump recently claimed he never said “lock her up” the other day to Hillary. I saw this on Lemmy first. John Stewart’s reaction a day or two later was perfect, and pointed out the gaslighting taking place.
I just feel like you have to find ways to laugh at all this crazy stuff… So comedy shows help. Just keep your guard up whenever consuming politically charged media, of course.
I just don’t see this toxic linux user thing at all.
Every second post is a meme about Linux users telling people they’re idiots for using Windows, but I’ve never seen Linux users abusing Windows users.
I’m sure that it happens to some extent, but it seems entirely possible to be active on lemmy without encountering a toxic Linux user.
Hey you might not read this since it’s a reply, but John Oliver does a pretty good job also! Last Week Tonight on HBO but they also post all their main stories on youtube.
Yes I get tired of constant negativity, even though I myself do what I can to not contribute to it.
It’s exhausting
