It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?
I do understand I can switch to any Mastodon instance I want and stick to a small community, however I like keeping up with trending topics in the world. Maybe the most popular accounts in the Mastodon community likes to rise up pitchforks every minute.
Most of what’s happening in politics is bad
You’re not wrong.
“Trending” is going to show you the topics that are getting the most engagement. Political content almost always gets a lot of engagement, because people will argue back and forth with each other, and each new reply will boost that post further up the ranking. It’s just the nature of that particular sorting method.
People have been trained by corporatist ad-click-driven "angagement"1-oriented antisocial media that all online communication is rage-fuelled.
No, wait. This doesn’t explain BITNET, FidoNet, USENET, etc. which predate such antisocial media by decades…
New theory: people online tend toward being assholes because they’re not in imminent danger of taking a punch to the nose for it.
1 “angagement”: a portmanteau of “anger” and “engagement”
It gets a lot more bearable once you setup a Politics filter that blocks dozens & dozens & dozens of keywords (mine is up to 66 words so far)…
This is perfect. My current list just contains 10 different ways to block posts about covid.
You have a word list I could borrow?
Here’s what I’m rolling with right now… I try to nuke everything even vaguely political…
GOP Trump Biden conservatives elections voter fraud senate senator house of representatives whitehouse reproductive rights pro-life pro-choice 2nd amendment gun control Marxist MAGA Pelosi climate change Parliament koch murdoch desantis politician fascist Rudy leftis liberal antisem right wing supremac on strike hateful elect liberals republicans democrats republican democrat congress abortion communist socialism socialist capitalism capitalist fascism vax global warming ukrain covid proud boy cops police defund minimum wage billionaire the government injustice human rights climate crisis democracy private healthcare public healthcare labor contract on strikeI fucking love you. Seriously thanks.
Lobotomizing yourself is faster.
Glad to hear it from someone with experience!
Nah, I’m not brainwashed into thinking that politics is intrinsically evil.
I don’t think people appreicate the old axiom “when you look into the abyss, it also looks into you” in this case. For a long time, corporate social media algorithms drove what content you saw. This tended to be “outrage” content, because as others have mentioned, it gets clicks. But marinate in that long enough and YOU become the source of the outrage clickbait. The algorithm starts people down that path until their mentality becomes self-reinforcing. They post what they’re used to posting – angry stuff. And they seek out more even without behind-the-scenes manipulation of their feed. Now imagine all those Twitter refugees landing in the Fediverse with that kind of outlook. It’s not surprising that outrage and bile are trending.
The way to break this cycle is… just ignore it. I have an extensive list of keyword filters on Mastodon. It screens out 99% of the political content. I just don’t want to see it. I’m here to engage with people who share the same passions and hobbies as myself. THAT’S what makes my Fediverse social media experience better. It’s not a magical function of crossing the corporate/open-source boundary. I have to be responsible for curating my feed according to what I want to seek.
The same goes for Lemmy. I’m using Leomard as my client on macOS, and it allows me to block out any Lemmy instances I don’t want to see. And I set my default view to “subscribed,” not “local” or “all.” That prevents me from getting psychologically drenched with whatever angry or trollish content might be lurking in those feeds when I open the client. I also sort by “new” rather than “hot,” “most comments,” etc. It’s great that people have opnions about things, but I find relying on up/downvotes to be a poor way of discovering the content I want.
Long story short (too late): your social media experience in the Fediverse is yours to shape. If you rely on the defaults and flow with the tide, you’ll likely end up somewhere you don’t want to be. If you trim your sails and take the wheel, there are all sorts of wonderful destinations out here.
Don’t use other people’s anger and unhappiness as your compass.
That seems to be the case for social media in general. Reddit, Twitter, Lemmy, Mastodon… They all have the same political rage-bate content.
That sounds a lot like twitter
I guess that is what happens with a Twitter replacement, still the same Twitter community.
at least on here, if you notice they’re all coming to the same instance, you can just block the instance. assuming they’re not on large one
“Drives engagement”. Making people angry at shit is a good way to get clicks, so ragebaiting makes up a large part of produced/posted/upvoted material.
There is no algorithm. Clicks don’t do shit on mastodon.
The thing is that love and passion also drive engagement. Tech and news companies could have created algos to push content that makes people happy, but they chose not to. Imagine how different life and the internet would be had they chosen the friendlier option.
This is one of the reasons why I think votes and other such nonsense are a detriment to sites like this. (It’s also why I’ve eliminated them from my Lemmy experience.)
The front page of lemmy.world has a similar tone. Frankly I have enough problems to deal with in my own life - to willingly browse something designed to piss you off and remind you that people you disagree with exist is just pointlessly distressing. Yet this is what the majority of Lemmy and Mastodon people are choosing to do if the numbers are to be believed.
The best way to follow news is RSS or via an aggregator. I recommend SPIDR, which organizes stories from different publications under one shared headline. You can click the flag in the top left to pick the news from your country.
RSS has been the best way to get your news for like 20 years, but most web browser have built-in RSS feeders these days, plus there’s always just plain old bookmarks
I found the better way to use Mastodon was to follow users/hashtags of interest and then filtering out most of the topics which produce ragebait. It means my feed isn’t as busy but I also get none of the ragebait.
That was my strategy too: follow hashtags of interest, and as I identify users who consistently say interesting things, follow them as well. Occasionally poke into “Local” and ferret out one or two more interesting users (and a whole bunch of users to block!). Oh, and make VERY heavy use of filters: filtering on hashtags, chiefly, but also key words that tend to get associated with asshats.
Try blocking individuals who are pushing negativity and sharing the good stuff. Be the change you want to see in the world.
ragebait gets clicks. just look at twitter, what got the most engagement was ragebait meant to make you mad, which for the most part works
Just like any discourse on politics ever. It’s less common to hear people praising a decision than criticising.
On a tangent, that’s why it’s important to loudly say when you agree with something, rather than quietly assume it’s just normal. Regardless of which party it comes from. Politicians are very sensitive to public perception.
That’s why I’m always arguing for higher taxes. I feel like not enough people are in favor of higher taxes.
I’m with you. Zero taxes on the bottom 50%. Progressively higher taxes as you go up that scale until you crack 100% for the tippy-top.
I’ve seen posts praising free school lunch getting passed by a few states.
If you want to keep up with trending topics, find news outlets you believe provide you the proper coverage of what you’re after, and just follow the RSS feeds instead.
Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are there for people to post hot takes on the news, not just share the news. RSS is the way to go if the news is what you’re after, and not people commenting on the news.
