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I try to filter out most of this negative stuff, but it has a downside. You become disconnected from the raw information feed if you don't occasionally just look at it. For short periods, it's tolerable, but then I just re-enable all filtering to reduce my cognitive load.
If I need to be cheered up, I prefer to look for science articles or news since these are generally about unbiased progress.
I love it! It's freaking awesome, peeps expressing themselves and all. More of that please
I think I see a way out of this.
You can figure it out, I believe in you.
I just block all the trolls and idiotic communities I see. Yes, it's tiresome, but that's the price of a federated platform.
Yes, which is why I have every politics and politics-adjacent community, and entire instances blocked.
Yes I've noticed this. For the sake of my mental health, I don't mull over such issues for too long. I used to be angry at injustices I saw, but now I can't be bothered (I stopped caring to be angry).
Of course we're fucking tired of the constant negativity! But that's because the reality is negative, so WTF is the alternative? Are you suggesting we should be delusional instead?
Most things in the world are better than they ever have been and they are still constantly improving. Internet and social media just points a huge spotlight on the things we still need to work on and ironically social media itself is one of those things. We'll never run out of negative things to pay attention to. Never. Doomscrolling to the point of mental exhaustion and sense of helplessnes is only making things worse. We all need to touch grass. The real world is not like social media tries to convince us.
I don't follow any sort of news for this reason. No tech news, no car news, no nation news. Show me only cat pictures and stuff people with their hands, thank you very much.
Hmm, I guess I must have already blocked a decent amount of the places the negative stuff is coming from. I still use /all and I have a pretty good mix of positive stuff and the other stuff.
There's always going to be important issues that are going to be difficult to debate without some level of emotion, especially when talking about politics or the environment, you have to remember that this personally affects people's lives.
However it can get overwhelming and it's important that you have the self-awareness to know when you need to step away.
I know it's easy to judge the Internet by its worst actors but you have to remember that everyone needs to learn and be part of the discourse it's not just the internet, that's humanity.
Unfortunately news hasn’t been news for 100 years. It’s entertainment now and the way to drive viewership is ragebait or bad news.
The world is going to shit. The idea that you think all the "negativity" is bad and not the fact that the world is a horrible place and getting worse every single day is the reason the world is a horrible place and getting worse every single day. Denial of horrible practices, support for bad corporations, denial of science, logic, and reason, and all of this is what is making things bad, and every time I see someone try to inject some common sense into discussions about anything bad and how these people get downvoted and absolutely flamed is just another sign that there's really little to no hope left in the world.
I do. That's why I'm using lemmy and reddit at the same time, cause at least on reddit there are subreddits that I care about. Both c/all and r/all are depressing to me but I'm still scrolling through both of them. Btw I'm scrolling on lemmy for almost a year and I do follow some communities here but I always use all and I never switch to subscribed, also I'm rarely subscribing to the new ones. Am I the only one who does that?
Mastodon has very nice keyword based filter system.
For example, I have the filter "idiot did a thing", and the keywords are a number of names of... popular people that news don't get tired of talking about, even though the thing isn't actually newsworthy.
So if I'm in the mood, I can check out what they did that day, and if I'm not in the mood, I'm aware that they did something again, but I don't have to get angry over the specifics.
Same for other "ongoing" hot topics, that I already am informed about, where I don't need the 24/7 doomscroll effect shoving negativity into my face.
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.
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.
Good post. Cheers.
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.
No