Technology

Idk man, the universe is an algorithm.

Everything I did, am doing, and will do, are all part of the algorithm. I have no control. Free will is a lie. Even the act of me typing this comment, is not of my free will. The neurons are making me do it. AH FUCK STOOOOP IT YE FUCKING NEURONS, BAD NEURONS...

Everything is fine, I have free will, disregard everything above, that's the other half of the brain in this body that's being weird.

THERE IS NO FREE WILL

AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH

You did not choose Lemmy. Lemmy chose you! Accept your fate. Accept Determinism.

Lemmy doesn't have a recommendation algorithm, yet our feeds are just as bad - if not worse. If your daily interest revolves around reading about U.S. politics, this might not be obvious to you, but for the rest of us, it’s painfully clear. And before you suggest "just avoid political communities" or "stick to your subscription feed," let me assure you that doesn't work. It's not just political communities - it's everywhere. I can't even read articles about space without people injecting their opinions on the CEO of a certain rocket company. Even communities like microblogmemes are beyond salvation. If you limit yourself exclusively to communities where the "no politics" rule is actually enforced, you'll exhaust new content within about two minutes each day.

My point is that the algorithm itself isn't the sole issue. Algorithms can actually be helpful, provided you invest even minimal effort into training them. YouTube doesn't bombard me with politics because it knows I'm not interested. Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone's experience here. If we measure the quality of social media by counting the "regrettable minutes" we've spent there, Lemmy would rank at the absolute bottom. Even Twitter doesn't irritate me as consistently as Lemmy does. I've gone to great lengths setting up content filters to block politics, but even when half my feed is blocked, the majority of what's left is still U.S. politics.

Lemmy users reading this:

I was so fed up with IG and explored mastodon/pixelfed for a bit, and it felt like a lot of weight off my shoulder when looking at the feed(s) knowing that there is no machinery feeding me straightup BS. The "feed" was behaving exactly as it used to during the days when RSS was a thing (remember those?).

like.. wow... I have control over this! and I don't have to spend too much energy filtering off BS. That convinced to explore alternatives like Lemmy.

I joined today. :)

Has Lemmy ever noticed how much the Anglophone web speaks like advertisers now?

I'm off to Youtube now to watch some content. Gotta get that new content! Thanks to modern networking technologies I'll never run out of content! Does the non-English web do the same? Are the French and Russians and Chinese similarly indoctrinated?

Let's rewrite some Wikipedia entry intros to see our adopted term work its wonders:

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni[a] (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known mononymously as Michelangelo,[b][1] was an Italian content creator of the High Renaissance.`

Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English content creator who wrote content under the pen name of George Orwell.[2][3]

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American content creator. Dubbed the "King of Content", he is regarded as one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. Over a four-decade career, his content broke racial barriers in America and made him a global figure. Through content, he proliferated visual performance for artists in popular music; popularizing content including the moonwalk (which he named), the robot, and the anti-gravity lean. Jackson is often deemed the greatest content creator of all time based on his content and subscribers.[1]

After watching Content on Youtube I'll probably visit the zoo to marvel at the meat. Then later I might load Pornhub and watch some meat. By then it'll be time for some dinner, so the butcher will fix me up with some meat.

This language demeans all creative endeavour. It trashes our ability to communicate. When read out loud it's infantilising too.

Yes! Full agree

Continues scrolling lemmy

Or you can aggressively tailor them. I still use FB because I enjoy several industry and hobby groups there. With a few FF plugins and proactively closing any ads, FB is completely usable and enjoyable.

Any social media you can’t control like this is definitely problematic, but I haven’t explored too many other platforms to see if they can be tailored. I did abandon Threads because it’s a right wing toxic troll hellhole with a shitty design, so some can’t be “fixed”.

I brows Lemmy by all and then I filter out the communities I don't want to see. This lets me see the new communities that pop up and decided if I want to sub to them. I have around 300 blocked.