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.
I use boost and it has a block/ban list of words in titles of posts. I have maybe 50 or 60 words in there and it really helps.
Only 45 here but adding more almost daily
Based on this list, maybe you need a niche and cozier community instead of a link aggregator. Have you considered starting your own community? Or maybe only subbing to communities which match your hobbies?
Lemmy has such a small user base that the niche communities I do sub to get almost no new content at all. Lemmy is literally the only platform I can browse on my phone when I’m bored. I don’t have any other social media, games or anything. It takes about 3 minutes for me to scroll thru my subscribed feed after which I start browsing all where I’m blocking several uninteresting communities a day to make my feed even remotely interesting.
I have created a community on another account but it quiets down immediately when I stop posting. The equivalent one on reddit gets probably 30 new threads each day.
I gotta ask what’s with the Kermit, Sailor Moon, Heathcliff filters?
People were posting a ton of Kermit and Sailor Moon AI content a while back and I wasn’t interested in seeing it. Same applies to the Heathcliff comic.
Why helldivers? I haven’t even heard that game talked about in like, over a month.
Many of the filters are outdated but I just don’t remove them. Lemmy has these certain topics that start trending and then there’s constant articles being posted about them because people notice it’s a popular topic. If it’s something I’m not interested in I’ll just pre-emptively block it after seeing few similar threads in a row. Same as with the Kermit/Sailor moon AI content for example.