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No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world Thorny_Insight @lemm.ee

Don't you all get tired of the constant negativity?

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.

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  • Yes, very tired of this and I've noticed the fediverse in particular is especially terrible at it. Mastodon or Lemmy, doesn't matter, I see much less optimism and good news compared to twitter or hackernews. I don't remember Reddit because it's been a year since I deleted my account there.

    I think I might start scaling back my fediverse usage a little because as much as everyone says I have to build my own feed, it doesn't matter because there's like 15 total users on here that keep postings the same bad news from the same 2 accounts that get related by the remaining 12 users. And if you mute the bad accounts then your feed is the void.

    I can't believe we are at a point where twitter which has an incentive to enrage their users and especially now that they encourage people to post engagement bait (by paying users), I see less bad news and negativity there than on here.

    I noticed the fediverse tends to be extremely left-biased, with things like on mastodon you get blocked because you didn't put a content warning on a post showing a recipe because someone could be offended by chopped apples or something like that. I think generally the way the left tends to work is by showing the evils of the right (and the right by outright lying of course) to push for change. This can work but the downside is that you just only see this shit all the time and it is very heavy to take in every day.

    It honestly feels like the good news never get relayed on here, and when they do, they are rarely popular. France has put the right to abortion in their constitution, but on here everything we hear about is how one clinic refused an abortion some time 2 years ago for some reason and they are getting sued for it.

    One other thing I just thought of, is that the somewhat positive news, are mostly about someone or something losing a case. Just now I saw an article posted about how a big Russian company is having trouble because of the war, and that's considered good news. Even the positivity on here is based on negativity (or at the detriment of someone else). And to get the records straight, I think it is somewhat good that big companies are not doing so well, I just don't give a shit and I would prefer to see what next technology will make my life easier or what law got passed that will make other people's lives better.

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