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.

  • AliceAEnglish
    2·
    7 months ago

    I’m wondering how people are dealing with that and why.

    Few things.

    The negativity here isn’t just coming from politics, is lemmy as a whole. That said, when it becomes insessent, I take a break from lemmy from a few days to maybe a week and a half.

    I still check reports and dms to address important matters but no commenting or posting or scrolling

    When I do come back, I’ve had a break enough to be able to ignore all the bs enough to participate. You can’t consume that toxic shit either.

    I already know lemmy is toxic negative and highly political with little to no engagement in non political stuff. So stick to subscribed communities.

    And only look at rage bait when I’m good enough and detached enough to ignore it and have no desire to engage with it. You can’t bc its never gunna stop.

    Lemmy is mostly toxic. Little fun. Just stick to the ‘little fun’ and don’t deviate from it. If you do it’s time to step away and take a break

    The ALL feed is never gunna be like reddit. Don’t trick yourself thinking it will be because it won’t.