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.
That’s why I post pictures of opossums, bats, and raccoons…
I think you can also see something fundamentally positive in the critical attitude of many Lemmy users: namely the fact that criticism of undesirable developments in politics, society, the economy and so on is practiced here at all. In my opinion, this is important and should not be taken for granted. If only because it is impossible for so many people in numerous countries around the world to express their opinions freely and criticize their governments or powerful people in their society.
In any case, I think that a certain fundamental skepticism towards the existing power structures in politics, media and business is something of a unifying element that motivates many people to participate in Fediverse, after all, this platform is an alternative to the centrally managed social media providers and their functional logics.
Nevertheless, I think your post is important because it shows that all the negativity that goes hand in hand with a critical examination of the numerous problems in the real world is extremely off-putting for many users. This is of course problematic both for the mass appeal of the Fediverse and to a certain degree probably also for the mental health of the user base.
Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer as to how to deal with this in a meaningful way. However, I try to stay positive and hope for the best.
We talk about positive things.
Like Linux.
Thank you for putting how I feel browsing Lemmy into words. I really hope that more wholesome communities can gain more traction soon.
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I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.
Nobody is making the world a better place by paying daily attention to every possible thing that’s wrong with it.
A counterpoint here, if people don’t talk about a problem, or in this case share, then the problem may go unresolved or intensify.
Multiply that by how many problems affect masses of people.
This sounds like the “don’t make everything political” rhetoric which is naively hilarious. If you’re encouraging moderation for the sake of mental well-being, sure - but that is just that, like many other things.
Information is a well; people will come and go. How much any one person consumes, like food and drink, is their choice regardless of consequence. You can argue diet, drugs, alcohol, entertainment, masturbation all the same.
Personally, I’d rather take on the mental burden of being informed over being as clueless as some. Ignorance leads to many problems, higher costs when you’re not much of a problem solver etc.
#VirtueSignaling REEEEEEEEEEE
Absolutely. One thing I miss about Reddit is having an active personalized feed of positive/neutral content.
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?
being delusional is better than being mentally ill.
What does being mentally ill have to do with anything? That’s a false dichotomy.
What the “constant negativity” should be doing is galvanizing you into action to try to fucking fix shit!
It is not a false dichotomy though.
Being mentally healthy and well integrated does not require you to live in a perfect, just and balanced universe. It requires you using all the cognitive, psychological and philosophical tools at your disposal to deal with the universe on its own terms.
Keeping yourself depressed for the sake of “not being deluded” is in itself a mental illness symptom, and only has negative consequences for everyone.
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.
That’s quite unfair to suggest that not wanting to spend all day looking at negativity on the internet means one doesn’t care about it or even embraces it. There’s a healthy middle ground where you’re informed but not spending all day every day thinking about it. No matter how many articles like that you read every single day you’re still going to miss the vast majority of them. That’s a never ending battle that you’re never going to win. If you want to make the world a better place then be the change you want to see in it. Doomerism is just self-harm and making things worse.
Even if you ditched the internet for a while, the real world is fucked and getting more so every day and the only way you still wouldn’t notice is if you live in a little bubble completely isolated from the rest of existence.
I disagree. On the internet it seems like the world is burning (and it kind of is) but outside in the real world sun is shining, birds are singing and people are being polite to eachother. Those two places are in no way equivalent.
You are so on point. I come here mainly for chuckles, some light hearted discussion and memes but what do is see most? Rage, rage and more rage.
