Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think
Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think
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76 comments
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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.
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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.
It's almost like US politics are a historic fucking shit show and that affects many other things.
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Doesn't mean I want to spend all day everyday reading about it. I have other interests.
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This isn’t my experience at all, maybe I just have curated my subscriptions enough that I don’t see that much. Or maybe it’s just because I’m so used to just tuning out socialist/communist comments on threads that have nothing to do with politics.
It’s also worth noting that Lenny’s algorithms sort by either top (which is just votes), hot (which is based on votes and comments which will surface contentious topics like politics more often), new (which is just when it was posted), and scaled (which is just hot but proportional to the size of the community so it will surface smaller communities more often).
If you sort by hot it’s going to give you a similar feed to Reddit. I prefer to sort by top by 6/12/24hr and by scaled personally.
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I have blocked any mention of trump and musk, and yet I still know every single stupid thing they do. It's impossible to avoid it.
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It's almost like...one is the leader of the richest country in the world and the other is running a government office that's dismantling the government.
Seriously, if you guys were alive in the 1930s or 1940s you'd be there like "I just can't pick up the paper anymore without talk of this Hitler guy!".
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People keep saying that and although he's abhorrent and probably a threat to democracy in the US I don't think he's going to start a war. He lacks a convenient victim that he can use to justify a war, and honestly I don't think he's smart enough to come up with one.
Anyway a war wouldn't achieve anything for him other than getting a target on his back.
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That’s the thing - consuming anything even remotely resembling a healthy news diet requires actively avoiding most of it. Unfiltered news consumption means getting firehosed with information to the point of paralysis and depression. I wouldn’t be surprised if even a hermit living in the woods knows the latest about Trump and Musk. There's no way to avoid hearing about them and who ever suggests you can clearly haven't even tried.
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At least part of the problem for me is that the app I am using to access Lemmy isn't really very good. I can block based on keywords in the title but not keywords in the post.
If I really wanted to I could probably find an app with better blocking abilities and try then to see if it's possible to completely block out the US politics, but I'm not massively incentivized to do so. Not being American I don't really get massively riled up about it, I get more upset about my own country's politicians, which most Americans probably have never even heard of.
The greater problem is simply the fact that US content in general seems to get over emphasized in lieu of everything else. There's a whole world of stuff going on out there and all we ever hear about is America. Even when the US has moderately sane leaders that is the case.
I really shouldn't know who the congressman for Texas is, there's no reason I should know that, yet I do. California catches fire, world news, massive flooding in Australia, barely mentioned.
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I use Voyager and I've blocked a ton of communities, and keywords related to it. I like the blocking functions on there so far. I need to also subscribe to more communities so I can have a better Home feed.
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Lemmy is better if you avoid all at least. On local I usually get stuff about Europe a lot more. But subscribed is dwarfed by technology a it's the largest community. Subscribed + scaled list seems to be a fairly good list though.
Might be time to start blocking some too, for my own sanity.
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I was just thinking about this yesterday. These days, Lemmy is just making me depressed. I like to read comments to get further insight to articles, maybe someone trying to point out the author's bias, or a joke. But Lemmy comments are all some variation of "the world is doomed", "kill this person", or "capitalism is the root of all woe". They are neither useful, insightful, or improve my day in any way. Lemmy is making my life less enjoyable. It was already an overall negative and cynical space during the Biden administration; now it is unbearable.
I've been on Lemmy for a long time now, since Reddit killed 3rd party clients with their API change, but now I think I might go back to Reddit. The company itself has a lot of problems, but at least I can get a lot of non-doom content to fill my day.
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To be fair, I don't think Lemmy is to blame for all the negativity. It's impossible to escape politics nowadays thanks to American dominance in social media. And since the US is a dumpster fire since 2016, the rest of the world gets to be a dumpster fire as well.
In my opinion, Lemmy is the least negative social media platform out there and that's saying something. I advise against going back to Reddit. I take peeks at it every once in a while and oh boy did things go downhill since I deleted my Reddit account after the API changes.
The best way to deal with all of this is to limit your exposure to social media all together.
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I want a local LLM filtering my feed(s). So I really don’t need to see Elmo and Donald -related stuff.
Simple word filters don’t work, but with a LLM I might be able to make it work
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Agree. Blocking / keyword based filtering is quite blunt tool. I'd much rather tell AI what I don't want to see and have it analyze the content for me.
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This is basically the same thing as what the big platforms do. You’re just offloading the decisions of what to see to a neural network and hope it’s deciding correctly. I’m not sure what a solution would be but I’m not sure I would put my eggs in the llm/ai basket. Not without a lot more details from the models on why they made a decision.
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Maybe stop sticking your head in the sand? 🤷
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Not wanting to be bombarded by a foreign country's political antics and sociopathic leaders == sticking your head in the sand? Interesting take!
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we're all connected
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Not everyone wants to spend their entire day reading about the politics of a country they don't even live in. Have you considered that some people prefer getting their news once a day from a proper news outlet, and then spending the rest of their day focused on topics they're actually interested in? That's not "sticking your head in the sand," it's having healthy boundaries.
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To be privilege enough to take on that firehose...
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Exactly. Maybe if you’re seeing it everywhere that’s because the issue is so pervasive it affects that much of the lives of those using it. So either do something about it or go to spaces where people don’t have problems I guess.
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Lemmy’s user base, however, seems so addicted to outrage that outrage inevitably dominates everyone’s experience here.
Ye-es, people look for outrage. Especially people who left mainstream platforms because of outrage. We don't have gladiator fights today, so the wish for murder should be vented out differently somehow.
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.
Right, and wouldn't it be much more convenient to block posts and users and whole communities by regex and logical rules?
Say, post title contains anything "federal" and "government" like - kill. Post content contains something about voting - kill. More than one third of comments involves political jargon - kill. The resulting kill score is measured against threshold.
But of course that would make communities and instances and moderators as they exist now much less useful. That would transition us back to Usenet in some sense. People don't want to give up that kind of power, even unconsciously they'll resist. When they are a community mod and everything about its climate depends on them, it's different in prestige from them just cleaning up obvious abuse, and the climate depending on individual kill rules set up on clients.
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76 comments