There’s more “hard left” (not sure of that’s a porn category or a music genre) than fasch stuff on “social” media? Doubt.
You won’t find any questions on the CES about, say, whether the respondent approves of capitalism. So yes, this analysis was likely done with the American Overton window in mind.
Well if you categorize everything that isn’t alt-right as hard left, it’s pretty believable. I mean hell, have you seen Wikipedia? Clearly hard left.
Considering the OP says the best social media places are the Nazi supporting ones…
The only social media I consume is lemmy, and that’s only about 3 hours per day at most. I’m the happiest I’ve been in a long time. It was easy as soon as I started going for regular walks
About the same here, though I have to say… Reading the “3 hours per day” part out loud still seems… Insane somehow.
In a similar vein, I’m currently staying at my mom’s house, and the internet is too shit to use my Jellyfin. As a result, I haven’t been watching any shows, and my day seems to be infinitely longer, like a million more activities fit in the sake 24 hours.
A bit strongly negative on phone use in general, but I’d say it’s a good overview of why most major social media websites (with algorithmic recommendations being a heavy handed component of one’s feed) are bad and why the traditional method (time-based sorting with subscriptions or feed curation) are better although not perfect.
Yeah, my phone has productivity timers, my note taking app, temperature controls for my home office, not to mention 2FA and other tools I need. I don’t see myself leaving it in the kitchen.
That said, reading this did made me think to turn off email push notifications. Fortunately I’m not in a position where I have to reply to emails immediately, so I like the idea of scheduled email time. Honestly don’t know why I didn’t think of that.
Additionally, Reddit and Substack are also good “social media” platforms, if what you care about is reading posts from people in the same community as you or people you have opted into receiving newsletters from.
Left extremism is good, actually
No, its not because in the end even the most noble goals will lead to tyranny and suffering when carried out by fanatics.
Do you think the biggest monsters in history started their day by thinking “Well, today I will make the world a little bit worse… hehehe”?
When people say “left wing extremism” they mean calls to end hunger by taxing billionaire out of existence. When they talk about “right wing extremism” it’s people literally advocating for genocide.
Eh the “radical left” is literally anyone opposed to fascism these days. “Left wing extremism” can’t be too far from that.
It’s a bit of a self-sustaining cycle. Media depends on engagement, social media even more so. Hate engagement is capable of increasing engagement, and it’s easier to create content that elicits hate engagement. Throw Internet Rando participation on top of that.
No, you should not quit social media. The beauty of it is that content that traditional media would never take a chance on which you would like to consume actually exists. What you should do is be mindful of what kind of content you choose to consume, and recognizing when content has an undesirable agenda beneath its surface. Content is not normally created for no purpose. Always ask “Why was this created? How does the creator intend for me to react to this? Is that an appropriate reaction?”
Just letting the content pour into your brain without consciously filtering it is a bad idea, and that’s got nothing to do with social vs traditional media at all.
Then again, it might be easier to make people stop doing something than it is to make them do something mindfully. Doing anything with intent is difficult.
Not that I disagree with you, I’m just afraid it’s a lot to ask. I guess that goes for asking people to stop using social media as well though.
I’m sure you’re right for a lot of people. Considering the audience here, who I expect to be more capable of doing more complex things on the basis of “they’re here”, I hope my advice is more productive than it would be to, say, the local rural Facebook moms group.
Isn’t it only true for algorithmic feed social media? Is lemmy safe from that over-representation?
Yeah, most of what the article complains about is algorithmic social media and how it boosts engagement of any kind, whether positive or negative. This leads to “extremist” takes gaining ground easier then moderate takes. Combined with algorithmic siloing, echo chambers etc. That we’ve heard a million times, make people more radical and disconnected from reality.
The “algorithm” most people use on lemmy is just most up voted, so controversial takes rarely rise to the top. A lot of the stuff would be considered controversial outside of here, but within lemmy there’s a “hard left” consensus where the moderates are probably democratic socialists.
Lemmy also benefits from not tracking total karma or whatever. Per-post or per-comment scores at most.
From my experience, Beehaw disabling downvotes furthers this even more. This means that people can either voice their disagreement, report the post/comment for violating the rules, or ignore it and move on. There’s no way to anonymously “punish” a post you disagree with (unless it violates the rules), and not as much incentive to stick to the echo chamber either.
I’ve never gotten the point of upvoting or downvoting as the main for of engagement with “social” media. I may do one or the other once a week when I get a chuckle or see an absurd take on journalism that isn’t worth engaging with, but simply clicking an icon is scarcely participation.
People with actual things to say is far more satisfying than facing a Hatfield-McCoy standoff.
That is pretty obvious, what’s really wild about this blog post and proof that we need off social media was that AI generated Gavin Newsom post with Ted Cruz and Hulk Hogan.
Posts article on social media. How ironic!
