No algorithm makes social networks so annoying. Lemmy is so much annoying because of this. I always see the same stuff, aka US news and some shitposts, the usual upvoted and trending stuff
There’s no discovery algorithm and no way to see posts from smaller subscribed communities easily. Each sorting method returns non-interesting posts.
People say algorithms hook you and make you dependent: they show you the stuff you want, so you stay for longer. If I didn’t want to see stuff I want, I wouldn’t go to Lemmy…
Idk man, the universe is an algorithm.
Everything I did, am doing, and will do, are all part of the algorithm. I have no control. Free will is a lie. Even the act of me typing this comment, is not of my free will. The neurons are making me do it. AH FUCK STOOOOP IT YE FUCKING NEURONS, BAD NEURONS...
Everything is fine, I have free will, disregard everything above, that's the other half of the brain in this body that's being weird.
THERE IS NO FREE WILL
AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH
You did not choose Lemmy. Lemmy chose you! Accept your fate. Accept Determinism.
Good use of this image lol. But wait till you see the time knife.
Reddit is clearly the Bad Place.
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.
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.
Doesn't mean I want to spend all day everyday reading about it. I have other interests.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!".
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe stop sticking your head in the sand? 🤷
Not wanting to be bombarded by a foreign country's political antics and sociopathic leaders == sticking your head in the sand? Interesting take!
we're all connected
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.
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.
To be privilege enough to take on that firehose...
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.
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
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.
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.
Lemmy users reading this:
LOL
I was actually thinking about my experience with Lemmy as I was reading this article, particularly how the scrolling is made to generate rage. I don’t filter my feed and just view “all”, but I don’t think I’ve once walked away from Lemmy not in a bad mood.
Now that may be observation bias or something, or a function of how I don’t tailor my own experience, but regardless, Lemmy leaves me angrier when I leave then when I open the app. I’m trying to cut back and eventually quit.
Viewing all? Yeah there's your problem. Subscribe to things you want to see, and never even think about the rest.
It's how I've kept my sanity for years using social media. Sticking to subscribed feed which is hobby/entertainment related stuff, and using aggressive filtering options if I decided to venture into all.
Same when it comes to youtube using newpipe and freetube so I stick to my feed and hiding stuff like trending videos, recommended videos, popular videos, and comments.
Turning a platform into being as minimalistic as possible has been my favorite method of consumption.
@catloaf @thebeardedpotato I go one further and subscribe to feeds in mastodon (feel a bit like an impostor though 👀
The scrolling is only made to generate rage if you browse all (your issue) or curate a feed with rage bait 🤷♂️ you can fix it in seconds if you want.
I was so fed up with IG and explored mastodon/pixelfed for a bit, and it felt like a lot of weight off my shoulder when looking at the feed(s) knowing that there is no machinery feeding me straightup BS. The "feed" was behaving exactly as it used to during the days when RSS was a thing (remember those?).
like.. wow... I have control over this! and I don't have to spend too much energy filtering off BS. That convinced to explore alternatives like Lemmy.
I joined today. :)
Welcome! Just FYI, lemmy.world blocks the piracy instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Yes! Full agree
Continues scrolling lemmy
Lemmy is not controlled by some sort of curated algorithm. You have full control over the sorting and what goes on your screen in a way that mainstream social media services do not allow.
If you think there’s something addictive or otherwise wrong about your feed, fix it. “The power is yours!”
Agreed, I was mostly joking, but there are still algorithms that drive the hot and controversial sorting. The fact that you can look up how those algorithms work is also a major difference.
And usually by “algorithm” people mean a feed that is curated to you specifically based off all the data they’ve vacuumed up. Hot/controversial have a clear set of rules about upvote/downvotes over time and they apply exactly the same to everyone, so everyone sorting by hot for instance on a thread or community is seeing the exact same thing
Or you can aggressively tailor them. I still use FB because I enjoy several industry and hobby groups there. With a few FF plugins and proactively closing any ads, FB is completely usable and enjoyable.
Any social media you can’t control like this is definitely problematic, but I haven’t explored too many other platforms to see if they can be tailored. I did abandon Threads because it’s a right wing toxic troll hellhole with a shitty design, so some can’t be “fixed”.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
