- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
I’m currently trying to figure out how to use RSS for this reason.
Technology Connections put out a video recently about this, it’s quite entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
Open source, tunable locally running content discovery and search with crowd sourced share preference models (like, people who like x probably like y)
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.
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!”.
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.
Maybe stop sticking your head in the sand? 🤷
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.
Has Lemmy ever noticed how much the Anglophone web speaks like advertisers now?
I’m off to Youtube now to watch some content. Gotta get that new content! Thanks to modern networking technologies I’ll never run out of content! Does the non-English web do the same? Are the French and Russians and Chinese similarly indoctrinated?
Let’s rewrite some Wikipedia entry intros to see our adopted term work its wonders:
Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni[a] (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), known mononymously as Michelangelo,[b][1] was an Italian content creator of the High Renaissance.`
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950) was an English content creator who wrote content under the pen name of George Orwell.[2][3]
Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009) was an American content creator. Dubbed the “King of Content”, he is regarded as one of the most significant figures of the 20th century. Over a four-decade career, his content broke racial barriers in America and made him a global figure. Through content, he proliferated visual performance for artists in popular music; popularizing content including the moonwalk (which he named), the robot, and the anti-gravity lean. Jackson is often deemed the greatest content creator of all time based on his content and subscribers.[1]
After watching Content on Youtube I’ll probably visit the zoo to marvel at the meat. Then later I might load Pornhub and watch some meat. By then it’ll be time for some dinner, so the butcher will fix me up with some meat.
This language demeans all creative endeavour. It trashes our ability to communicate. When read out loud it’s infantilising too.
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.
We need open source, local running, use tunable, auditable, collectively shareable content discovery algorithm
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. :)
I brows Lemmy by all and then I filter out the communities I don’t want to see. This lets me see the new communities that pop up and decided if I want to sub to them. I have around 300 blocked.
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.
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.
Viewing all? Yeah there’s your problem. Subscribe to things you want to see, and never even think about the rest.
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.
Reddit is clearly the Bad Place.
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