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.
I don’t mind when bad news is posted. It’s important to know these things. What bothers me is how the top comment is always some low-effort defeatest bullshit like “and there will never be consequences.”
I’m finding that some really bizarre ideas around persecution are embraced on lemmy.
In some other thread someone is trying to convince me that wealthy people hate e-bikes because they don’t want poor people to be free.
There is some evidence for the bizarre ideas: Social dominance theory - Wikipedia
Many Differences between Liberals and Conservatives May Boil Down to One Belief - Scientific American
Holy shit why have I not been reading sociology all these years?
Does anyone know of a good intro to sociology textbook I can read to get started?
YES good point. This is truly where I feel the most disgust.
Honestly if you wanted to demoralize a nation and had either some GPT bots or rooms full of foreign operatives, this kind of defeatist top comment would be a pretty effective way of doing it.
You can just influence the culture of their people. Make them think through social proof that the right way to act is to be defeatist and pessimistic and negative.