How to Short-Circuit the Outrage Machine
How to Short-Circuit the Outrage Machine
There’s a simple fix you can make right now to transform your online life.
Any citizen of the social internet knows the feeling: that irritable contentiousness, that desire to get into it that seems almost impossible to resist, even though you know you’ve already squandered too many hours and too much emotional energy on pointless internet disputes. If you use Twitter, you may have noticed that at least half the posts seemed intent on making someone—especially you—mad. In his new book, Outrage Machine, the technology researcher Tobias Rose-Stockwell explains that the underlying architecture of the biggest social media platforms is essentially (although, he argues, unintentionally) designed to get under your skin in just this way. The results, unsurprisingly, have been bad for our sanity, our culture, and our politics.
On this topic, an increasingly popular one as the social media economy convulses in response to Twitter’s Elonification, the preferred tone is either stern jeremiad or, for the well and truly addicted commentator (usually a journalist), a sort of punch-drunk nihilism much like that of someone who declares he’ll never quit smoking even though it’s going to kill him. Rose-Stockwell, by contrast, keeps his cool, pointing out that social media is full of “angry, terrible content” that makes our lives worse, while carefully avoiding any sign of partisanship or panic.
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I've tried T̶w̶i̶t̶t̶e̶r̶ X, and it just seems like a bunch of angry people text yelling at each other. It's like walking in to a huge room with 25 different arguments going on, and it's hard to tell what is even happening. I really don't get the appeal. I tried Mastodon, because I thought it might be better. It didn't appear to be.
I agree - the Mastodon platform, while much better than Twitter, still makes it difficult to find good communities, and a lot of the ragebait gets pushed to the top due to engagement. It takes some active curation of your feed to make it worthwhile.
I recommend using Kbin. It reads both Lemmy and Mastodon, and can classify Mastodon toots based on tagged topic. Additionally, if you're in a community / magazine, Kbin also looks for Mastodon Toots based on moderator assigned tags to that community, and posts it in their Microblog section.
You have to find the communities with nice people in them. There are lots of these little spots on the platform, but the general discourse is a bit edgy/hateful/etc.
I have an even easier solution. Don't use Twitter.
And here on Lemmy/kbin I'm starting to see the same patterns I saw back on Reddit. The same hivemind opinions are establishing themselves in the same communities, and shooting down opposition in the same way. It's not really surprising, I suppose - people are the same people no matter where they go. Disappointing, but not surprising.
I suppose the main hope I have is that the Fediverse has more fragmented forums than Reddit did, so there are more opportunities for different hiveminds with different opinions to establish themselves. I suppose that'll have to do for "balance" for now.
Microblogging doesn’t seem to me to be a good model for community engagement. Like you say, it’s a big room with people yelling, so it’s hard to understand more than a snippet of what one person is saying.
Mastodon is better than Twitter/X, but I think that is mostly because more people on Mastodon are there with the intent to find more meaningful engagement. That advantage is decreasing as more of the Lowest Common Denominator signs on.