RDJ_pointing_at_self: What counts as politics is a political question in itself, with a subjective answer melded by the hegemon. Absolutely everything can be connected to politics in some way.
Would this filter just remove news/memes about political candidates & elections?
Would this filter remove news/memes about all government officials?
Would this filter remove anything that could considered political, including news about things like climate change? news about worker strikes? news about product boycotts? news about drag show protests? news in general?
Would this filter remove anything that 'becomes' political, like Barbie/Oppenheimer, Disney, Rage Against the Machine, Dixie Chicks, Bud Light? Or would it go further and consider all media an expression of a political viewpoint and ban all discussion of entertainment media?
I genuinely appreciate how you put scare quotes on "becomes" in "becomes political", because it's legitimately baffling how some people think that Rage Against the Machine "wasn't political" before. Like, they literally donated their profits to the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and interviewed Subcomandante Marcos for one of their video releases! You can hardly get more political!
It's impossible to filter out politics, because lots of people think everything they disagree with is political. It's always the fault of the other side.
Apps can fill that gap to some degree now, but we need widespread adoption of tagging before it's very useful for this. I'm not sure lemmy itself will ever support that tbh. Reddit never had it, and there's a laundry list of issues already on the official tracker.
Maybe everyone that moderates a community that sees this could strongly consider the important tags being implemented at that level, if the C/ contains things that are difficult to filter via blocking.
As an example, there's no need for a C/ that's dedicated to knitting to mandate a political of nsfanything tag when that's not going to be part of the C/ to begin with. Not worth their time. Something a bit more generalized, like a meme C/ would be nice if they added politics tag for posts of that nature, maybe one for sexual (but not porn) subject matter, but wouldn't need an nsfl because that's not going to be allowed to begin with.
The app I use most, Connect, has filter function, but it's only as good as other users make their titles.
There's no such thing as a perfect filter though. Doesn't matter how it's implemented, there's always gaps.
We should still implement tags anyway but one of the issues is that people just won't tag their stuff properly. Happens on imgur all the time. Maybe people are lazy about it or maybe they know less people will see their post but it's frustrating.
I dont mind reading or learning more about politics, but c/politics is just an leftist circle jerk echocamber. There have been a growing amount of users noticing this as well and eventually someone will make an unbaised community for US politics. C/politics is just a infestation of all the crazies that left r/politics.
There is no unbiased news, all news is biased by the views of the author, the culture of the news institution and wider society and the dominant ideologies within the society.
Now, I’m not saying this is what you meant, but often I hear people requesting unbiased news when really what they’re asking for is news that reflects their internalized ideological perspective.
It’s also used to suggest that all perspectives have the same inherent value out to suggest that all media must offer the “opposing perspective” alongside the perspective of the authors.
Not all perspectives do have equal value though, nor do they deserve equal coverage. We don’t call out flat earth whack jobs “to get their perspective” every time NASA announces a new orbital satellite launch, because we recognize that their perspective won’t provide anything of value to the discussion.
Is there an option to filter by keyword? Not on the app I use, but is that a Lemmy/kbin/etc feature that the app just doesn’t implement? I’d love to filter any mention of:
Leftist/right-wing/alt-left/alt-right
Nazis
Capitalism
Trump
Trudeau
Biden
LGBT+ (let’s be honest, 99% of content mentioning it is ragebait/political/controversial in some way)
Gun control
Abortion
The list goes on. I’d probably end up with like two posts a day on my feed but damn would those posts be peaceful.
Having some sort of hashtag system tied to “magazines” would allow for better filtering. The ability to filter out politics, or sports, or celebrities from your feed with one click.