Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think
Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think
usher.dev
Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think
67 comments
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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. :)
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Welcome! Just FYI, lemmy.world blocks the piracy instance (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
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He’ll, I still use rss. Newsify!
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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.
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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.
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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!".
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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.
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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.
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Doesn't mean I want to spend all day everyday reading about it. I have other interests.
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Maybe stop sticking your head in the sand? 🤷
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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.
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Not wanting to be bombarded by a foreign country's political antics and sociopathic leaders == sticking your head in the sand? Interesting take!
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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.
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To be privilege enough to take on that firehose...
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Reddit is clearly the Bad Place.
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Life is the bad place.
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Good use of this image lol. But wait till you see the time knife.
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Technology Connections put out a video recently about this, it's quite entertaining: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJpZjg8GuA
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OMG, I was just going to say the same thing!
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Nice to see another fan in the wild! :D
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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.
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Sort by new is your answer here.
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Shows uninteresting posts / trash posts containing a few words or so
And also mainly shows posts from bigger communities. Smaller communities tend to have much less posts per day/per month, so seeing one is really rare
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Through the Voyager phone app I sometimes use the 'random community' search option to make Lemmy like StumbleUpon. I dont see this random option through desktop though...maybe its a Voyager thing
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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…
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raises hand*
Uh, this is a Lemmy’s sir
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I really enjoy being introduced to new things based on what other people like me enjoy.
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I'm currently trying to figure out how to use RSS for this reason.
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I ready mbin by all > active (I take the approach of banning magazines I am not interested in rather than being in a subscribed bubble) and the few Japan-related (tax/legal/resident) subredits that haven't moved here yet by newest (only subscribed communities there of which I have like 5). I watch videos from my subscribed list until there's nothing left (rare) so rarely use any kind of algo feed. I watch twitch only for people I follow. I don't use any other social media for now (I did just start a business, so that will change somewhat since I need to advertise and get engagement).
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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”.
67 comments
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.
You can also set filters in some clients. And other micro feed like software (piefed) can put filters for your user.
Or browse by new. Seems to work for me.
Setting up my own instance ended up being pretty good for me since it meant I had to manually subscribe to every community I want. The quality of "All" posts depends heavily on the instance you're on.
Just ban political communities