I hope this is a good place for this. A few weeks ago I started a simple experiment: Block every community in the All feed that is about the US election in some way.

I thought this up after a thread about the Biden debate, as someone kindly (not really kindly) informed me that I should curate my own experience here. I thought about it and realized just how much election/politics stuff there is on the front page. It was quite hard blocking communities I like, especially 196 on blahaj.

Now the quality of my feed did go up in some ways but it’s very slow. I also realized that I am feeling a lot less rage/anger than before when scrolling lemmy. I didn’t even realize how much the constant political stuff from another continent affected me…

What is your opinion on this? Is Lemmy really filled with too much US political rage bait? Should I continue with my zero tolerance policy?

It would also interest me to hear an American perspective. Is there more or less politics here, on other platforms or real life. How does rage/hate affect you when scrolling through Lemmy and does it take a toll?

  • Auster@lemm.ee
    132·
    4 months ago

    I saw a post earlier today suggesting quite a lot of those political posts may be coming from bots or paid actors. And considering those post more often than not also carry stigmatization and faith-like views, even if it’s made by actual users, I think it’s still a good call to at least keep a lower tolerance, maybe avoiding the rage-click posts and communities and sticking to more informative posts instead.

    • weker01@sh.itjust.worksOP
      10·
      4 months ago

      Do you think Lemmy is big enough to attract that kind of attention? I would be genuinely surprised if it does.

      My theory was that the content just floods over from other sources. Where there are bots / paid people. Anecdotally I’ve not seen the classic bots like you see on Twitter and Reddit here yet.

      • blackbelt352@lemmy.world
        4·
        4 months ago

        Yes.

        Lemmy has gotten quite a bit bigger since the Reddit API fiasco about a year ago, a lot of people who left reddit for lemmy tended fairly progressive/left leaning, seeing the writing on the wall and how enshitification was going to get so much worse as reddit was preparing for its IPO. These are the kinds of people that various special interest groups want to discourage voting. I mean most of the subreddits I was a part of devolved into awful botspam as mlre and more people left, and reddit really only exists for weirdo right wingers, and even the porn subreddits really degraded in quality or were just shuttered for being unmoderated.

        Even though this lemmy instance is a global site with users from all over the world, users from the US still likely makes up a signification population here, and by extension, makes this instance a big target for election propaganda trying to dissuade the generally progressive potential voters here from voting by reminding us how bad genocide Joe is for slow rolling weapons to Israel or how he’s forgotten about Ukraine because its not still in the headlines or some other propaganda.

      • Auster@lemm.ee
        2·
        4 months ago

        If size is of matter, I would imagine it’s due to being small, but with great potential for growth and diffusion, instead.

        But like you said, and perhaps in a lighter point of view, it may indeed just be that same diffusion picking communities with established cultures already, instead of potential bots and paid actors.

      • Batman@lemmy.world
        2·
        4 months ago

        I think it is, as it lacks bot detection, not quite as bad as Reddit, but you see people make arguments which sound good but don’t stay on topic.

        A big factor is the lack of barriers. They already have the complex software from other platforms, the only new code is to alter the interaction scripts. The “make post” script for Facebook becomes the "make post " script for Lemmy. The problem domains are so similar I bet you can use the same numerical sociology (a good topic to look up to learn about how governments make these bots) models/code across the platforms. Though you may need a few extra features to accurately express our love of Linux, star trek, and beans.