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?
It is very US politics heavy. And for many people, that is understandably tedious.
We also don’t have a large enough user base to fill out the niche communities, which is creating a lot of little voids that feels like one big void.
IMO, a very noticeable percentage of our users are also arrogant jerks. The kind of users who only reply with snark or criticism, and never add anything positive. You look at their history, and its just comment after comment crapping on others. I have blocked several of these sniping assholes.
The jerks aren’t surprising. Guessing many are jerks who got banned over on reddit, so they feel like Dennis Reynolds unleashed over here. A crowd like that can scare people off, though. Social media has a known problem of filtering assholes in instead of out.
Fortunately, there are enough decent people that I still have hope that Lemmy is not a lost cause. It’s slowly growing, and some of the new people are pitching in and posting useful / interesting things. Reddit will continue to get worse with its unhinged greed and exploitation. So I hope for future influxes of more people.
I am definitely on the hope side of things. Lemmy has extreme potential for growth. Just not explosive fast growth. I believe the strength of Lemmy could be “natural” growth as the threat of the platform going downhill is smaller.
I have the keywords politics, trump, Biden, Harris, Republican, Democrat, Israel, Palestine, and a bunch of other shit blocked, and I still see way more of it than I’d like. The amount of political content is fucking staggering, and you cannot block it all. I know, I’ve been trying for a year now.
