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less free range than you’d think. I would say at least 30% of content on the fediverse is bot originated. 5-16% of commentary is AI generated.
Ok, 5-16% is precise enough that you must have an interesting methodology to share but you were waiting for a question to prompt an answer. This is that comment.
You want a source? For my math?!
source: it was revealed to me in a dream
Yeah “I would say” does not give me confidence that there was, uh, any methodology to speak of. I’d be happy to be wrong though.
Average fediverse interaction
We have very different fedi interactions. Have a nice day!
Have a nice fuck you day!
Fuck you, have a nice day! You lovely asshole!
Yeah I agr–
Have a nice day!
“This fucking place stinks! It’s a piece of shit. I’m done! I quit! Fuck you!”
*turns up an hour later*
Sadly this is not true. We do have a recommendation system, called Top. And it spamms me with enraging american politics when I go to All.
The difference is in who decides what you see.
Lemmy’s “Top” is scaled based on what other Lemmy users are doing: upvotes, comments, etc. It’s basically the people who use the site collectively deciding what’s interesting, which is a lot of American politics these days.
Meta, Youtube, Twitter, etc. use what people on the site say as part of the algorithm, but they also examine the content to try to discover if it is something engaging or enraging. They compare it against models of what makes people stay engaged, so if there’s something with millions of comments and lots of “likes” but Meta doesn’t think it’s good content for them to sell ads against, they’ll push it down in the ranking.
If it is Top, then that is what people are choosing to upvote. But you don’t have to browse by Top. PieFed even offers keyword filters, plus the ability to unsubscribe from all such communities while also allowing you to see them with just the touch of a button to go to a Topic Feed showing it when you (rarely) actually do want it. You could also replicate this behavior in Lemmy, but it takes having one account per Internet area and that’s a huge pain. Or you could just sort by New. Or block the users submitting such content. The list of configuration options available to you is practically endless, and nowhere explained in the slightest degree that would be helpful:-).
!nonpolitical_comics@piefed.social does a pretty good job of keeping that stuff out.
Sadly, this kind of filtering is (and can not be) the default. And configuring your feed well is hard and takes time. You could also, in theory, do a similar filter thing in the cooperations’ big asocial media sites.
I just remember that it was very very much work curating my feed (and constantly needing updating as new communities came out needing to be blocked), back when I was on Lemmy, and then when I switched to PieFed it became incredibly easy. Tbf it did take me a few weeks to get used to it, but ever since I have almost never switched back to scrolling All.
Even then though, why downvote content simply for existing? Like I don’t live in [insert name of specific neighborhood/town/city/state/region/nation/continent/area of world], or follow [any sports team at all], but even though I don’t want to see its content (usually, I mean like on a daily basis, although perhaps rarely?) I do not begrudge such a community for its mere existence? In fact I celebrate it! I highly disagree with the philosophy displayed by people who downvote such posts that are not relevant to them, harming those communities that are just struggling to get off the ground. I don’t think that’s terribly productive.
That was a common problem even in the old/bad place, once a post reached r/All causing a flood of toxic newcomers (this one more about receiving toxic comment replies than votes I think). And actually PieFed offers a solution where if the mod configures it such, only votes from subscribed community members gets counted. That aspect won’t federate with Lemmy though, since the latter is only aware of the binary options for voting and can’t handle such nuances currently.
I didn’t know there are people who go to All to downvote stuff for other reasons than trolling.
I also don’t know why you explained this here in this detail. But thanks for ranting for almost just me! :)
Well, they at least claim that they aren’t trolls.
🤔 Although isn’t that exactly what a troll would say?! I say, I’ve cracked the case! 🧐 They are trolls! Either that, or… they are not, or something else, I dunno.
If you go by the metric of “if not troll then why behave as troll would?”, then the answer becomes much easier to find:-).
What if I told you that you don’t have to do that?
But how do I get the “100% organic free-range rage” advertised by OP then?
I prefer “scaled”, which is even more like a recommendation system.
I prefer “new”.
I just like it when people post the sandwiches
Okay, maybe not that one
One of my favorite subreddits back when posting photoshopped pictures of birds with arms was all the rage was /r/notbirdswitharms which was a sub where you couldn’t not just post birds with arms, you couldn’t post anything that wasn’t a sandwich
So, like a club?
My ragebait is vegan, so you can get mad guilt free.
But is it gluten free? I’m MAD!
Nice. My ragebait is mostly solar powered so also largely guilt free.
> Veganism is abstainment from, as far as is possible and practicable, the exploitation of animals for any purpose.
> Editable meme templates are “exploitables”.
> Memes with animals are animal exploitation.
> These are therefore not vegan and hereby banned from /c/vegan@lemmy.world.
Carnist Troll detected
I’d imagine it’s a peaceful place, though.
Because they’re not allowed to have beef with others.
Everything is banned on c/vegan.
Can’t even post a nice steak there.
It’s easy to blame “the algorithm” for our divisiveness. Much harder to accept that the algorithm does that because it amplifies flaws in human nature.
It is fairly easy to accept that it is just amplifying human nature. The main issue is that with the major locked down aggregators the amplification is intentional and continuously changed to increase the amplification by doing things like stuffing divisive posts into feeds.
because it amplifies flaws in human nature.
It might be amplifying already existing traits, but that doesn’t excuse it. It’s still damaging to society at large
A huge chunk of humanity is currently tripping up over the “is fascism bad?” question. There’s no fucking way we’re tackling the subtle influence of internet algorithms.
On the bright side, if we do ever get around to the topic there will probably be a lot fewer opinions to contend with.
Thanks guys. This entire thread is killing me.
Hell yeah! But don’t forget the beans
Even if fedi was pure and perfect, it still exists within a wider ecosystem of algo-driven rage and it’s influence leaks in from every side. It’s not just that we don’t exclusively get our news from the fedi it’s that news articles themselves are optimized for rage, the writers are deeply under it’s spell, politician’s media strategy is optimized for it.
True, there’s definitely that. I guess I just wish there was more thought between that and “do I really need to post this?”
Just don’t go full regard
censorship of any kind is retarded
Now I’m raging at your misuse of “it’s”
Algorithms give you what you want. If you’re getting rage, you’re looking at and upvoting rage. On Reddit, 99% of what I get are posts about Hitman, Blender, Boomershooters and other things I’m interested in. The same with YT except I also get obscure movies from the 30s and 40s. The more of that I consume, the more the algorithms push it to me. The same with news. If there’s a big news event I might read and watch a bunch of news and then all the news stuff gets pushed to me.
Algorithms boil down to “Did user look at, upvote something with these keywords? If yes, then send more things with those keywords their way.” These magical mystery algorithms are probably 5 lines of code most.
Not on YouTube. I only watch instructional videos and how-to fix videos.
But it doesn’t stop YouTube from oddly recommending a right wing grifter or influencer shit with that stupid ass shock face.
You looked at one of those videos at some point. I get them too because I occasionally get curious. Some of it is tied to watch history. You might have one buried in the pile. If you clean it out, you might not see those anymore.
Nope. Not even a bit.
I despise YouTube. But sometimes, instructions are only in video form.
Yes, it gives you what you respond to, it steers towards engagement. So it provides content which has a strong emotional response because the strong emotions drive us to engage. Anger and resentment are very strong driving powers here. I don’t doubt that what you’re saying about how the things you engage with, and how you steer the algorithm or the algorith steers you. But that doesn’t disprove the fact that algorithms are generally making our debates more angry, it would just suggest that you are less vulnerable to this.
What would disprove it is if people would quit upvoting, reading, and watching things that make them more and more angry. Algorithms don’t steer anyone. People steer themselves with the algorithms. They’re essentially mirrors of one’s personality. Just be aware if you upvote a post that says “Tech billionaire kills baby seals with his bare hands, has sex with the corpses, and laughs about it on TikTok”, you’re going to get more stuff that has all those keywords in it. However, if you upvote “How do I subdivide a mesh in Blender?” you will get a bunch of stuff about Blender, subdividing 3D models, and other topics related to that.
Yes, it’s a mirror, that shows us people are very emotional, and prone to react to emotional triggers. The algorithm has figured this out and is using it to maximize engagement. People will not stop reacting to these emotional triggers. Sure it’s commendable to avoid these rage-baits and pay attention to other things, and some will be better at this than others. But to think that people en masse can choose to not be caught and manipulated by these algorithms seems really naive. I know tons of people who spend more time on TikTok than they wish they did, but it’s hard to resists something that’s so cleverly optimized towards you, as Yuval Noah Harari says it: it’s hacking our brain.
And we’re all socialized by corporate platforms to engage with eachother in a way that prioritizes engagement, which we bring with us when we come to the fediverse
And those who buck the system are fired.
… or worse.
They don’t get cookies:(
Well damn, now I want to know just how good those cookies must be…
Also, username does not check out, unless there is cheese in those cookies, perhaps? 🧀
Perhaps…
It certainly could be true but ever since I started blocking news on sight and read my local newspaper only, I have not seen nearly as much rage bait content.
That being said it is kind of annoying that every time I block a community posting news another one pops up :/
Posting current events in the appropriate communities should not be considered “rage”. People deserve to be informed and have the ability to plan for the future.
What you are doing is essentially raging against the news.
The thing is, this 100% organic rage is OUR rage, not the rage of our supposed technofeudal overlords.
Our garbage in this case
Just like mama used to make
In a slightly odd way, I think this might be a positive for some looking for a new place online.
I went and scrolled facebook recently and it is absolutely crazy. You get some ads, sure, and a few things that real people posted, but like half of what is on there feels like some kind of shady psychological experiment.
It’s like a whole spectrum of flavors of ultra-processed engagement bait. Much of it is made to look like normal people posting normal things, just with a “follow” next to the name and 5,000 replies from kind old people trapped in a rabbit hole they don’t even know exists.
I can’t even fathom what contemporary Facebook is like. I deleted it in, I think, 2009 or thereabouts, right after they changed the timeline from reverse chronological to whatever their first iteration of the engagement-based one is. I thought that sucked pretty bad, so, yeah, can’t even imagine how bad it is today.
