If you can, please take a moment to check out the article before commenting. There’s more to it than just the headline. Article authors:
- Megan Shipman | Behavioural Neuroscientist and Fellow at the Cascade Institute, Royal Roads University
- Zachary Pierce-Messick | Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Medicine, Johns Hopkins University
We don’t have any profit driven algorithms here, however people do still often complain about the doom and gloom that fills the feeds. What can we do to help push back on this?
Some personal thoughts
- Piefed already has some helpful features in line with the message of this article. There is an indicator at the bottom of the page with how much time we have spent on the site each day, with a reminder message saying “We hope this use of your time aligns with your priorities and values”. Additionally, the topic based feeds makes it easier to join positive communities for those who want to. The blocks are helpful for those who want to filter out articles about particular topics.
- Meanwhile, these platforms are starting out at a time when there is a lot of relevant negative news from around the world. If you use the platform to stay informed and keep others informed, then you will inevitably be sharing and commenting on negative news/updates.
Going by experience, it helps greatly to block news communities, or at least the domains or users that have a predilection for sharing misery, fear, envy, and all the doom “goodness”. Also requires being able to identify such places and people, but I’d imagine a small pain at the moment is much better than to have your filter polluted and grinding your gears slowly enough that when you get to have enough, you’re at the verge of snapping. And if using RSS feeds, since those usually don’t have custom feeds applied¹, Ublock Origin for hiding the whole post based on who posted or what site it links to helps too.
¹Lemmy has RSS feeds for any given user’s feed btw.
