6mo ago

Too much US election content on Lemmy?

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?

68 comments

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.
  
  Well said, and it is Lemmy's greatest strength. Hopefully the devs can implement some kind of automated instance replication, or mirroring, or migration...for those scenarios where a beleaguered admin wants out.
- 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.
  Unfortunately, that's correct
  
  I have been here for a year and I’ve only run into a couple assholes. I get more upvotes and good comment replies here than I ever did on Reddit. Maybe it’s the communities I’m subscribed to, or maybe I’m being more choosy with what I comment on, but regardless I enjoy my interactions on Lemmy significantly more than other social media / link aggregators.
  
  Spez in sunglasses and hat.

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.
- 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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
- I wouldn't be surprised at all, I suspect that's what's happening on most social media platforms like Facebook, X, Reddit, and so on. You'll see completely crazy and extreme takes with tons of upvotes that no one you know irl would agree with.
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astroturfing

Some apps have keyword filters that might also help :)
- Connect, Voyager
  Piefed too
  Mentioning them for people curious
  
  Tried all 3, staying with synch
  Voyager looks iOS all around, just can't
  Connect font is too small even after making it as big as possible
  Piefed doesn't show on play store

European here, I avoid most news, be it US or EU.
I created !yurop@lemm.ee to share light hearted and positive content about Europe.
So yeah, you are not the only one.
- Love that place!
  
  Thanks!

It is time to take refuge in the Subscribed tab of your Lemmy app or choice

I've been blocking channels and users left and right (no pun intended). Most of the time it's just bots arguing with bots anyways.
- How dare you say I’m arguing with ~~other~~ bots.
  
  On the Internet nobody knows you're a ~~dog~~ bot.

I come in here specifically to catch up on US election coverage. It's better than other news feeds I have. I totally understand why it's annoying but I also appreciate it for myself. People seem to be more real in the comments compared to other communities. The articles at the top aren't what I find elsewhere. Sorry you have to work so hard to curate your experience though.
- A lot of it yeah. Totally. :(

I banned all mainstream communities because otherwise my "all" feed was essentially "trump bad". It's unbearable.
The problem, however, is, that once elections are over I'll have to figure out which communities to unblock. Otherwise I am going to miss out on pretty much all the content lemmy has to offer.

Communities should have tags or something that I can just filter out of my feed
- Voyager and Connect allow to filter keywords

I took a two week break from Lemmy and other engagement sources and it did wonders for my mental health. I'd recommend trying something similar.
- For me, even just making the switch from Reddit to Lemmy has done quite a lot for mental health and really helped reshape my social media diet into something much better.
  On Lemmy I encounter a lot fewer true assholes on the platform (theres still snark and sarcasm and inside jokes, but I liked that aspect of reddit), it's a lot slower of stream of content, the posts take longer to change so I don't get stuck in an infinite scroll of perpetually new content, and I've rebalanced where I'm spending my time online, more informational and wholesome side of youtube and a discord community that I found that I really like.
  But yeah even taking a break from these every so often is still a good idea.
- Yea that can't hurt. It's just hard to do IMHO a lot of muscle memory.

block the words elon musk, donald trump, kamala harris, republicans, democrats.
i did it for the longest time.
- How do I do this?
  
  Use Voyager, Connect or Sync

I did the same thing as you, blocked all political communities. My quality of life is much better now.

Too much political content regardless. I came for the tech focussed discussions, not for reddit 2.0.
Luckily banning communities and choosing a homeserver that does not federate with instances I dont like gets me along. I enjoy the organicness and interaction and hope it never goes away. Also its getting a little crowded everywhere...
- Welcome here!
  Indeed, it might take some time to curate your feed, but once it's done, the nice content starts to happen.
  Feel free to have a look at !newcommunities@lemmy.world, there is a weekly thread where people promote active communities

I filter out anything that makes me angry with voyager, still needs some added terms, but my feed barely has US politics in it, the odd one slips through, also ticking that box in the Lemmy website settings to block bots makes a difference.
- Same with me but on Connect. I can still use All and discover new stuff easily by being ruthless with blocking. I have several hundred blocked communities and use the keyword filters for major us politicians and such.
  If there is someone who posts US politics in a general sub I just block the user.
  I know I'm throwing some good out with bad but thems the breaks.

I hope Lemmy continues to grow as other sites keep getting worse. That will probably help round out the content. I'm only too well aware of how widespread American politics is as I have dealt with it my whole American life. I don't blame you for avoiding it, and have only started recently engaging with it. Though, compared to other social media, I find Lemmy to be more mild in the intensity and range being pushed around the site. I expect it will increase over the next few months. As for advice, if it makes you angry/upset, then yeah, keep political instances blocked. I learned how to ignore it, but that took time. 196 is still pretty great tho. Hope you find your peace and enjoyment from the community. Ask more questions, and you'll probably find what you're looking for.
- Nooo keep them where they are we dont need enshittification on lemmy.

as someone kindly (not really kindly) informed me that I should curate my own experience here.
Delivery of the message notwithstanding, definitely do curate. It takes weeks whittle All down to only topics that interest you, but tackle it one community at a time and you'll get there. All is about the only thing I browse now - I've blocked a TON of communities that don't interest me, and the experience now if much, MUCH better.
I strongly recommend also using a key word filter - many of Lemmy's apps have this feature, and IIRC there's a "RES" of Lemmy floating around the web somewhere, but I neglected to bookmark it and don't remember what it's called -_- ...if you happen to know what I'm talking about, please drop a link!
Anywho, if you're tired of US politics in your Lemmy, chop it!
- Me just browsing /all/

To bad there isn't an easier way to filter out posts without having to block entire communities. It seems the election has infiltrated all of them. I can understand how frustrating that must be for nonAmericans. An option to leave out posts that contain keywords would be useful. I use it a lot when doing a Google search.
- Most lemmy apps will allow filtering of keywords. Personally i use Connect.
  
  TIL, thanks!

As an American I block almost all political news content online except for my local news. I feel like that sort of content gets into everything online not just Lemmy, it's absolutely obnoxious.

Another poster suggested Piefed, tried it and even without an account much better. With an account, it's supposed to have keyword filters.
Lemmy made by people who don't wsnt filters.

Don't get your political coverage from social media. Look for reputable news sources. I block all the political communities.

FYI, I posted on !youshouldknow@lemmy.world about this topic: https://sopuli.xyz/post/15756394

Instead of outright blocking communities you enjoyed you could try using keyword filters instead
- Hmmm but what about all the image memes?
  
  It’s not perfect but gets like 98% of em
- How do I do that for mobile?
  
  Sync should have the option in the settings

each community also has an RSS feed

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.

It's just party of American life. You learn to get used to it.
- This reminds of the song Amerika from Rammstein.

68 comments