• 6 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: January 30th, 2025

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  • It seems a lot of your critiques are more of the media in general and not social media.

    if I got my news and my understanding of the world from Lemmy, it would be easy to believe a whole bunch of people in the United States have given up on civil society and committed themselvesto political violence.

    Yeah and if I got my news from Fox News or the New York post it would be easy to believe the cities are full of gangs of maurading immigrants. At least lemmy doesn’t pretend to be a “fair and balanced” representative of the US. Everyone here knows lemmy is far left relative to the US just like they know everyone’s not using or interested in Linux .

    As for the favoring of longer form more in depth content vs short form out of context content, that’s just what people like and are drawn to regardless of the media type. More people will watch TV news with shorter segments and less content then a newspaper, and more people will watch late night with even shorter form and less context then TV news. And then there are people who don’t watch or engage with the news at all because they have other things to do.

    If anything lemmy is better then a lot of the other social media because it doesn’t disincentivize links. Most other platforms the algorithm is optimizing for watch time / keeping you on the platform, so links to long form news articles get down rated because if you click on that link and go to that site for 5 mins, that’s 5 mins your not spending on the platform. For that sample you took half of the top posts were links to articles, see how long it would take you to find one article link scrolling through tik tok.

    Of course, the most passionate, angry, dramatic, and emotion-provoking memes get the most upvotes and go to the top of the algorithm.

    Again this is a problem with all media, if it bleeds it leads has been an adage for centuries.

    In general lemmy is showing people what they want to see, which media in general has always tried to do. Yes there are a lot of valid critiques of the behavior that this prerogative incentivizes, but that’s different than the critiques of algorithmic social media that prioritizes engagement and staying on the platform, which brings in a whole new set of problematic incentives in addition to the standard problems of media.


  • Yeah, most of what the article complains about is algorithmic social media and how it boosts engagement of any kind, whether positive or negative. This leads to “extremist” takes gaining ground easier then moderate takes. Combined with algorithmic siloing, echo chambers etc. That we’ve heard a million times, make people more radical and disconnected from reality.

    The “algorithm” most people use on lemmy is just most up voted, so controversial takes rarely rise to the top. A lot of the stuff would be considered controversial outside of here, but within lemmy there’s a “hard left” consensus where the moderates are probably democratic socialists.












  • I understand people making choices despite popularity, it seems a lot of people here are of that category, I’m concerned with the people who are choosing not to join a cause because of its lack of popularity, leading to the issues mentioned above. I think this second group is a larger percentage of the population then the first group. I think we can agree that these causes gaining popularity is good, even though they can have value without popularity. So getting that second group into the cause would be good.

    I think what your advocating is to just evangelize the benefits and then people will come. But I think there are a lot of people that even if I could explain every benefit of Linux, they’d still stay on windows citing one of the above benefits of popularity, same with a lot of the causes listed above. If we are to say evangelizing is the best/only method then we leave a lot of those people for which education is not enough.

    I was looking for people who were at that point of being educated about a cause, but weighed it it less then those benefits of popularity and continued on in the capitalist consumerist system. Then maybe something else pushed those scales to the other side and they chose to join the cause. What was that experience? Was it having a child? Was it an experience with death, spiritual experience, revelation, drug trip, etc. I guess that’s the question.


  • I wouldn’t say Palestine is a losing cause. All the ones I listed are minoritarian, some in the low single digit percentage of people, especially in the US. A majority of people in the US and a large majority of the world want a ceasefire. It’s not failing due to lack of popular support, its failimg because a small minority of very powerful people really want this genocide.


  • What makes you think a given person prefers the capitalist options?

    The fact that they vast majority of people choose the capitalist option. You could chalk some of it up to lack of awareness, but even those that are aware still tend to go for the default capitalist option. Out of every normal person you’ve explained Linux to in real life, how many do you think made the switch? Yes individuals may choose them but the vast majority of normal people aren’t.

    vegans are not bothered by restaurants not catering to them because they simply won’t go

    Speak for yourself, I’m a vegetarian and often get annoyed by the lack of options, and that’s in a very liberal city. Not everyone has your same moral conviction, my girlfriend is a vegetarian too but will eat meat if it’s the only option on the menu. You can say she’s a fake vegetarian or doesn’t truly believe in the welfare of animals, but she still cares a hell of a lot more than your average person, so if she’s is still occasionally eating meat then your never going to get rid of animal products for the average person who doesn’t give two shits about animal welfare.

    The fact is the more good vegan options there are the more people will be vegan, or at least partially vegan. Most people value taste and there food preferences more then animal welfare, environment etc. But if there’s an item on the menu that is tasty and they prefer and its vegan then they’ll choose it, and that’s a win. But most chefs aren’t putting there time into making a variety of tasty vegan food because the markets not there. Yes there are people with a higher moral conviction that value welfare over taste but that is a slim minority who won’t be able to stop all the abuse the industry causes.

    Also you don’t always select where you go to dinner, a lot of times the friends or family your going to dinner with will select it. Some are kind and will check the menu for options but a lot of the time they can forget and just pick one. Am I supposed to not go to dinner after my cousins graduation because it’s at a steakhouse?

    Can you elaborate on this one?

    A platform like this benefits from having more and more diverse communities to keep people engaged. Lemmy, as it stands right now, only has a couple broad communities, mostly about these causes I mentioned: FOSS, socialism, etc. If your not interested in those communities at all you probably won’t find lemmy very valuable. Even if you are somewhat interested in those things you may still stay on reddit because it has the other communities your interested in along with those that are on lemmy. This is especially true for niche interests but even some broader interests like sports in general are completely absent from lemmy. This is self fulfilling to a certain extent, as less people talk about sports, less people post about sports, less people come here for sports etc. So for a person who wants a feed of say 50% socialist memes and 50% baseball they’re gonna go to reddit because they can get that, even if the socialist memes and discussion is better over here, now we’re missing out on that person’s discussion in the socialist meme communities and that’s a loss for everyone in that community.








  • That’ll cause competition with the private owned stores and force them to push down prices / raise wages until their profit margins are gone, putting them out of business.

    The only entity that will buy the defunct stores will be the state , or maybe some actual non-profits , and now the state owns all the grocery stores and communism will be achieved. Then we get bread lines, is that what you want? /s.