this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
458 points (92.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35723 readers
911 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Despite not subscribing to political communities and having a large number of content filters based on keywords, my feed here is still for a large part all negative articles and ragebait. Elon Musk this and Israel that. Microsoft ruining windows, AI ruining internet, right wingers and capitalism ruining the world, police being racist and shooting innocent people, companies demanding workers into offices, privacy being under constant attack from all sides.. And all this despite the effort I go thru to block that from my view. I can only imagine what the unfiltered feed is like.

I get that this is all important stuff but holy shit it's depressing when that's all I read here every day. Sure, some of it is legitimately news worthy but lets be real here; much of it isn't. It's just to get you riled up and engaging with the post. It's the exact same thing all major social media recommendation algorithms are doing; feeding you content that causes outrage to keep you on the platform for as long as possible. Do we really need to know about every stupid thing Elon says or every police shooting where the victim is black?

It's no wonder so many people, especially younger ones feel absolutely miserable from day to day. It can't be healthy to live like this. I feel like this kind of media diet is pretty much equivalent to eating fast food every single day.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 33 points 5 months ago (5 children)

Nobody is making the world a better place by paying daily attention to every possible thing that's wrong with it.

[–] motor_spirit@lemmy.world 44 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

This sounds like the "don't make everything political" rhetoric which is naively hilarious. If you're encouraging moderation for the sake of mental well-being, sure - but that is just that, like many other things.

Information is a well; people will come and go. How much any one person consumes, like food and drink, is their choice regardless of consequence. You can argue diet, drugs, alcohol, entertainment, masturbation all the same.

Personally, I'd rather take on the mental burden of being informed over being as clueless as some. Ignorance leads to many problems, higher costs when you're not much of a problem solver etc.

[–] JoShmoe@ani.social 36 points 5 months ago (1 children)

A counterpoint here, if people don’t talk about a problem, or in this case share, then the problem may go unresolved or intensify.

Multiply that by how many problems affect masses of people.

[–] kakes@sh.itjust.works 18 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Imo the problem is that social media is one of the worst possible places to foment political change, yet is by far the most popular.

If people actually have a shit about this stuff, they'd be out campaigning for it, or helping people affected by it, instead of just clicking a button and patting themselves on the back.

Not to say social media can't bring change of course, but I mean, the people posting the most are pretty much by definition doing the least.

[–] darthelmet@lemmy.world 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We've have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

  • In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

  • In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

  • In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

  • Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn't upset advertisers.

Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn't allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

It's suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don't really know what to do about it.

[–] kakes@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

I completely agree that "third places" have been all but eradicated in favor of revenue-generating spaces. This trend alone has lead to the death of a lot of things, including a sense of community and local engagement. (Edit: Worth noting that I also agree with your point about atomization)

I think it also has a lot to do with how abstracted we are from reality. We've built all these systems to replace actual face-to-face communities, and people would rather surround themselves in that than to expose themselves to the unpredictability of real life - for better and worse.

It's a hard sell to get people to reverse course because it's so much more painless/numbing to engage with these systems. (Not to even mention AI promising to give every person their own personal Yes-Man.)

[–] kakes@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Seriously. I wonder how many of those doomers actually volunteer in their community, or are active in their local politics. If the answer was any more than "basically none," I don't think we would have most of these issues.

[–] Thorny_Insight@lemm.ee 12 points 5 months ago

It almost seems like people want to feel enraged. There's a difference between activism and slacktivism. Complaining about things on social media has next to none effect on the real world. If one wants to make the world a better place, then choosing an issue and actually doings something concrete about it seems more productive.

[–] Cornelius_Wangenheim@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

The idea is that you spread the knowledge to others and occasionally do something about some of them, even if it's only a small contribution.