In a recent series of experiments, we paid people a few dollars to unfollow the most divisive political accounts on X. After a month, they reported feeling 23% less animosity towards other political groups. In fact, their experience was so positive that nearly half the people declined to refollow those hostile accounts after the study was over. And those who maintain their healthier newsfeed reported less animosity a full 11 months after the study.
Twitter got a lot better when I unfollowed the peeps whose tweets I hated. But it also got boring, so I stopped using it (this was loooong before Trump, Elon, etc).
There’s probably a lesson there.
so we defederate from .ml and lemmy could be saved?
fascinating
FTFY: Are a few people ruining the world for the rest of us?
Answer: Yes. They need to face justice.
Musk, Bezos, Zuck, Page ruined the internet for us. That’s who to blame
Absolutely agree. There’s a minority of highly polarized people who encourage a false binary view of the world - where anyone who doesn’t 100% agree with you is your enemy, and questioning even a subtle aspect of an opinion is an all-out attack. These people post so much they dominate forums and create the false appearance of trends. Most people aren’t nearly that polarized.
I find in real life they are just as polarized but not as rude about it. Both left and right friends of mine.
However almost all of them get the hint to respectfully change the topic when there is an impasse. Online the badgering continues unabated.
The main point is that these interactions happen much less often IRL than online, where the anger trolls post relentlessly. If they acted like that in person almost nobody would ever talk to them, but for some weird reason they get a lot of takers online.
A “few” people? The problem is not a handful of loudmouths, but the masses hanging on their lips. An influencer is not influencing without a mass of followers.
The money cult ruined the internet like they ruin everything else
Yep. Musk. Trump. Rogan. Spez. Libs for Tik Tok. Zuckerberg. And so on. It’s like giving Conservatives access to the web lead to it being a septic tank.
You can extrapolate that to humanity for the last few centuries or even millennias
