Reuters is known as the “reluctant imperialist” news source. They use neutral language as much as possible but still back British interests. Owned by a Canadian multinational.
Conseratives and fascists are the same group, so I’ll refer to them as fascists.
You are talking about one of the core criticisms of corporate secret algorithms to determine what to influence you with. Fascism is forced to creep into everyones world view when you use standard social media, and the average person wouldn’t have the slightest idea. Certain key things will be more related to fascist content, like philosophy, psychology, guns, comedy. If you think about what fascists enjoy, or what they need to slander then it makes what I said make more sense.
Jordan Peterson does a lot of vids around psych/philosophy to redirect curious people to false answers that are close to true but more agreeable for fascists. An example of a psychological cooption is “mass psychosis” being coopted into “mass formation psychosis” by fascists. Mass psychosis explains too many true things, where mass formation psychosis redirects people towards a more palletable direction for them.
This is why I want to be nowhere near corporate media if possible. If you delete your cookies(or private browse for the same effect) then youtube will promote the most adjacent things to what you watch like old youtube used to do, although it’ll still promote fascism when directly adjacent. With cookies though they have an excuse to have questionable content linger statistically too often.
Not necessarily in all countries, but in the USA I’d say all Republicans are fascist, or at least complicit in the spread of fascism. The conservative wing of the Dems, nah.
Nooo, i finished my comment to you and then upvoted you while proof reading >_> turns out that kills the comment… ugh…
If i could rewrite my first comment to just talk about conservatives then i would have. I’d rather focus on active threats of evil corp shenanigans.
I agree that republicans are becoming fascists in the overt sense. My views are based more on that they are unknowingly fascist by actions, not awareness. Conservative policy in a nutshell is really just “We good, You bad” and power plays without any rational explanation. Can you really name any decent policies conservatives have? All i hear is hate, scapegoating, intensification of totalitarian power structures, increasing control for corporations, war and guns. Those things were key in Nazi Germany too.
It’s a distilled version of ‘the wisdom of the crowds’. With all the dog piling that comes with reactions to things that are pointed at the wrong audience. There’s generally some people with baggage in there somewhere who will take issue, and you get downvoted.
However, what’s always interesting about these platforms is where good ideas rise, where they come from, and how controversial they are, all of which you lose with the twitter/mastodon architecture.
It may be easier to find your crowd, but how useful is that to you depends on what you use your online presence for.
Mastodon was very depressing for me, this follower centric self presentation stuff is super not my style, it don’t want it to be about me, I most likely suck but I say smart things some times, so I want it to be about the stuff I say.
Plus I don’t mind being downvoted into oblivion. I actually think that this can be a good thing. It means that there was something at least controversial about what I posted so I might be wrong or have to argue better.
Lastly, mastodon is too much safe space and filter bubble. I want to read things from people that I disagree with and I want to argue with them in good faith. When I tried this on mastodon, I got misquoted, blocked, harassed… You name it.
While this post is actually fine and within the community guidelines, we don’t have the bandwidth to moderate it properly - and it really needs moderation. For that reason, I’m going to lock rather than remove the thread. Thank you for the high quality post.
IDK, I think most of the toxicity comes from when something gets popular. I never read much into the votes on reddit because it’s usually more influenced by when you post than what you post. If you combined all the karma of my accounts it’d probably be in the millions but mostly I was just trying to either help people or make them laugh, never cared much about the points.
During my time on reddit, I’ve learnt to appreciate downvotes. Silent feedback is much better than passive-aggressive replies that serve no purpose other than letting the person vent out.
Most of the time the downvotes I would get on Reddit are on topics where I disagreed with a couple of the early people and they downvoted. This would cause a cascade of people piling on. Other times I could make essentially the same comment and get lots of upvotes.
Not a big deal either way, it is boring to always be aligned with everyone else as long as you are open to constructive discussions about it.
I got majorly downvoted once for sharing my opinion on not wanting to travel to a foreign country alone as a woman. A lot of flippant comments too. Like okay, this is not the sub for me. I still can’t believe I was attacked like I was.
There was one a few years ago that has since shut down. I think it was called Ruqqus or something? Using the website I think it was the best out of all the alternatives I’ve tried, the site was well made and enjoyable, good features and tools (open source, but not federated)
Only problem was the userbase was nothing but far-right users, so racist and bigots.
I think Lemmy is good, once the apps become more polished and refined then it might become my favourite.
Even if you watch leftwing videos sometimes YouTube just goes “oh you’re a young-ish male who’s into politics? Here’s som nazi vids you’ll like.” ESPECIALLY if the leftwing videos talk about righty’s.
People on Lemmy try to rationalize that they’ll use the downvote as intended (off topic content) but our ape brains eventually just make downvote = I don’t like said thing.
I wish we could do away with upvotes and downvotes altogether.
I think having some form of "I agree with this" or similar helps to make you feel engaged with the content (for better or worse).
I think perhaps the actual person responsible for the post or comment shouldn't be able to see the results, though, otherwise it just becomes another ego building thing, and you see people strategising explicitly to build karma like on reddit. instead, the author should see a rating, like "slight approval" "mixed feelings" "strong dissent", etc.
How dare you. As a former redditor now lemming I would wilt into a shriveled, frail, incontinent, barely conscious entity without the ego-fueling fire of my all-powerful downvote.
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