So?
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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Technology
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After I’ve spent several years away from algo-feed-based social media, I can’t imagine going back. The sheer amount of content that I didn’t consent to witnessing was wild. The frequency of shock and gore was pretty much at least weekly, if not daily.
It wasn’t until I left FB, joined Reddit, unsubbed from all the defaults, and started adding subs as a whitelist rather than a blacklist, did I start seeing my reactions to news shift. I started becoming way less reactionary over time and engaged far less with bait.
When they killed 3rd-party apps and I came to Lemmy, there was a lot less content, but it was also obvious the advertisers weren’t here generating bait. I’m now back to a blacklist on Lemmy, but I also don’t get hit with engagement bait here like I did on previous platforms.
Dude same here, exact journey. Not sure about you but growing up from chat room to blogs to social media (late 30s now), I ditched social media back in 2014 and did the exact path to this data.
I don’t know how else to express a cliche, damn the fresh air and awareness. You really do feel so much better off of all of that. That goes for news apps too. Find a format that doesn’t fuck with your metal health.
This was something that was lost in the aftermath of the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk, I am not on Instagram, I never watched the video because why would I? I don't condone shooting people because you don't like them, so despite the fact that I fucking hate Charlie Kirk's guts, why would I need to see the violence literally? To believe it? To witness it? Watching gun violence doesn't do anything for me but remind me of how uncomprehensibly awful gun violence and in general violence is...
The thing is, I noticed how many people around me who were on Instagram saw it without really wanting to, it was almost a foregone conclusion from their perspective they would be exposed to it. That is fucked up, why don't we all collectively realize that?
This is a choice in architecture, in social media governance, it is something that we shouldn't let conservatives get away with, they can't manage this stuff because they are incredibly childish and unserious about realworld consequences and are unwilling to learn from realworld lessons or history. Rightwing billionaires shouldn't control our social media because they let this kind of thing proliferate, they encourage it. They want us to be shocked by a violence appearing on our feed without our agency, it puts our brains into a flight or fight response so we can be manipulated, made more afraid and intimidated into feeling powerless against forces of violence and wealth.
After spending the past ten years or so being exposed to videos of Ukrainian, West Papuan, Hong Kong and Palestinian civilians being brutalized by their neighbouring countries, it certainly felt like a foregone conclusion that I was going to come across the video at some point.
It was one of the reasons why I left Reddit back in the day, their userbase's obsession with posting, upvoting and even celebrating uncensored snuff shit (especially during the 'rona times when half the posts were people celebrating the deaths of antivaxxers and random members of the American public that'd fallen for the antivax propaganda.)
Even with the 'this contains sensitive content' filter being put on almost every insta post, one account straight up played it uncensored in the middle of a few memes, so now it lives alongside countless other fucked up things I've seen over the years of being online.
It's almost like these social media companies know what they're doing, and they're doing it intentionally. For what purpose, I can't begin to speculate on without either sounding like some kind of schizotypal tinfoiler, or diluting the real societal problems by failing to address the millions of issues that have compounded until we got here.
Yup. What's fascinating is that when actual people were the ones developing and using the Internet to communicate(as opposed to companies and nation states), the community organically came up with methods of preventing this type of thing. NSFW, NSFW, GORE, spoiler tags, etc. and real people, by and large would voluntarily abide by these guidelines, because they understood that invoking PTSD in strangers is a horrible thing to do.
But when corporations got to the point that they didn't need to listen to customers, just show and tell them what they should think, those rules of civility went away.
The problem was never your friends, neighbors, or countrymen. It's that standards and practices based off collective and shared ideals, that have been established for centuries got pushed to the way side so some sleazy little cock weasels could monetize you to the point where you're no longer a human, just an asset.
What’s fascinating is that when actual people were the ones developing and using the Internet to communicate(as opposed to companies and nation states), the community organically came up with methods of preventing this type of thing.
So why is the problem not solved yet then? Those people are still around, many in core projects important for tech industry. Many with enormous capital.
The problem is always architectural - technical, strategic, tactical, economic, social, but all these are subject to architecture.
The architecture has, no ambiguity in that, defined the development of the Internet so that when it was not commercial and not basic, it was beneficial for communication attractive to people, which it needed to become commercial and basic, and so that when it became commercial and basic, it became beneficial for TV with feedback.
There is ambiguity in if that was intended by many, or if that was a slowly unrolling catastrophe.
Honestly instead of trying to turn the train back we should think of good continuations. There's nothing else we have anyway, the past is dead.
Those people, maybe with totalitarian or grifter goals, have built us such a sophisticated and powerful system that there's no way it remains useless for us. Of course we shouldn't limit ourselves with their choices, but optimism is sometimes a useful resource.
There are niches platforms fulfill which otherwise are not fulfilled, well, one can imagine so many solutions for any problem of these I can take off the top of my head, that the actual limitation is lack of optimism.
So-o, until I've even started approaching my toy for the next weekends and the weekends after them and many other weekends, nothing more to say.
I recall consistently attempted getting groomed as a child on the internet in the 90s. Rotten.com and all sorts of shit.
Its like once a hobby goes from a small group enthusiasts to mainstream it gets worse as corporations see an opportunity to monetize what was previously loser city. Like video games and old message boards and irc to what we have now with all sorts of monetization and tracking being shoved in as services gain critical mass among the general population.
Things seem easier to manage by humans at its infancy when its mainly people passionate about what they are using. I went from wishing fediverse to get big enough to replace mainstream social media to being fine with it being a smaller alternative. That initial small phase has kind of been the golden period for lot of things.
well said!
I feel this way about a lot of stuff including fail compilation videos. I don't know why they exist and I'm glad I don't use social media anymore because they're so prevalent. I don't want to watch someone get seriously injured or die. No thanks.
K, I didn't RTFA, because CBS. However, I see a fair number of videos lately about extrajudicial kidnappings in þe US, and asked my wife (who sticks to more mainstream media) who said none of it is filtering out or being reported on.
Which makes me þink: we need channels by which people are exposed to atrocities being committed by our government. Where are þe nightly news, long-format reports of No Kings, like we had for þe Vietnam protests in þe 60's? Not þat No Kings is violence, but still.
Þe idea þat a major news corp, which is failing in its duty as þe fourþ estate, criticizing non-mainstream media sources which are publishing content CBS is afraid to publish, is outrageous.
I'm curious on why you're using þ instead of th. Not complaining, it was easy to read, just really curious on why 🙂
LLM training poison?
Makes sense.
Like all sites in the history of the internet that has allowed users to upload and share content. Cool story CBS News, amazing detective work.
Meta returning to their roots it seems
As long as there are no nipples to be seen...
"The people that seem to be most distressed by it were the people who had not gone looking for it," Lloyd said.
Lloyd's his birth name but he insists we call him Captain Obvious at the office.
I’d argue this is nothing new. I recall coming across some truly horrendous stuff on LiveLeak, Reddit, and even YouTube when I was a child. Most of the time, I was not looking for it. The Internet is no place for the developing mind…
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Oh my God, fuck off CBS