Why are trending posts on Mastodon mostly negatively politically oriented?

It seems anytime I try to check out Mastodon it is always some negative political view or affiliation of why X, Y & Z is bad. Is this just what most people like boosting or is it a sign of botting to push negativity over the more positive headlines?

I do understand I can switch to any Mastodon instance I want and stick to a small community, however I like keeping up with trending topics in the world. Maybe the most popular accounts in the Mastodon community likes to rise up pitchforks every minute.

cstine,

If you want to keep up with trending topics, find news outlets you believe provide you the proper coverage of what you’re after, and just follow the RSS feeds instead.

Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are there for people to post hot takes on the news, not just share the news. RSS is the way to go if the news is what you’re after, and not people commenting on the news.

Kaldo,
Kaldo avatar

RSS doesn't have trending or any sort of curation though, the news sources usually have 10 garbage click bait articles for any one that you might be interested in. I haven't found a way to make it work as a reliable way for trending news, yet at least.

raiun,

Fair point. Appreciate your perspective.

Jackthelad,

I use Tusky and I never see these trending posts. It’s great because I’m sick of the tedious political shite from all sides on Twitter, I don’t need it on Mastodon as well.

ttmrichter,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

People have been trained by corporatist ad-click-driven “angagement”^1^-oriented antisocial media that all online communication is rage-fuelled.

No, wait. This doesn’t explain BITNET, FidoNet, USENET, etc. which predate such antisocial media by decades…

New theory: people online tend toward being assholes because they’re not in imminent danger of taking a punch to the nose for it.

^1^ “angagement”: a portmanteau of “anger” and “engagement”

ittu,

I’ve seen posts praising free school lunch getting passed by a few states.

Anticorp,

That seems to be the case for social media in general. Reddit, Twitter, Lemmy, Mastodon… They all have the same political rage-bate content.

mesamunefire,

Try blocking individuals who are pushing negativity and sharing the good stuff. Be the change you want to see in the world.

artair,
@artair@pawb.social avatar

I don’t think people appreicate the old axiom “when you look into the abyss, it also looks into you” in this case. For a long time, corporate social media algorithms drove what content you saw. This tended to be “outrage” content, because as others have mentioned, it gets clicks. But marinate in that long enough and YOU become the source of the outrage clickbait. The algorithm starts people down that path until their mentality becomes self-reinforcing. They post what they’re used to posting – angry stuff. And they seek out more even without behind-the-scenes manipulation of their feed. Now imagine all those Twitter refugees landing in the Fediverse with that kind of outlook. It’s not surprising that outrage and bile are trending.

The way to break this cycle is… just ignore it. I have an extensive list of keyword filters on Mastodon. It screens out 99% of the political content. I just don’t want to see it. I’m here to engage with people who share the same passions and hobbies as myself. THAT’S what makes my Fediverse social media experience better. It’s not a magical function of crossing the corporate/open-source boundary. I have to be responsible for curating my feed according to what I want to seek.

The same goes for Lemmy. I’m using Leomard as my client on macOS, and it allows me to block out any Lemmy instances I don’t want to see. And I set my default view to “subscribed,” not “local” or “all.” That prevents me from getting psychologically drenched with whatever angry or trollish content might be lurking in those feeds when I open the client. I also sort by “new” rather than “hot,” “most comments,” etc. It’s great that people have opnions about things, but I find relying on up/downvotes to be a poor way of discovering the content I want.

Long story short (too late): your social media experience in the Fediverse is yours to shape. If you rely on the defaults and flow with the tide, you’ll likely end up somewhere you don’t want to be. If you trim your sails and take the wheel, there are all sorts of wonderful destinations out here.

Don’t use other people’s anger and unhappiness as your compass.

amio,

"Drives engagement". Making people angry at shit is a good way to get clicks, so ragebaiting makes up a large part of produced/posted/upvoted material.

coffee_poops,

There is no algorithm. Clicks don’t do shit on mastodon.

Anticorp,

The thing is that love and passion also drive engagement. Tech and news companies could have created algos to push content that makes people happy, but they chose not to. Imagine how different life and the internet would be had they chosen the friendlier option.

ttmrichter,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

This is one of the reasons why I think votes and other such nonsense are a detriment to sites like this. (It’s also why I’ve eliminated them from my Lemmy experience.)

thecam,
@thecam@lemmy.world avatar

Check our Nostr, yeah it has a politicial bias but its not prone to censorship unlike mastodon and twitter.

InterSynth,
@InterSynth@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Eh. Was checking out Nostr a few days ago because it sounded interesting, but it’s just full of cryptobros.

thecam,
@thecam@lemmy.world avatar

It is full of bitcoin maxies. It needs more people that are not crypto people on there.

ttmrichter,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

The problem is that cryptobros are the kinds of people that drive away non-cryptobros. If you go to a site as a normal person and see nothing but cryptobros, you’re not going to have an incentive to stick around, now, are you?

thecam,
@thecam@lemmy.world avatar

Someone got to break the ice. Lemmy used to be very tech savvy, still us but now there are other topics to discuss. You gotta get on there and post into the void, get the ball rolling.

ttmrichter,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

Lemmy used to be very tech savvy, but not repulsive. Cryptobros are repulsive (and not just because of the cryptocurrency shilling!). What’s my incentive to stick around?

thecam,
@thecam@lemmy.world avatar

Like I said, someone got to break the ice. You don’t want to do that and that is fine and I get it.

People need to join and create their little own corners on Nostr were you discuss other topics and maybe a rule in these corners will be no crypto shilling and not be repulsive. Eventually these corners will grow in size to were Nostr is not just crypto bros.

ttmrichter,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

Or, far more likely, Nostr will remain a place for cryptobros. And that’s fine. Keeps them out of my spaces.

thecam,
@thecam@lemmy.world avatar

I do hope nostr becomes the new twitter for everyone. And it does have a chance of that with the musk changes to twitter.

dobeltip,
@dobeltip@lemmy.world avatar

I follow digital art hashtag and now my feed full of art and furry art. But it’s better than looking at US politics posts that i never understand.

Xavienth,

How do you follow hashtags?

lazycouchpotato,
@lazycouchpotato@lemmy.world avatar

It’s currently not possible on the official Android app (unsure about iOS) but you can do so on the website and third party apps. I’m using Tusky on Android as it reminiscent of one of my favorite dead apps Flamingo for Twitter.

donio,

In the default Mastodon web UI you can simply click on a hashtag and then press the “Follow hashtag” button. If you want to follow a hashtag that’s not showing up in your feed yet then you can search for it and then click on it in the search results. If you don’t see the “follow hashtag” button that might mean that your instance is running a very old version of Mastodon. Hashtag follows were added in version 4.0 which came out at the end of last year.

One caveat is that hashtags follows only show posts that “make it” to your instance either because they were created locally or because another user on your instances followed the person who posted them. In practice being on an instance with a sizable user base or an instance that’s oriented towards your interests should work well.

exu,

Same, digitalart and also pixelart fill a lot of my timeline.

Chozo,
Chozo avatar

"Trending" is going to show you the topics that are getting the most engagement. Political content almost always gets a lot of engagement, because people will argue back and forth with each other, and each new reply will boost that post further up the ranking. It's just the nature of that particular sorting method.

colonial,
@colonial@lemmy.world avatar

This is why I can never get into microblogging/Twitter-type platforms. Character limits and one-click reposting mean that what little discourse you get is shallow, and ragebait is consistently pushed to the top.

I’m not going to say that Lemmy or (especially) Reddit completely avoid this, but you generally get much more insightful conversation and can opt-in to political communities.

There was a thread on !asklemmy recently asking people for their unpopular political opinions, and it actually wasn’t a total shitshow!

Fizz,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

By “not a total shitshow” do you mean that it actually contained unpopular opinions or do you mean it was not filled with extremists.

colonial,
@colonial@lemmy.world avatar

Actual unpopular (but not extremist) opinions.

RxBrad,

It gets a lot more bearable once you setup a Politics filter that blocks dozens & dozens & dozens of keywords (mine is up to 66 words so far)…

https://lemmings.world/pictrs/image/9c492523-4601-4bcb-8d24-af5eb17596d3.png

richieadler,

Lobotomizing yourself is faster.

Aux,

Glad to hear it from someone with experience!

richieadler,

Nah, I’m not brainwashed into thinking that politics is intrinsically evil.

spittingimage,
@spittingimage@lemmy.world avatar

Nah, you can’t aim the icepick properly yourself. Believe me, I’ve tried.

ArcaneSlime,

You have a word list I could borrow?

RxBrad,

Here’s what I’m rolling with right now… I try to nuke everything even vaguely political…


<span style="color:#323232;">GOP
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Trump
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Biden
</span><span style="color:#323232;">conservatives
</span><span style="color:#323232;">elections
</span><span style="color:#323232;">voter fraud
</span><span style="color:#323232;">senate
</span><span style="color:#323232;">senator
</span><span style="color:#323232;">house of representatives
</span><span style="color:#323232;">whitehouse
</span><span style="color:#323232;">reproductive rights
</span><span style="color:#323232;">pro-life
</span><span style="color:#323232;">pro-choice
</span><span style="color:#323232;">2nd amendment
</span><span style="color:#323232;">gun control
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Marxist
</span><span style="color:#323232;">MAGA
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Pelosi
</span><span style="color:#323232;">climate change
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Parliament
</span><span style="color:#323232;">koch
</span><span style="color:#323232;">murdoch
</span><span style="color:#323232;">desantis
</span><span style="color:#323232;">politician
</span><span style="color:#323232;">fascist
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Rudy
</span><span style="color:#323232;">leftis
</span><span style="color:#323232;">liberal
</span><span style="color:#323232;">antisem
</span><span style="color:#323232;">right wing
</span><span style="color:#323232;">supremac
</span><span style="color:#323232;">on strike
</span><span style="color:#323232;">hateful
</span><span style="color:#323232;">elect
</span><span style="color:#323232;">liberals
</span><span style="color:#323232;">republicans
</span><span style="color:#323232;">democrats
</span><span style="color:#323232;">republican
</span><span style="color:#323232;">democrat
</span><span style="color:#323232;">congress
</span><span style="color:#323232;">abortion
</span><span style="color:#323232;">communist
</span><span style="color:#323232;">socialism
</span><span style="color:#323232;">socialist
</span><span style="color:#323232;">capitalism
</span><span style="color:#323232;">capitalist
</span><span style="color:#323232;">fascism
</span><span style="color:#323232;">vax
</span><span style="color:#323232;">global warming 
</span><span style="color:#323232;">ukrain
</span><span style="color:#323232;">covid
</span><span style="color:#323232;">proud boy
</span><span style="color:#323232;">cops
</span><span style="color:#323232;">police
</span><span style="color:#323232;">defund
</span><span style="color:#323232;">minimum wage
</span><span style="color:#323232;">billionaire
</span><span style="color:#323232;">the government
</span><span style="color:#323232;">injustice
</span><span style="color:#323232;">human rights
</span><span style="color:#323232;">climate crisis
</span><span style="color:#323232;">democracy
</span><span style="color:#323232;">private healthcare
</span><span style="color:#323232;">public healthcare
</span><span style="color:#323232;">labor contract
</span><span style="color:#323232;">on strike
</span>
ArcaneSlime,

I fucking love you. Seriously thanks.

Fizz,
@Fizz@lemmy.nz avatar

This is perfect. My current list just contains 10 different ways to block posts about covid.

Strafer,

I found the better way to use Mastodon was to follow users/hashtags of interest and then filtering out most of the topics which produce ragebait. It means my feed isn’t as busy but I also get none of the ragebait.

ttmrichter,
@ttmrichter@lemmy.world avatar

That was my strategy too: follow hashtags of interest, and as I identify users who consistently say interesting things, follow them as well. Occasionally poke into “Local” and ferret out one or two more interesting users (and a whole bunch of users to block!). Oh, and make VERY heavy use of filters: filtering on hashtags, chiefly, but also key words that tend to get associated with asshats.

Callie,

ragebait gets clicks. just look at twitter, what got the most engagement was ragebait meant to make you mad, which for the most part works

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