The internet is a mistake for a lot of people and I don’t think we can fix that.
And you know for a fact that I am not exaggerating. This is where the current political discourse is at.
Can I please have the freedom to do that without the lecture?
(Apparently the answer is "yes", but the commentary must be of the partisan approved kind.)
Everybody thinks their tribe is immune to this sort of stuff but it isn’t. It’s all the same nonsense packaged for different echo chambers.
At the end of the day, everybody is human. It isn’t us vs them, it’s just us.
Having the right to choose what you see doesn't mean you should choose to build yourself an ideological bubble.
The other side politically doesn't just have different views, they are barely human knuckle draggers. Basically neanderthals, so who cares if they go extinct.
One side: this group of people shouldn't even exist. The other side: no, let them exist actually.
My feed is free from extreme left content but I didn't have to block anything. Simply by not reading that kind of content, the algorithm knows I am not interested.
This is what is so difficult in facebook vs. HN. Here if people post angry insulting rants, it gets collectively downvoted to oblivion. That is effective.
On facebook there is no equivalent. All I can do is block an individual, but I personally have to do it for every offensive person, which is for practical purposes impossible. Facebooks needs a downvote button and an option to hide any comments which have N downvotes.
Whereas on Facebook style algorithmic feeds, you have to "use those functions liberally" and the result is only "pretty" clean.
I don't trust "facebook users" as a group to provide a signal I consider useful.
In more universal platform such as Facebook you need to indicate who you are by subscribing to specific groups or downvoting some of the content yourself. Just visiting. Facebook is not enoug. Once you signal who you are you also benefit from other people just like you downvoting content you wouldn't like, for you.
+ Interested Show more this like this in my feed
and
- Not Interested Show less things like this in my feed
They even allow clicking those repeatedly on the same post.
I offer this as a data point about how hard it is to turn a polluted feed around. But I'm now wondering if "feed cleaning" is a service that could be automated, via LLM.