Yet.
Lemmy is so far left leaning because a large part of its existence is due to people being mad at capitalism
And its so tiring to hear about all the time
Edit: and I don’t disagree
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developed by socialists
I thought only capitalism drives innovation?
it does, in the fields of exploitation sciences, also known as orthodox micro economics
Freedom and personal liberty drives innovation more than anything else.
Capitalism drives dependance tho. Not a socialist but capitalism is terrible as well. Lemmy is created by free software and open source software enthusiasts. This means that code is public, its for everyone, and anyone can use it woth or without modification.
Some people think this is communism
One of the devs has a guide on how to get into communism and which books to read on their GitHub. People think lemmy is communistic because the devs are.
One of the devs
People have very different opinions. The free software dev communities consist of many weird people as well. Many autistic ones, having other mental issues, and some sane people. But in the end all that matters is the software that they create. They are open and visible. Thoose people can’t be corrupt like the proprietary corporations(facebook, google, reddit) as the anyone can see what the software exactly does. If the software does the job without tracking or doing malicious attempts on you like facebook or google, then its really good
I mean the lead dev. Dessaline
A robust and non-ideological non-profit sector is key to any form of healthy capitalist system. That should be an agreeable statement to anyone regardless of if they like or hate capitalism.
There are two main reasons that evangelicals oppose government social services. One: Communism bad (well, “socialism bad” now because they have to poison the well against European democracies now that USSR is gone). Two: If the government helps people, people will be less likely to seek help from evangelical organizations, which eliminates a huge way to market Supply Side Jesus to people. Eating in to evangelicals’ ability to proselytize compellingly is therefore a non-starter.
community property is a feature of socialism.
Community property is also a feature of capitalism (the form of it in the USA).
Police stations, public parks, classified documents, national/state parks and conservation areas are examples.
I think ‘community property’ is a byproduct of having a functional community.
Nah those are socialist features within capitalism and are all under assault from the neolib privateers.
more like a prerequisite
You know people can have strong ideals and still have the humanity to help people who may disagree with them? Not everything is run by political ideology.
Thinking like this is why people get surprised when right leaning parties get voted for in elections
Lol right? “Right wing politics only seem popular because of bots”. No, left wing politics only seem popular on social media because old people dont use it, despite making up the majority of many populations, and often times are the only people who actually vote in elections.
Left wing politics are more popular in the real world than they are in real world governments. The thing is that extremely online youth have absolutely no idea of just how far left they are.
Not really. I mean that “because…” part.
Leftism is inherenty tied to technology, especially new. It’s part of its lifestyle. EVERY new, massive social “site” (or online service) is expected to be left-leaning by default. It may later change its political viewpoint, but in its relative infancy it’s left.
Rightism is more about actions taking place in real-world. As such, the technology isn’t perceived as more than a tool, used for specific purpose only, rather than part of, or the foundation of a lifestyle.
…and of course there’s a plethora of alternative political views, options and convictions that are a mix of either extremes of the spectrum - if you meet a person online, it shouldn’t be surprisied to learn about “pro-life”, but also “anti-Trump” and similarly puzzling approaches to various aspects of life.
tl;dr: it’s not about bots. It’s because Lemmy/Mastodon isn’t popular enough to serve as a tool for right-wing politics.
Leftism is inherenty tied to technology, especially new.
I don’t know, there has always been a huge libertarian contingent of the tech industry as well. I’m not sure which is bigger. I hope the leftism.
I feel that comment is on the vibe of “liberals are leftists”.
Edit: “that comment” as in the one above the one I’m replying to…
Libertarians are not leftists.
Depends on which libertarian ideology is being expressed. Left libertarians - anarcho-syndicalists libertarian socialists, anarcho-communists are all libertarians. The right wing of anarchism aren’t leftists, the left wing are.
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Communism and libertarianism have nothing to do with each other. What are you even talking about?
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I’d say I’m generally conservative and have been dabbling in alternative social media for a number of years. Some of the biggest Mastodon instances are/were right leaning. Gab.ai started off as a proprietary site and then migrated to Mastodon. Truth.social was always based on Mastodon. I’ve never been active on them because I don’t like echo chambers though. I’ve never really had a desire to have my thoughts reaffirmed by strangers…
I would assume they’re presence isn’t felt in the fediverse because the concept of de-federating is working? Gab is likely cut off by others and truth social never federated with others to begin with. I don’t think Truth ever intended to though, and really just wanted something they didn’t have to build from scratch.
The only Mastodon instance I actually have an account with now is somewhat right leaning but it’s not their emphasis. Even then I’m not too active on it.
From what I gather, Mastodon attracts little attention in conservative circles.
One of main reasons I’ve heard is that “there’s hardly anyone to talk with”. Beats me if it’s default, general conservative opinion…
I mean, they’re there to talk to… If you like jacking each other off… I don’t.
Both of those sites have been ostracized (defederated) from the mastodon fediverse. The mastodon fediverse is in general quite left.
Yes, I said that. Well technically I said Gab was. Truth was so forked I don’t believe there was even an option to defederate them. They intended on a walled garden on their own.
Agree with this ,RW is having an elongasm on twitter while most of my lefties moved to mastodon
The political discourse seems toned down here, I am already happy with that.
It’s more easily avoided.
But I am seeing 2010 style cringe new atheism though. It’s never a good sign when those people are around, they were the precursors to the cancer we see on the big platforms today.
Yes, I prefer my online culture to be entirely Christian, or failing that, trauma-free ex-Christians that have no desire to talk about how fucked the US is because of evangelicalism. High five, buddy.
New atheism cringe is different to being pro abortion, women’s autonomy, and advancing marginalised people’s rights. Completely different.
If you specifically identify with new atheism and the thinking of Dawkins and his brigade, I’d seriously reconsider.
Here’s where I’m at - at the local level, the US is already a de facto theocracy in many places. If you have the privilege of being unexposed to this, great. The issue I have with Dawkins is that he’s an asshole that got called out for being an asshole by his own admirers and he doubled down on being an asshole to his own popular detriment. I have no issue with loud pissed-off atheists in a rabidly conservative USA. If the issue is that old school atheists kept their mouths shut, while new atheists are out and proud, you and I are not going to see eye to eye.
If the issue is that old school atheists kept their mouths shut, while new atheists are out and proud, you and I are not going to see eye to eye.
If you think ‘new’ means modern, as in present day, then you’ve been arguing with me for hours for no reason. Because ‘new atheism’ refers to a specific movement, around the 2010s. It’s not simply ‘atheism’ now.
I don’t care about shouty atheists or quiet atheists, it literally doesn’t matter to me. I am wary of people congregating around easy targets like broadly religious people, when religious people can mean anybody. It can be a white supremacist American, or it could be a Yemeni Muslim getting genocided by Saudis using American and UK bombs. And I don’t see that very important distinction made when those low iq anti-theist posts are spammed on c/all.
It doesn’t to me. It’s just communists vs liberals rather than left vs right.
Grandpa also doesn’t understand federation
Grandpa actually votes tho
As a grandfather, boomer, white cis male, I suggest you might just be over-generalizing.
“as a black man”
Not by bots but by rage farming algorithms. Rage farming the right is easy and profitable. Facebook has gotten that down to science. The fake absolutist free speech espoused by Twitter’s management as well as the apparent moderation inaction by Facebook are all about that. Letting right wing nuts rage freely generates engagement, generates ad revenue. The only thing the platforms actively manage is making sure that big name ads don’t show up on Nazi posts.
I think that the left-right dichotomy is inherently flawed. A lot of what I believe might be considered “right-leaning” or “left-leaning,” but I cannot say that I prescribe to either sort of ideology fully or with any fidelity.
I will always be opposed to any view with a pervasive “moral” authority, and both the so-called left and right are obsessed with their own versions of this. The problem we run into is the false supposition that beliefs can be categorized on a spectrum spanning right to left (or, even more liberally, a spectrum spread across two dimensions). It has been a ridiculous notion from its inception, whenever that might have been.
Building one’s identity (another silly notion, in general—identity itself being a frivolous construct that functions only as a fulcrum for the extortion of social power) upon a supposed spectrum is likewise ridiculous. You can be conservative or liberal, or anything, really. But those beliefs do not exist in a linear or planar dimension. They are so far removed from each other that one cannot fathom sliding incrementally from one to the next.
And to each respective party, “left” and “right,” the other can be demonized as evil, even without full comprehension of the other. It’s all just so damned tribalistic and silly.
Lemmy also isn’t profit driven, so you don’t get libertarian tech bros.
I honestly don’t think that’s the case. There’s tons of right leaning and left leaning people that are bots. You can just never know. I think it comes down to the age range using this place and the culture using it. Reactionary people prefer sites like 4chan or the other online communities designed to cater to them. The age comes in because based on research the largest age demographic using Lemmy is between 25 and 35. This site is too underground to attract the middle aged and older cohort that are right wing. It’s also not hip enough to attract the under 20 crowd who make up the bulk of Steven Crowder, Ben Shapiro and Tim Pool viewers.
Surely you’re pulling those age ranges out of your ass.
People will stay where they’re right, and avoid places where they’re wrong. See: Facebook groups.
I don’t think I’m all THAT left leaning. I just like to be told I’m wrong… I may have problems.
i think its not just the bots but also that the right want their posts to be seen and want to “present” themself and their “opinions”. And i think for that, lemmy is just not visible enough, yet.
Algorithms and AI. Rage gets views, so it’s what gets pushed to the top, so it gets even more views, so it gets pushed to the top.
Yeah, Lemmy has address to this by just having an incredibly glitchy algorithm (look at this post with five up votes from four months ago, it deserves to be on the front page). No one can game it because no one understands it.
Can someone explain to me why everyone on this site thinks that everything bad about other social media sites is somehow being forced upon the users to enslave them to “the algorithm”? It’s like socialist Qanon.
Sooooo, there’s a lot of truth to it.
Once a site is big enough that they want to cash in on it, they develop tools and ai and make choices that are designed to keep you on the site longer.
These tools and ai quickly discover that the way to keep you engaged is to keep you enraged. Content that angers you will keep your engagement longer and keep you coming back.
This is well researched and I’ll cite sources if you need it.
So what happens is that the ai, while it isn’t designed explicitly to show right wing content, will end up learning that showing that content accomplished it’s actual goal. It’s original goal being “Keep people on the site longer”
Right wing content fits a nice niche where it engages a lot of people. Donald trump claiming that he lost the election will enraged the right because they believe in his horse shit and that the election was stolen, and the left gets enraged by it because it causes unnecessary violence like Jan 6th. The AI loves that because it’s fairly universally enraging, and engaging most people.
To build upon this, just getting into a petty online argument about nothing keeps users coming back. I enjoy reading the back and forth between two strangers
Yep!
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I don’t understand why you got downvoted. Openly discussing exactly how you’re going to trespass on government property and hog tie prominent politicians would raise a lot of eyebrows quickly. The multiple coordinated attacks, stashes of firearms and ammunition, the bombs that were placed, and the scheduled armed reinforcements that we now know about through the various court cases all happened in protected echo chambers and private chats, not on the open web
There is no truth to it. The vast majority of negative interactions and aberations on a social media site is brought about by the users, not by the operators of the site. These tools they have are not as powerful as you think they are. The only reason they have any power at all is because the users give them that power because that is what they want. You don’t have a successful site by manipulating the user base to do what you want them to do, they will just leave. You simply give them what they want and they never leave. “The algorithm” is there to give the user what they want, and they’re actually really bad at doing that.
The users create the content, the background ai decides which content to prioritize and promote to the front page, etc…
Which part of that is wrong?
The fact that the user is the one imputing the data to determine the received content in some way. You’re selecting the content you interact with, not a black box trying to take over the population. They just want you to stay on the site, look at the ads, and never leave. They don’t care about your political allegiance or what movies you like, they will feed you whatever you want.
Agreed!!!
The user selects the content that they interact with, but because content that upsets you is so engaging, the AI will heartily promote it.
look at how engaged you are with these comments! Is it because they make you upset?
How interesting. ;-)
I only really ever comment when I have something to say. This usually is only when I disagree with something.
That’s why my upvote ratio is terrible. I rarely comment when I agree with something someone has said. I bet my ratio would be a lot better if I did.
But that’s just human nature, I think. Some people crave acceptance and validation so they comment agreement and some people crave conflict and challenge, so they comment in disagreement.
Everyone is the hero of their own story, so I think they feel the need to “correct” perceived injustices.
I think your experience is common.
And I think AI exploits this, because it’s useful.
You’re attributing combative interaction to an algorithm on a site that has no algorithm. Congratulations you just proved the algorithm isnt needed to cause interaction. People do this with no computer forcing them to, but tons of people here are convinced that every other site is filled with bots manipulating content for people when the people are asking for the content, sometimes very directly.
I’m attributing combative interactions to “keeping your attention”
The ai just exploits this.
So while it’s not NEEDED, it does happen and it works.
Maybe your point is better worded as “the AI doesn’t overrule your own ability to choose”
Which while true, doesn’t change my point. Combative interactions happen without ai, the ai just learns and promotes them.
So you understand the system very well, yet completely ignore the ethically dubious aspects of the system.
People are not born desiring harmful garbage. They are, at least in part, taught, conditioned to desire it.
When you say that a site “feeds you whatever you want”, you’re ignoring the chicken-or-the-egg pattern of desire and satisfaction on the market. The site teaches you want you want. Internet addiction and the ways in which contemporary media and tech affect your mind (most obviously by reducing people’s attention spans) are fairly well known today.
Imagine a drug dealer who sells his garbage to the same person so much that they develop an addiction. With your logic, we can just blame the junkie who keeps returning to the dealer, while the dealer is pretty much innocent - surely it’s not his responsibility if someone else develops an addiction and destroys their life!
Purely anecdotal, but I have two Facebook profiles. I’m extremely left leaning, especially in the fake one, yet both have their feeds blowing up with articles from conservative pages and groups about this “small town” song, Donald Trump, and Ron DeSantis. Oh, and Fox News articles too, up until I hid them.
I don’t engage with any of those communities or anything even tangentially related to them. I have discussed all of those concepts in groups lately, though.
I don’t know exactly what angle you’re looking to clarify in that regard, but to ELI5 it:
There are two factors: targeted ads and algorithm manipulation.
Mainstream social media sites earn money from ads they deliver. The more people stay on the site and view posts, the more ads they see. The algorithm is designed to promote content that users are likelier to view, not necessarily content that they would like more. In practice, this tends to be content that provides some sort of shock value. That combination of targeted ads with clickbait creates “doomscrolling”.
Longer explanation below:
The value that social media sites give to advertisers is that they know everything about their users. They collect data based on posts and viewing habits to learn things like income, hobbies, location, sexual orientation, political affiliation, etc. When advertisers buy ads to show on social media sites, they get to target these ads at specific people that they are likely to leave the biggest impact on.
But what happens if you want to increase the visibility of your (not ad) content on social media? A lot of companies use social media to bring people to their own sites/channels where they make money. In some cases, they can pay to be promoted, giving them an advantage in the algorithm. In other cases, they can manipulate the algorithm using clickbait (to engage users using the doomscrolling trend) or even using bots to give a false sense of engagement.
In recent major elections/referendums, there were a lot of ads and promoted content intended to sway opinions. People would intentionally be shown content to upset them, increasing doomscrolling and increasing their chances of getting out to vote against these things. However, in many cases, the content that people would see would be half-truths or outright lies. Because they were earning money, social media sites did not care about verifying the content of the ads they were showing.
It’s been proven that Brexit, for example, was decided by voters who were manipulated via targeted ads and clickbait delivered by social media to believe falsehoods that swayed their vote. And in many cases, these lies weren’t just spread by specific political campaigns, but actually by external governmental entities who had a vested interest in the outcome. Namely Russia, who had a lot to gain from a weaker EU.
Lemmy is not immune to doomscrolling and bot manipulation, but it doesn’t have ads and, that we know of, does not sell user data. It’s harder to be targeted here because the only thing people can do is try to game the vote system to make their content more visible (which is sadly easier than it should be). But all you have access to are people subscribed to specific communities or registered on specific instances. It’s harder to target people en masse and you only have a single data point to target, namely people who like [community topic].
Is manipulation a force?
No one forces you to engage in arguments on Reddit or Twitter. You have autonomy over who you interact with on both sites. You’re not being forced or manipulated to do anything. If you engage in this these things people perceive as negative, it’s because you choce to do it of your own free will.
No, it’s because of your scrolling speed, pauses, engagements, updoots, downdoots. Everything you do is taken into consideration to update your feed with more stuff that you are likely to engage with. That’s all.
And you’re the one doing it all, not a computer. the computer is not that smart, you need to tell it what you want to see.
There’s also the fact that there isn’t an algorithm trying to keep you doomscrolling by promoting
commercialcontroversial content.Tbf r/politics was extremely left leaning.
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We get it, you’re
veganan anarcho-communistJust be take a short trip to any country outside the US and you’ll realize that it is indeed the case: No left in the US.
There is a left it’s just not the established Democrat party.
Ah yes, like Europe?
Spain, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Hungary? Which
socialistright wing “paradise” should I visit?Or maybe Germany, where the AfD is gathering steam?
Maybe actually learn about the world before spouting sayings you learned on Twitter 3 years ago.
Europe sure has a big resurgence in right wing politics, however a socialist left is still represented (albeit on the decline).
I’m not stating that there is a socialist paradise somewhere, just that in the US you can hardly consider the left “left” (Overton window, yadi yada)
bee nurse
Extremely is a stretch.
“Extremely” doesn’t go far enough to accurately describe that cesspool
