1y ago

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.

74 comments

Most of what's happening in politics is bad
- You’re not wrong.

A lot of the people who have fled Twitter to Mastodon are the most... online, with strong political opinions.
Even though I usually agree with them, I find it exhausting and the opposite of fun to be bombarded with outrage politics 24/7, so I'm pretty careful about the accounts I follow.
- Same. I stay away from #Explore and just keep to my feed of people I actually follow. And I make sure to unfollow those who are too stressful to hear from constantly.
  I agree with almost all the of all politics all the time people who constantly post negative things, but it's too tiring to read them, especially since knowing about it does me no good and I can't do anything about it anyway. I already vote and donate as much as I can, and I live in a Blue state so anything outside of my area's just not possible for me to influence.
  I've found it's better just to ignore it and focus on positive things that make my life better.
  
  It's the worst part of social media, in my opinion. If you're ingesting that stuff 24/7, you'd think the world was ending every week.
  We aren't built to process that volume of information without it warping our perception.

That sounds a lot like twitter
- I guess that is what happens with a Twitter replacement, still the same Twitter community.

I don't know. I picked some hashtags to follow, and now my feed is full of cats.
- Mine is all amiga and Commodore 64 games. Not the exact scenario I was expecting when following #retrogaming
  
  Yeah, not what I'd expect either. The lack of an algorithm is one of the things I'm not crazy about on there. It took me months to get into Mastodon at first because I got tired of the complaints about Elon. I only know one person on the platform too. But I do like the cat pictures.
  
  Wait, what did you expect when you followed #retrogaming?

"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.

The front page of lemmy.world has a similar tone. Frankly I have enough problems to deal with in my own life - to willingly browse something designed to piss you off and remind you that people you disagree with exist is just pointlessly distressing. Yet this is what the majority of Lemmy and Mastodon people are choosing to do if the numbers are to be believed.
The best way to follow news is RSS or via an aggregator. I recommend SPIDR, which organizes stories from different publications under one shared headline. You can click the flag in the top left to pick the news from your country.
- RSS has been the best way to get your news for like 20 years, but most web browser have built-in RSS feeders these days, plus there's always just plain old bookmarks

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.
- Same, digitalart and also pixelart fill a lot of my timeline.
- How do you follow hashtags?
  
  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.
  
  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.

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@lemmy.ml recently asking people for their unpopular political opinions, and it actually wasn't a total shitshow!
- By "not a total shitshow" do you mean that it actually contained unpopular opinions or do you mean it was not filled with extremists.
  
  Actual unpopular (but not extremist) opinions.

It's easier to removed about what's wrong than to actively do something to make it better.
- I mean plenty of people removed are doing what's within their power. This is a reductionist and bad faith argument
  
  Everyone has the ability to change the things around them. People want to change the world. That is an unrealistic goal to start with. What you can change directly and immediately is your family/household. Then you can move to your neighborhood. As you change the things closest to you, then you can slowly move out to larger things.
  Going on a worldwide platform and removed may make you feel better, but it does nothing to change things and just makes people avoid you.
- Because it's one or the other. This dichotomy isn't even slightly false.
- Well said, unfortunate reality.

Just like any discourse on politics ever. It's less common to hear people praising a decision than criticising.
On a tangent, that's why it's important to loudly say when you agree with something, rather than quietly assume it's just normal. Regardless of which party it comes from. Politicians are very sensitive to public perception.
- That's why I'm always arguing for higher taxes. I feel like not enough people are in favor of higher taxes.
  
  I'm with you. Zero taxes on the bottom 50%. Progressively higher taxes as you go up that scale until you crack 100% for the tippy-top.

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.
- 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.

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"

I thought the selling point behind most Twitter like services is that it's focused on negative positioning. E.g. things that are negative focused get more attention and engagement

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.

I had to mute all elon hate (love?) in mastodon. I need filters in lemmy to do the same.
Why is everybody so obsessed with the guy? Don't like xitter? Don't log in. That's it.

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

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.

I've deleted my main Masto account, I am so tired of the "if you like x then you hate y" which is just so frustrating and counterintuitive to a constructive debate. If you don't agree with their opinion it's because you are a racist Nazi that supports the genocide of trans people as well as being pro-billionnaire...
The main example of this is the whole Meta Threads federating with Activitypub, if you somehow see good things with this, it's because you support giving a platform to Nazis and transphobes, which is just so far from the truth.
The weird negative point of mastodon is it massively facilitates being stuck inside an echo chamber because you can literally defederate with any instance that might have any hint of someone who doesn't agree with you
And so in the end I find myself going to Twitter more than I'd like because people I want to see the content people I follow post there and I can't just create myself a safe garden of opinions I think are "objectively" wrong
- This is also why I stopped going to Mastodon. In addition to negative ragebait politics being almost the only thing that's trending (and I have too much of that in my life already) there's no real nuance or tolerance for anything outside the echo chamber.
  You DO get called a racist nazi transphobe for stepping outside the box or trying to support people, ideas or places that might not be 100% perfect or pass the strictest ideological purity test. I thought Liberal Twitter was pretty exclusionary and echo-chamber-y, but Mastodon's a lot worse.
- Weird. I don't see any of that on my Mastodon feed.
  It's almost as if I get to choose what's displayed in my feed instead of having it force-fed to me.
  I'm thinking that perhaps someone didn't learn how the system works and how to use it and instead just read #Explore. For a sane experience in Mastodon, you need to build a feed by hand (no algorithm will do it for you), build filters by hand, and in general you're far more in control of your experience than you are at places like Echs. I'll peek into #Explore every so often to find new people to add to my feed (and many more people to block from it!), but other than that I don't use it. Precisely for the reasons you cite here.

"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.
- There is no algorithm. Clicks don't do shit on mastodon.
- 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.
- 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.)

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.
- 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.
- Fair point. Appreciate your perspective.

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

Their logo is a letter opener?

(sorry, english is not my first language) what does it means "negatively politically oriented"?
- Complaining about politics, essentially.
- Imagine you have two friends talking about politics. One of them always says bad things about politicians and thinks everything is going wrong. They focus on problems and criticisms related to politics.
- politically oriented = the post is related to politics
  negatively oriented = the post contains negative emotions, eg. they are complaining about something

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

Check our Nostr, yeah it has a politicial bias but its not prone to censorship unlike mastodon and twitter.
- Eh. Was checking out Nostr a few days ago because it sounded interesting, but it's just full of cryptobros.
  
  It is full of bitcoin maxies. It needs more people that are not crypto people on there.

74 comments