This is all journalism these days
this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2024
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"This is journalism," Lemmy Claims to be News Outlet
The really reputable outlets will phrase it "'this [Lemmy] is... Journalism"' claims user of the increasingly popular reddit alternative, in post positing the decline of all other forms of media."
Are we increasing though? I thought we plateaued or even dipped. e.g. https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats even says we dropped sharply, like 51k monthly active users in April compared to 47k now (this ignores the halfyear stats that iirc were affected by some technical changes), and the total users tanked from 1.9 mil to just 1.4 (though we surely don't have that many lurkers, so a lot of those were surely bots/alts), and even servers went down.
Everyone that I've mentioned Lemmy to irl gives me a horrible look like why would you tell me about this TruthSocial-like place (except leftist instead of right-wing as that one is) that actively calls for public beheadings of e.g. landlords?
So we've got some... issues that are blocking our future growth, from reaching more mainstream audiences.
I'll be honest, I hope Lemmy doesn't reach a mainstream audience. It's nice having a smaller site away from all the bullshit that will inevitably come with mainstream attention. We can say "just defederate! Join another instance" but when we get to a point where giant corpos are running instances that host 95% of users and 99% of content, we'll be in the same boat as now if we defed, except that Lemmy will then have a mainstream (and thus mostly right of center) image. If this, or a little more, is all we're ever really going to get on an open source platform that feels open source, I'm okay with that. I like seeing the same usernames around, and feeling like I found the internet equivalent of Stars Hollow, CT
It's a double edged sword, that.
On the one hand, we're kinda awesome the way we are.:-) Perhaps a bit more content would be good though?
On the other, there's like 50 people that generate virtually all the content, and they won't necessarily be able to keep up that pace forever. If we aren't sustainable, this project will die off. And I don't mean like cease working, but rather lose our uniqueness, like what happened to Reddit, which technically remember still exists:-).
I hear you about "fully mainstream", but I think we could stand to grow a bit more. What's going on with mander.xyz and scientists/academics is awesome:-).
I'm not familiar with what's going on with that. Care to enlighten me?
And I totally get what you mean. More content would be great. I specifically miss my philosophical and spiritual communities from Reddit. I love learning about mythos and different religions, especially the more esoteric stuff, as well as political philosophy. That content just isn't here in the same way (or sometimes, at all). It would be amazing to have that here. But I'd also rather go without certain things if it means not feeling like I'm being sold a story. Reddit felt like it wasn't social media in the same way as Twitter and Facebook, but the moment I left it for Lemmy it was this scales-from-my-eyes kind of moment. It was crazy how toxic reddit was for me, and going back a few times, and looking at my old profile, I do not like the person I was there. Always on the defense, always on edge, always prepared to argue a point because I knew some asshole was going to attack me for no reason, and make me defend myself. It's like it activates the caveman part of the brain and put me in fight or flight. I'd love for Lemmy to get big enough to have awesome content, but not so big as to devolve into that. But I'm not smart enough to know what that balance is, or if it's even an issue of size, or just culture.
Just that they are actively recruiting people from STEM.
Most of what made Reddit great was not Huffman's software but the people that were worth chatting with. Most of those people did not come here, hence the huge lack of niche subjects here by comparison.
Though indeed, even before the whole fuck spez fiasco Reddit was becoming enshittified, as it encouraged people to talk rather than listen - e.g. to make a new post rather than be able to find an existing one. And yes, it also encouraged us to become pedantic assholes, making every one of us defensive - me too.
A fantastic article somewhat related btw: https://medium.com/@max.p.schlienger/the-cargo-cult-of-the-ennui-engine-890c541cebcb, highlighting that social media becomes what the vision of the developers makes it to be. From the size and position and coloration of the buttons - and which ones, like are downvotes even turned on? - and every little thing, Reddit was doomed to become what it was purely bc of its choice to encourage its own profits at the expense of all else.
A favorite example of mine is that since ads go in-between posts but not comments, Reddit encouraged "more posts", far more so than "more comments", and not at all searching for existing posts, e.g. they only allowed 2 pinned posts, not 5 or 10 or 20 or something, just 2. So in places like r/Android they would have weekly mega threads where people could ask things e.g. "what phone should I buy?", but rather than help connect people to those mega threads specifically offered for that, the developers forced mods to do the work to try to stem the absolute tsunami of posts all saying "which phone should I buy?" - almost invariably with no other details, each just a child (of whatever mental age) wanting ~~personalized recommendations~~ attention, but thereby halting the ability of people to discuss things related to Android phones, bc how could you get a word mixed in among all that noise?
Even nonprofit social media is still damaging to us, but to a radically lesser degree it would seem, compared to a for-profit one attempting to predate upon e.g. our anxieties.
Just that they are actively recruiting people from STEM.
Not only that, we have a couple of social science people around too :-)
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That's really cool. I love the idea of Lemmy instances being their own specific cultures, and the idea of an industry/field specific instance is honestly one of the coolest aspects of Lemmy. I'd love to see, like, artist based instances really take off, for example, or even like an instance specifically for fast food workers. Might help get some kind of union action going eventually if it really took off
That's the idea. Right now most mainstream audiences seem to prefer X to moving away from that, but it sure would be nice to have alternative options. Such as Mbin that will check both Mastodon and Lemmy instances.
I specifically miss my philosophical and spiritual communities from Reddit. I love learning about mythos and different religions, especially the more esoteric stuff, as well as political philosophy. That content just isn’t here in the same way (or sometimes, at all). It would be amazing to have that here.
If you speak german, that is what the community !philosophie@feddit.org is all about.
Sadly I do not :(
Damn, you've mentioned lemmy irl? And other people have known about it?
Never once have they known about it already:-).
The horrified looks come on our subsequent visit, and then they refuse to talk about it again. I suppose it's our dirty secret... that we use Lemmy btw.:-P
I've only met maybe five people in real life that even know what Reddit is. Like yeah that's that super nerdy site right?
I've never even tried to mention Lemmy.
But... we could always use new memes!?
Maybe something like this:
with the caption "I use Arch btw"😁
I've mentioned lemmy irl, too. Various times actually. Obviously no one knows it. But they usually don't even know of mastodon or the fediverse either. And even reddit is just a name they've heard before. Everyone I know irl is on Instagram though.
But if you look at messages it has raised, so less accounts but more active. And I don't know the rest but I'm not in a hurry to see Lemmy become as big as Reddit. I can wait a couple of years to grow at a faster rate.
Titles like this make me angry. Sometimes it feels like an insult to my intelligence. Just tell me what it’s about and stop making stuff up.
I make a point of not clicking on such articles, or really anything with click bait titles if I can avoid it.
You have to remember... those headlines aren't for you. They're for the average idiot who isn't even remotely interested in the scientific mumbo jumbo and allbthat highly technical gobbledygook. They want to be spoonfed a statement they can parrot to a co-worker and move on with their day being a terrible consumer of info.
I’ve been noticing a disturbing trend lately, and I wonder if the way these headlines are written is feeding it: creationist articles have been slipping into my science news feed, usually riffing off whatever bullshit alarmist/exaggerated headlines spread through the popsci realm the day before.
If you don’t know what you’re looking at (and most people don’t), you’ll wind up reading creationist propaganda when you think you’re reading a science article.
Cannot confirm. I get a lot of stuff about black hole cosmology.
I do, too, and alongside that are articles about how new discoveries in cosmology are upending all of science, and alongside those, thinly veiled creationist articles about how that means science has been totally wrong all along, therefore god. The Hubble tension has spawned a lot of these, with at least one article in my feed per day from the Discovery Institute and the like.
e: articles like these:
Were We Made to Make Black Holes? Evolution News is part of the Discovery Institute
The “Hubble Tension” and the Big Bang Evolution News
James Webb Space Telescope Reveals Fast-Growing Galaxies Answers In Genesis, speaks for itself
Weird, I don't get any of those. I get a lot of "quantum soul" nonsense instead.
But, I think thats because I decided that if black holes make universes, then this must not be my only life experience. And if that's true, then there is no god and life has no meaning.
I bet the algorithm picked up on that and is trying to feed me this other junk instead.
I’m pretty vocally atheist, but I watch debunking content, and part of that is anti-Flerf and anti-fascist stuff, so maybe the algorithm picked up on that.
Who knows! The algorithm works in mysterious ways 😂
I've added words like may, could, might etc to my lemmy filter to get rid of these articles
Given that quantum theory and general relativity are incompatible, something has to give.
Also, general relativity requires dark matter and energy to explain cosmological data, but particle physics has yet to capture the faintest indication of something supposedly 5x more common than visible matter.
🎉🎈🤡 JOURNALISM🤡🎈 🎉
the single biggest pet peeve that i have is when somebody says something like "X is good for you in Y situations under Z conditions" and then everybody immediately goes "X is good for you, do more X" This happens so often i'm starting to think we shouldn't allow people to have opinions anymore.
like it's so easy to just, not say something silly, or stupid.
Or the opposite even! We replaced a mouse's blood with artificial sweetener and that mouse died of super cancer. Ergo, artificial sweetener will give you super cancer.
yeah. There are so many problems with so many things in so many ways.
It really doesn't help that people like to grasp onto the "ultimate" truth when it comes to this stuff. Even when there are good arguments for things people will fall head over heels down a mountain just to make a bad argument.
and it just pains me, i'm not mad (ok i might be a little mad, or maybe a lot) but i'm (also) disappointed in them as well, because we can collectively do better as a species, but we just, choose not to.
i mean, for the love of god shitpost as much as you want, i love shitposting, it's the best, but just, read my posts on eudaimonia if you have to. It's worth the effort, and it will greatly improve your life. (maybe not my posts, but stop being silly, please.)
this rat has turbo cancer!
spoiler for
rain world, hunter campaign
I've been saying for a while that it really feels like media literacy has gone down significantly. I read some opinions or takeaways on a movie and the responses I see can be so confusing, like how someone could possibly come to their conclusion. It could be a movie about fire engulfing everything and they'd be like, "wow, wind sure does destroy a lot of stuff!", for some reason.
To some extent I get it, I make pretty distant connections myself pretty often, though I generally acknowledge that it wasn't the intended read of the work but an interpretation of it. Using the fire example above, wind blows fire around, so the wind is destructive too. Sure, that's great.
So I don't mind people having these opinions, even if I would have disagreed with them. What bugs me is just how goddamn certain and adamant people get about it, without being facetious about it. If after viewing you genuinely believe that wind is the root cause of the issues, and not all the examples from the source material showing that it's fire... I just don't know what to tell you.
Of course, this isn't for things like meme, or like I said interpretations of the work. If a bunch of people all independently see it and come to similar conclusions, that's a byproduct of the work. Also similarly, if one person says a theory and everybody likes it, that's also a bit different to me, though it can be a little annoying if it's ran without any other thoughts. Not many things have just a single read to it, so it seems limiting to permanently categorize it. There's also plenty of cases where the work itself does a very poor job getting its point across, probably like this comment right here (sorry, I have a headache).
All in all, in general I'm fine with the whacky opinions that might not be based in the work or even in reality. It gets frustrating when the person is so adamant that their interpretation is the one definitive read and any alternative is dismissed, because it stifles discussion.
zoe bee recently posted a really good bit on media literacy, worth a watch if you have the time.
Calling back to my original post, saying that people shouldn't have opinions, it's a bit of a shitpost and highly satirical, but i think it would be generally productive for society if we started pushing for people to disavow opinions more generally. An opinion is more akin to a bet than anything else, it's just a statement that you make based on preconceived reasoning. There are things opinions should exist for, shit like "i like the color blue" is a really good example.
But when you start getting to shit like "i think the jews control the world banking system" i think it's probably good to take a step back and consider the point of an opinion in the first place.
Personally i like wacky opinions, i have a bunch, but they're inconsequential, it's shit like "i like linux and think that windows is bad" there's a point where it's not just an opinion anymore, and we should stop referring to them as such. Having a different worldview is not an opinion, it's a worldview, and that worldview is probably based on pseudofact in a lot of places.
I feel like we've sort of conflated the idea of an opinion with an "idea" which is wrong.
In fairness sometimes small tiny differences like that do turn out to be significant. But measurement error usually wins out most of the time
Then there's things like:
"Passing through the magnetic field, exactly half the electrons went UP, and exactly half the electrons went DOWN", and classical physics went OUT through the quantum window.
The title on this article is one of my favorite gems:
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/scientific-breakthrough-mysterious-cosmic-metal-190000695.html
Cosmic metal?
Is that some kind of refined variation of unobtanium?
(Without reading more… I’m just going to assume they mean meteoric iron? Though the title does read like a prompt for a b-tier sci-fi that ends with Kirk trying to put his dick into something he absolutely shouldn’t put his dick into.)
Is it an urgent space-gem?
I enjoyed reading that. I'm no chemist or physicist, but that sounds like it could be a cool real world thing. Care to shatter my ignorance?
From what I understand its a Nickel alloy that has good magnetic properties which can replace rare earth alloys for magnets that renewable technology is heavily reliant on. At face value yes this would be pretty big, but in terms of actual real world practicality on replacing rare earth magnets I really couldn't tell you. Most science articles tend to oversell scientific breakthroughs in my experience, science is slow and incremental, if it's a real breakthrough the technology tends to catch fire fairly quickly before any articles are written on it
Science journalism is mostly a joke. Worst of all medical journalism.
Every time
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