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Zaleramancer @beehaw.org

Pervasive Political News and Discussion is Suffocating: Please advise.

Hello fellow bees.

I'm exhausted of seeing US politics and world news creep into all the communities in trying to use. I have the vast majority of communities and instances about this blocked for a reason, but no matter how many communities I block it still happens.

I'm not trying to ignore what's going on. I am not feeling the wrath of the privileged at the acknowledge of the suffering of the weak. I devote a specific amount of time each week where I brace myself and gaze upon the horrors so that I can stay informed.

The problems I have with a lot of this is that it seems predominately to be regurgitating the news cycle uncritically. Many posts don't even rephrase the headlines that are purposefully designed to be upsetting.

What I would like is if before someone resposted this kind of thing that they would consider if it's:

Actionable, which is to say it has a clear call to action about the problems it presents.

Significant, which is to say it bears relevance on people's immediate well-being in a way that is not simply a restatement of extant problems.

Useful, which is to say it both represents a useful resource and is presented in a way that makes that easy.

I don't need to see news articles about how 7 out of 10 Republician senators would rather eat a baby than put out a trans person on fire. I know and I don't need to be reminded while trying to find something interesting to read at the bus stop.

If it doesn't do one of the above, I think posting it is contributing to information overload exhaustion that makes people feel so helpless.

At the very least, could we try to keep the stuff restrained to the relevant communities? I already have 10 of the current Beehaw communities blocked because they're either about political news, are dominated by it or represent an undue risk to being suddenly jumpscared by it.

What do you think? Please advise, because I enjoy Beehaw but this is so exhausting.

17 comments

  • So, I have given it some thought. I talked to my partner about it and, honestly, I don't see the point in trying to build or be a part of online communities anymore. I don't like or trust people now. I don't have the patience or goodwill I used to. I'm tired of the same conversations playing out over and over again. Nothing changes. No one values the things I value as much as I do, so everyone always disappoints me in the end.

    It just results in me bringing negativity back into my personal life, and seldom brings me any joy now. I can't expect other people to change things to accommodate my needs, so the only answer I can find is to remove myself from situations that harm me.

    So I'm going to try to stop being active online. Bye, best of luck and well wishes. I think this may be one of the best platforms I've been on in terms of quality of conversation and moderation- great job, but I'm obviously too damaged to function in situations like this.

    Peace ✌️

  • In case you missed it during a break, finding steady ground has a nice guide on building resiliency during resistance. You are not helpless!

    • I appreciate the thought, but I didn't find that useful for my situation. I already think about this all the time, and I am not in a position to responsibly channel any energy away from keeping my loved ones alive and healthy.

  • Idk if I have a solution to your problem, but i agree that sometimes browsing beehaw feels like an exercise in gritting my teeth and exposing myself to the horrors of the world. I wish this space was a little more like reddit in the sense that it would be nice to be here and have conversations that are not about current events, which are so exhausting lately. I make a point of mostly posting about things besides US politics for this reason, bc i feel like other users really have those topics covered. I used to post more in Jokes and Humor because I thought this server really needed some more levity, but I was getting all my memes from Facebook, and then I was trying to not be on FB after the 2024 election, and now the only places I see memes are places where the memes are pretty political. Not so good for the levity problem.

    One idea that might help you: subbing to active non-Beehaw Lemmy communities that are less serious. Most of those communities post more than any one beehaw community, so if you go to the "subscribed" feed and sort by "hot", the majority of posts you see will be from those outside communities. I subbed to 196 for a little while before realizing that that one community dominated my feed bc people be postin on there constantly. I didn't want that, but maybe that would be a boon for you.

    • I am trying to focus on it, it's just I can lose an hour+ whenever I come across a headline that's purpose built to piss people off- because I have to fight myself not to make an entire small essay about why it's irresponsibility presented and generally ineffective.

  • I generally just subscribe to communities that have fun things I'm interested in so that generally remains devoid of politics. Before switching to posts across Beehaw though, I do a mental check on if I'm ready to see how the world is ending today.

    Some days I only stick to subscribed stuff just because I need a break from all that. I'd recommend this approach: subscribe to fun communities across whatever instances have them, and stick to that when you need a break.

  • I think that we would need some kind of tagging system for posts to achieve this, since almost any community could have overlap with politics, especially depending on what you consider to be politics. I'd love a tagging system like that, e.g. "good_news", "bad_news", "political", "non_political", etc, but I don't think Lemmy supports that?

  • Which communities in particular do you find it creeping into?

    • Article about how school lunches require system change in Humanity and Culture

      Five out the the eight last AskBeahaw posts. Six if you include the one that got deleted between me making this post and replying here.

      Your Favorite Celebrity Would Have Supported Hitler in Chat.

      The Psychological Toll of the US Election in Science.

      I'm not sure about LGBTQ+ anymore, since I blocked it a while ago because of the drip of news about how it's getting incrementally closer to being legal for me to be hunted for sport.

      • Thank you for the examples. Chat is chat, and we're probably not going to enact any changes to it.

        The humanity and cultures and science posts are both quite relevant and in the appropriate community. School lunches are not really political news and discussion so much as it is highlighting a gap in the system in a particular part of our culture and it is a discussion and reflections upon what we value as a society. A study on psychological toll of literally anything is science, and thus belongs there.

        This is a community. We do our best to keep discussions in the relevant places, but there is often broad overlap and unfortunately no way to curate everything for everyone. I understand and vibe with the desire to keep oneself sane in the increasingly hostile world we live in, but I'm not sure there's an amenable solution that doesn't end up catering to you in specific at the cost of the rest of the community. I want to see the articles you posted in both humanity and cultures and science, and I don't think they are more appropriately slated for the politics sub and I suspect others feel similarly because neither were reported for being in the wrong location.

      • I can certainly understand wanting to keep your exposure to these topics to a certain time and not be bombarded throughout the day. A lot of us would probably be better off if that was something we could do. That said, I think Gaywallet is right that this will be difficult due to the way that Beehaw is - our communities are a lot broader than ones on, say, reddit or other Lemmy instances for the most part, which means that a "no politics" rule is going to be impractical in a lot of cases.

        How do you normally browse Lemmy/Beehaw? If you're accessing via browser it may be more difficult, but if you mostly browse on Mobile using a Lemmy app I know that some of them have keyword filters that you might be able to use to catch some of these types of posts. The School Lunch example would probably be difficult, but the other two you could probably have prevented from showing up in your feed with a filter like that.

        When I'm browsing on Android I've been using Voyager which I know has a filter like this under "Filters and Blocks" in the settings menu.

17 comments