this post was submitted on 12 Nov 2025
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Isn't it only true for algorithmic feed social media? Is lemmy safe from that over-representation?
Yeah, most of what the article complains about is algorithmic social media and how it boosts engagement of any kind, whether positive or negative. This leads to "extremist" takes gaining ground easier then moderate takes. Combined with algorithmic siloing, echo chambers etc. That we've heard a million times, make people more radical and disconnected from reality.
The "algorithm" most people use on lemmy is just most up voted, so controversial takes rarely rise to the top. A lot of the stuff would be considered controversial outside of here, but within lemmy there's a "hard left" consensus where the moderates are probably democratic socialists.
Lemmy also benefits from not tracking total karma or whatever. Per-post or per-comment scores at most.
From my experience, Beehaw disabling downvotes furthers this even more. This means that people can either voice their disagreement, report the post/comment for violating the rules, or ignore it and move on. There's no way to anonymously "punish" a post you disagree with (unless it violates the rules), and not as much incentive to stick to the echo chamber either.
I've never gotten the point of upvoting or downvoting as the main for of engagement with "social" media. I may do one or the other once a week when I get a chuckle or see an absurd take on journalism that isn't worth engaging with, but simply clicking an icon is scarcely participation.
People with actual things to say is far more satisfying than facing a Hatfield-McCoy standoff.
It seems a lot of your critiques are more of the media in general and not social media.
Yeah and if I got my news from Fox News or the New York post it would be easy to believe the cities are full of gangs of maurading immigrants. At least lemmy doesn't pretend to be a "fair and balanced" representative of the US. Everyone here knows lemmy is far left relative to the US just like they know everyone's not using or interested in Linux .
As for the favoring of longer form more in depth content vs short form out of context content, that's just what people like and are drawn to regardless of the media type. More people will watch TV news with shorter segments and less content then a newspaper, and more people will watch late night with even shorter form and less context then TV news. And then there are people who don't watch or engage with the news at all because they have other things to do.
If anything lemmy is better then a lot of the other social media because it doesn't disincentivize links. Most other platforms the algorithm is optimizing for watch time / keeping you on the platform, so links to long form news articles get down rated because if you click on that link and go to that site for 5 mins, that's 5 mins your not spending on the platform. For that sample you took half of the top posts were links to articles, see how long it would take you to find one article link scrolling through tik tok.
Again this is a problem with all media, if it bleeds it leads has been an adage for centuries.
In general lemmy is showing people what they want to see, which media in general has always tried to do. Yes there are a lot of valid critiques of the behavior that this prerogative incentivizes, but that's different than the critiques of algorithmic social media that prioritizes engagement and staying on the platform, which brings in a whole new set of problematic incentives in addition to the standard problems of media.