It's the winter that makes summer so enjoyable. Can't appreciate nice weather if it's like that every day.
Oh don't worry. They're fine.
With that much money I could buy 8 houses like the one I live in right now.
The only reason I don’t do the same thing is that I want to be aware of how prevalent the toxicity is.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with the logic here. I did a similar thing years ago by pretty much stopping paying attention to the news. You'd think that would lead to me not being aware of what's going on in the world but turns out one does not simply just turn off the news. When something actually newsworthy happens I'll hear about it just the same way as everyone else. It's effectively impossible to avoid even if you try to. The only kind of news I more or less totally insulated myself from is celebrity gossip and other similar entirely meaningless trash.
Also I don't block people to create an echo chamber for myself. More often than not it's not what people say that get them blocked, it's how they say it. I'm more than willing to engage an actual nazi on a debate as long as they're approaching it in a good faith even to some extent. It's people that are just throwing shit that I'm trying to get rid of. I'm basically just trying to improve the signal-to-noise ratio but the noise will only get quieter but never dissapear completely.
Grocery trips are just a tiny portion of from where my fuel costs come from. I use the truck for work. I'd save practically no money at all by walking to the store.
Oh yeah there's definitely a lot to improve. A ton of people would be more than willing to ditch their cars if there was viable alternatives that don't massively inconvenience our daily lives.
There is a grocery store only about 500 meters from my house but small ones like that are so much more expensive than the one I go to now. I'm easily saving my monthly fuel costs just by shopping there.
This is the only way. Ruthlessly blocking everything you're not interested about seeing.
By blocklist on Lemmy is 1200+ users and communities long and even though I still see plenty of toxicity the difference is still noticeable. The only issue with it is that it's quite blunt tool. An user might be making inflammatory comments only on threads about a certain topic and then get blocked for it but then I'm not seeing any of their other content either which rarely is all toxic.
Negativity get's more engagement on Lemmy aswell. The vast majority of content on the front page is about the world being on fire.
It's not inherently toxic but I'd argue the experience is a net-negative. Social media rewards all the bad and inflammatory behaviour that makes it so. The incentives are not aligned with being nice to each other.
One of the culprits in my mind are visible like counts. The ability to up- and downvote messages is a good one but the scores shouldn't be visible to anyone. Comments like "ACAB" or "eat the rich" bring zero value into the discussion but rather are just meant to fish likes from your own team and annoy the opposition. I doubt that removing that feature now would no longer solve the issue but it's one of the main things that trained us to act that way.
Personally I'm hoping for more powerful tools for curating our feeds. It's probably going to have to be AI based as I can't imagine how else you'd do that but on top of just simple word and domain filters (which even lemmy doesn't have) we need smart filters aswell that you could enable which filters out topics you don't like seeing. Kind of like with enough people using adblockers it would discourage ads-based bussines models and incentivices companies to come up with alternatives. With enough people using similar blockers for toxic content the people creating would quickly realize they're shouting into the void.
Salty liquorice ice cream, probably.
It's not a weird taste to me but I'd imagine the vast majority of non-Finnish people would absolutely hate it.
Would be quite surprising if there was an ads-based platform that doesn't do that. Age and gender are among the most relevant things when targeting ads.
I live in Finland