People love to talk about how ‘the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of patriots.’
It’s easy to talk about big dramatic battles.
The truth is that it’s really a never-ending struggle that requires sweat.
How many people bother to show up for primary elections? How many are willing to get a petition signed to get a good candidate on the ballot?
I do those things constantly and the fact that other people don’t infuriates me.
It’s like a group project and I’m doing my part but we still all fail because nobody else gives a damn.
I hate democracy and people now.
The quote is that the tree is “refreshed” with blood, which is an important distinction. Also, Jefferson wrote it after the founding of the US - he understood that our democracy is not an exception to this cycle.
Yes, if we all did our civic duty not just to vote, but to actually inform ourselves about the choices, we’d be able to maintain democracy potentially indefinitely, but the reality is that a huge portion of people are complacent, and won’t take even the simplest of actions until they’re forced to. So, democracy degrades slowly as it’s desperately propped up by the few who understand its importance until it finally fails enough to start really affecting the people who “aren’t really into politics,” by which point its too late to use sweat instead of blood.
We water the tree with the sweat of the few, but when that inevitably isn’t enough and it starts to wither, we refresh it with blood of the many.
What did the Arab spring give the people in the end?
Syria? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Lybia? never ending civil war between factions controlled by foreign interests
Tunesia? temporary improvements now to be revoked by a new authoritarian
Egypt? temporary improvements followed by an US backed coup installing an even worse military dictatorMaybe we were just naive in thinking that social media back then wasn’t already doing the bidding of governments against people.
Just took em a second to figure out how.
Turns out all it took was algorithms promoting hate speech, conservative view points and other rage bait.
As soon as the algorithm become engagement based, instead of “positive reaction” based,
ie. algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative, when it used to promote posts based on positive reaction.
So now ragebait dominates most social media algorithms.
algorithms now promote a post by how many reactions it has recieved, even if these reactions are negative
ESPECIALLY if those reactions are negative. Rage and fear are THE top engagement drivers and engagement means retention means ad impressions means dollars.
That ot also means the end of democracy is immaterial to the billionaire ghouls in charge, of course.
Yeah, it’s precisely why I stopped using every social media except the fediverse. It was toxic to my mental health.
I feel safe assuming it’s been similarly toxic to everyone else’s, just some people haven’t zeroed in on that being the problem.
Even Lemmy was like this. Especially with the default comment sort “active”, which promotes comments that lead to arguments. My experience has been better since I switched to “top”.
I still haven’t found a good post sort that works for me. “Hot” and “Scaled” literally only promote stuff posted in the past two hours. “Top” is kinda sad because you always see posts 1 day old, and “Active” has the negative engagement problem.
The best solution I’ve found is be on an instance with downvotes disabled and sort by “active” but it isn’t perfect.
I just sort by newest over 12/24 hours. I’ve found I tend to argue much less with idiots if I get in and out before the troublemakers show up.
I usually go by top of the last 6 hours and top of the last 12 hours. is that just a thing in my app?
I feel the same way and now typically use “Top 6 Hours”
…which is a actually how I found this thread.
I always sort by New and let the chaos chips fall where they may
maybe we should be able to blend several of these like i’ll take 20% of top day and 30% of active and 5% controversial… lemmy would grow more of the content was more suitable.
Thanks for the tips. I’m going to play around with it. Mine is set to hot currently, but maybe that’s not my cuppa.
Also strawman liberal arguments to make living strawmen of privileged but sheltered children who won’t know any better than to make fools of themselves in public forums.
The oligarchs got scared, then they got even.
that’s part of why there’s saudi money in twitter
Monetization of human weaknesses. By this I mean our biased, emotional, prone-to-addiction brains being colonized for data and ad-revenue.
Or maybe mediums are inherently neutral?
I disagree. Few things are truly neutral. What people usually consider neutral is just what’s normal at the time. The structures within which we live and express ourselves are shaped by people and institutions.
