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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 10th, 2025

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  • (Disclaimer: This article seems to have been posted to several communities on lemmy, so I’m going to comment this under every single one I find.)

    Hmm, I’m not liking this headline. Let’s try rewriting it a bit, shall we?

    Why YOU (the person writing this article) are knowingly volunteering for Trump, and how to stop trying to blame everyone else for it.

    Yeah, that’s better.

    Every time Trump says or posts something bizarre — whether it’s a typo, a wild conspiracy theory, or an AI-generated image of himself as the pope — social media explodes.

    Led by who? The media. People like you, the author of this very article, writing articles with the explicit purpose of generating outrage so they can sell more ads. You know you are making this problem worse and you don’t care, so stop trying to blame it on everyone else.

    This tactic is shockingly effective

    Because you enable it, you platform it, you amplify it. If people like you would stop writing articles that amount to ‘notorious fire hose of bullshit spews even more bullshit’ it would be a whole fucking lot less effective.

    Those who amplify Trump’s absurd statements into top news stories and endless scandals aren’t undermining his agenda

    That’s you and journalists like you. So fucking stop it. Stop writing articles about how Trump’s presidency is Putin’s wet dream (looks like someone had the good sense to delete that one), how Trump is going to invade Canada, ‘dire warnings’ about Trump’s fraud, etc. With your current article blaming everyone but yourself for this problem the hypocrisy is finally piled high enough that I can no longer ignore it. So please, in the kindest possible terms, I would like to cordially invite you to fuck ALL the way off with your nonsense.

    Since you went to the trouble of making a list, let’s go through your points one by one, shall we?

    1. Understand his strategy … By flooding the public with scandal after scandal, lie after lie, they create confusion, fatigue, and a sense of helplessness.

    And you would think the people who work for media, who are ostensibly the most media-liteate among us, would have recognized their own prominent place in it. It’s not ‘them’ flooding the world with their scandals and lies, it’s YOU. You are creating in articles like the above (not to mention this one) the helplessness that you purport to be working against.

    1. Be ruthlessly selective with your attention … Skip outrage bait.

    Like the 3 articles I mentioned above that you wrote?

    1. Be mindful what you share … Ask yourself before you share: Is this helping people understand, organize, or act

    Practice what you fucking preach.

    1. Focus on meaningful action … Take a moment to honestly compare how much time you’ve spent absorbed in Trump scandals with the time you’ve put into meaningful efforts or thoughtful planning to help protect democracy.

    And how much time have you spent on articles like the above ginning up exactly the sort of outrage that you now purport to be against? How much meaningful effort and thoughtful planning have you contributed to this? If this article is your best example I’m gonna go ahead and guess basically none.

    1. Keep the faith … Making us feel afraid and helpless is a key goal of authoritarian confusion tactics.

    And, apparently, a key goal of media shills like you who enable it.

    1. Help others tune out the noise … When you see outrage bait spreading online, speak up.

    Here the fuck I am, speaking up.

    and why it’s so important to stay focused on what actually matters: useful, actionable information.

    None of which is in this article. Instead what we find is victim-blaming, projection, and a frankly shocking lack of self-awareness that you are the problem, not the solution. Nobody on social media is doing original reporting here, they’re all linking articles written by people like you, and blaming the victim is the oldest fucking trick in the book to try to shift the blame from yourself: ‘If only you would all recycle harder (or, what seems to be your personal favorite, stop eating meat) we wouldn’t have climate change,’ ‘If only you would all put down your phones we wouldn’t have an epidemic of loneliness’, ‘If only you would all vote the way I think you should we would live in a magical happy place where nothing ever goes wrong.’

    All bullshit, all the time. But that’s okay, I have a few of my own:

    If only the media would stop being a willing mouthpiece for fascism.

    If only the media would stop chasing ad revenue and start actually trying to inform the populace with unbiased, non-sensational truth about what’s actually going on.

    If only the media would stop blasting every fucking word Trump and his bullshit-factory crank out.

    If only people like you would stop telling us everything is our fault and take some fucking responsibility for your not-insignificant part in this.




  • You know, I just realized I don’t get it (or at least not as much) with Voyager on mobile, and I didn’t even think about it. I’m using the Alexandrite UI on desktop and it’s bad about it, I haven’t found any options for it in the settings or anything. I noticed it a few times on reddit, but I was subbed to so many communities and they were so much more active that it almost never happened. Oh well.



  • Yeah, I like Scaled, I’ve switched to using that now. Thanks!

    And yeah with Active I’ve noticed it seems to put the same posts at the top if I check it multiple times a day (I’ll often pop in for 20-30 minutes while waiting on something else or whatever), so hopefully Scaled does a better job about mixing that up.

    As an aside: I am subbed to several political/news communities and I keep seeing the same post cross-posted to all 3 of them back to back, do you know of a way to avoid that? I want the other content from those subs but seeing the same ‘human fire hose of shit spews some more shit’ article 2-3 times in a row is annoying.



  • Good to know. Yeah I’m pretty chill with MLs. I enjoy debating politics (and religion and philosophy for that matter), but I see no point in getting cranky in the pants or holding a grudge or whatever about it.

    I was dimly aware of Lemmygrad.ml and sorta decided to avoid it so I’ll just keep doing that (also I get the impression lemmygrad is defederated on many mainstream instances.) Slpnk.net is the other one I was considering, but it seems kinda dead compared to lemmy.ml or hexbear.

    Alright, I think I’ll just go ahead and make an account on lemmy.ml and see how it goes. I’m already subbed to many of the communities on it and slrpnk.net and a couple on hexbear (tho I don’t seem to see posts on those very often). Thank you for the advice.


  • Fair enough, thanks for your advice. And yeah even if there was karma I wouldn’t give a shit; I was on reddit for more than a decade on the same account and I couldn’t even tell you what ballpark my karma was in when I left cause I cared so little. Mainly the inconvenience is in rejoining all the communities I care about, but it’s not that big a deal.


  • Thank you for taking the time to provide an in-depth answer.

    I have not seen much of that, but I believe you. And yeah, I left reddit because I got temp-banned for ‘advocating violence’ because I said Luigi didn’t deserve to go to prison for what he did. It was bullshit and got lifted on appeal, but not before I also got perma-banned for some bullshit about evading a ban with multiple accounts (I’ve only ever had one account in the ~14 years I was on reddit, I never even made throwaways or anything.) It was also lifted on appeal, but by that point I was pretty fed up at how fashy and trigger-happy reddit admins (not even mods) are. I didn’t realize that was also a problem on lemmy.world, that’s disheartening.

    I am an ancom myself with what most liberals would consider some pretty spicy takes on politics so I feel like it’s only a matter of time until I run afoul of the bullshit-police here too if it’s that bad. Do you think it’s worth making a new account on lemmy.ml (the only other instance I’ve even considered, but the description talks a lot about FOSS and not much about socialism/etc so I wasn’t sure) and starting over? What’s your opinion on other more socialist-focused instances like Hexbear (or others I may not be aware of)? Or is there some way to transfer my account? I’m still pretty new, like a couple months old, so it’s not the end of the world if I have to start over, but it’s kind of a pain so I’m not sure if it’s worth it.