Turning over to the round side seems to have garnered a lot more views. I wonder whether he would have stayed flat if it were otherwise. After all many more are making content online in the hopes of money and fame than in some quest for truth.

I am disgusted and appalled.

We need to look outside of social media. Doesn’t mean the media we consume don’t play a role in shaping opinions. The short attention spans and highly simplified messaging encouraged by endless scrolling on social media platforms play right into the hands of populists who trade in slogans, scapegoats and easy solutions. The algorithm takes care of the rest. Once you’ve expressed an interest in politically edgy content, you will be served more of that, to the point where your perception of reality will be completely shaped by that.

Although I disagree that the main problem is politicization, a lot of what you said otherwise concurs with my experience. The depth just isn’t there. Maybe it’s a numbers thing. You’d see many simplistic takes left and right on Reddit too, but given the sheer volume of contributors, more often than not someone would have some true insight to share, a well thought out rebuttal, a reasoned argument, or just some humor to lighten up the conversation, and that would rise to the top. So top comments were usually guaranteed to be worthwhile and low effort comments would become easier to ignore. At least in the better subreddits. Not so much the case on Lemmy. A lot of low effort sarcasm, political slogans, and tribalism in the comments. I do like Lemmy on the whole though, so sticking with it for the time being.

It’s become more efficient to get basic info on virtually any topic by just asking an LLM like ChatGPT and that could be a serious threat to Google Search. People might form the habit of asking AIs for everything and then go to Google Search only when they want to dig deeper / find relevant articles etc. So I assume they added their own AI right into Search in an effort to continue being the first (and perhaps only) place one goes to for information.

Easy for China to say, means very little as they are not relevant to the conflict, not even indirectly that I know of. Political posturing more like.

Sure, ok; it just read like that. Maybe I misunderstood.

I am not sure that I would share your attitude in “benefiting” a developing nation with your perspectives, but yeah, death threats not cool in any case. As I said in my original comment, there may be more to this than meets the eye. Maybe these guys are being jerks and intolerant of other viewpoints more often than not, can’t tell. As far as I’m concerned it is ok for people to argue passionately, angrily even, so long as they do not seek to undermine discussion or, worse, hurt others just because they disagree with them.

Good idea, if anyone can point me to it or to specific examples, I would appreciate it. Also do not care enough to start an investigation by myself.

Fwiw, I wouldn’t judge an entire instance by a handful individual posts. Users will be users. But still, some evidence would be a lot better than no evidence. Plenty of evidence would be even better.

I understand that they are staunchly pro-communist and also take a pro-Palestine, including some of them (many of them?) a more clearly pro-Hamas stance. And that all of this could annoy many of the centrist liberals that seem to dominate here. But from perusing the lemmygrad link I do not see clear signs of hate speech, certainly not a clear hate speech agenda as you would see with some hate groups. And judging by the comments on here many seem to be happy to be “rid of them” because they are “annoying”, or “immature”, or “tankies”, or whatever. It really reads largely like “their opinions annoy me” so I’m glad they’re gone.

There may be more to it, I don’t know, but personally I wouldn’t like lemmy.world, an otherwise fine instance by all means, to become a centrist liberal silo where no other opinion outside (mostly US-centric) liberal orthodoxy is heard. So yeah, not convinced that this was the right decision, basically because of a lack of evidence.

One is a savings bank, the other an investment bank. The problem is these aren’t separate anymore.