I found that idea interesting. Will we consider it the norm in the future to have a "firewall" layer between news and ourselves?
I once wrote a short story where the protagonist was receiving news of the death of a friend but it was intercepted by its AI assistant that said "when you will have time, there is an emotional news that does not require urgent action that you will need to digest". I feel it could become the norm.
EDIT: For context, Karpathy is a very famous deep learning researcher who just came back from a 2-weeks break from internet. I think he does not talks about politics there but it applies quite a bit.
EDIT2: I find it interesting that many reactions here are (IMO) missing the point. This is not about shielding one from information that one may be uncomfortable with but with tweets especially designed to elicit reactions, which is kind of becoming a plague on twitter due to their new incentives. It is to make the difference between presenting news in a neutral way and as "incredibly atrocious crime done to CHILDREN and you are a monster for not caring!". The second one does feel a lot like exploit of emotional backdoors in my opinion.
Yeah this is an "unpopular opinion" but I don't believe the lemmyverse in it's current form is sustainable for this reason.
Instances federate with everyone by default. It's only when instances are really egregious that admins will defederate from them.
Sooner or later Lemmy will present more of a target for state actors wishing to stoke foment and such. At that time the only redress will be for admins to defederate with other instances by default, and only federate with those who's moderation policies align with their own.
You might say, the lemmyverse will shatter.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.
End rant.