this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2025
62 points (88.8% liked)
Technology
60306 readers
4631 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Well yeah, before the internet, it was harder to find like-minded people, so you engaged with whoever was close to you, like family and neighbors.
The internet made it a lot easier to find like-minded people and ignore everyone else. I think that's the main reason we're so polarized today. Just look at Lemmy, it's basically all leftists, and even the conservative areas are just leftists making fun of conservatives.
If you put moderation on the client, there's a chance that people from various backgrounds will use it and just moderate out the stuff they don't agree with, and people who want a mix can have it too. At least that's the hope.
I think one reason that is often overlooked in that polarization is that there are a lot fewer places in RL too where you have to interact with others in a more than superficial way or even can do so if you actively choose to do so.
A big reason for that is cars which isolate people as they travel from place to place and another is the reshaping of our cities into large homogeneous parts, each just for a group of people with similar income and culture.
Perhaps, but at least my experience with mass transit and walking is that people largely don't interact directly and are doing their own thing.
I think the biggest thing to blame is smartphones. Before phones became commonplace, a few people would wear headphones or whatever, but most didn't. I had lots of conversations on buses and trains and at stops and stations. But now everyone is on their phones instead.