I want to curate my feed to mostly just contain serious people. Doesn’t matter whether I agree with their views or not - it’s all about how those views are expressed. So many people on social media are just thrilled to have a megaphone and the ability to make noise. I don’t like noise.
For example, right now there are people who opened the thread just because I put “AI” in the title and they can’t wait to share their views about AI in the comments as if it’s meaningfully relevant to what I’m saying. They know what I mean, but you can’t just miss an opportunity to score a few points dunking on AI, can you?
Whatever gene makes people want to shout these thought-terminating clichés, upvote others who do it, and find some sense of belonging from it is clearly missing from me. I’d rather just not even hear about it - it’s extremely exhausting and has never achieved anything worthwhile.
It doesn’t really matter whether most people like the smell of your farts or not - you’re still poisoning the air.
I’m making no demands on other people here. They can be jerks or virtue-signal as much as they want. I’d just prefer not to see it myself because I find no value in it. I’m not trying to stop them - I’m trying to exclude myself from it.
And this is me trying to be the change. In the ideal case, more and more people would start enabling those filters and all of a sudden the people making noise would see their engagement dropping because more and more of their posts are getting caught in content filters. That would send the signal that if you want your voice to be heard, you actually need to put some effort into it.