Fair enough xD

That reminds me. My autistic brother in law deleted his Facebook and asked my wife if she would delete hers. She mods a small community she like being a part of so I can't blame her for not but I got permission to trash mine. Cya Facebook.

Sort of true, but the algorithm that Reddit-like platforms use is transparent and simple (it's just based on likes and dislikes, and I think you can even look up the source for the sorting modes) and hence doesn't directly try to feed you content that'd enrage you. I can just not read the posts about Musk and Trump, since I find most takes on the former bad and don't care much about the latter. Meanwhile, on platforms like Twitter or Tiktok you are directly fed content out of some recommendation ML model trained on user engagement.

(There's also subtler differences. For example, on Reddit/Lemmy/etc, if you hate a post you can dislike it, which will generally make it show up less to people. But on, say, Tumblr, not only are there no dislikes, but if you are really hate a post you can only respond to it by reposting it, therefore spreading it further among your followers! That's an absolutely devious platform-design move that could have been invented directly by Satan himself.)

all hail keyword filter blockers! nowadays i only see trumpet/muskat in posts that don't mention their names in the title, and tbf i don't mind staying a little informed on their latest pro-dystopia moves, but now it's not as much a firehose of bullshit to my face every day all day, but an occasional squirt gun hit

No arugment there. I'm not questioning that corpos make the issue deliberately worse as an engagement engine. That's a fact.

But a lot of people jump from there to assuming those patterns will just vanish without algorithmic intervention, and that's just not true, which can lead to a lot of disappointment when people move to other alternatives.