[RelativeDelta]

There's also a degree of ideological warfare to consider.

An idea that might sway others to join your enemy's team is a threat to you. If you can, you probably want to prevent others from hearing it.

Blocking, shadow-banning, de-federating and de-platforming all functionally do this.

When the difference between opinion A and opinion B on topic Y is largely determined by how the topic is framed and discussed, you can see why people have a vested interest in denying their opponents the opportunity to speak and be heard.

[PaulHoule]

I am mostly interested in blocking for myself. What other people see doesn’t bother me.

The one area where I’d like to put blocking into the community is with some kind of sentiment analysis, I think angry content is contagious and that it would be a lot of work to make an algorithmic feed more toxic than boosting + chronological feed + explore the most boosted. In fact I would start with making a predictive model of what succeeds in that environment and then filter away the non-toxic.

If you could suppress angry toots in the platform, however I think it would lower the temperature level.

I have looked for an open source sentiment analysis model for social media as opposed to product reviews and so far turned up empty as I’d like one for my own feed (though blocking f5t and t3s keywords works wonders). I have thought about making my own but collecting 5000 angry toots would probably kill me.

[RelativeDelta]

That kind of presupposes that anger is bad, no?

That seems like an assertion more than something that can be proven.

Surely it is right to be angry about threats as anger motivates action to eliminate the threat.

[PaulHoule]

It's like inflammation, no?

If you stub your toe you should have inflammation for a short time as part of a healing process. A lot of people have chronic inflammation, however, for instance their lungs get inflamed from exposure to otherwise harmless pollen and develop asthma. Even if the trigger is removed the inflammatory process can feed on itself which is why someone like that is prescribed anti-inflammatory drugs.

As an acute condition I think anger is helpful if (1) you get mad, and (2) take action to not be mad anymore. If you are angry about something for weeks, months, years, decades, etc. is a chronic condition and no longer helpful even if it is justified, righteous, whatever. My take is that some small amount of anger online, say ε = 0.05 is acute and the remaining 1-ε is chronic and unhelpful.

There are other things that promote engagement (mastodonsters like my flower photos, I can't get enough of people consorting with foxes on YouTube shorts) but anger is one of the most effective of them and online platforms have commercial reasons to promote outrage.

So far as politics go it is just not helpful that anti-vax people are angry at the government because conspiracy theories fill the place that religion used to fill, even in religious people who've given up on the good word of our Saviour and now worship idols like The Donald. Somebody else gets angry because somebody else didn't wear a mask so they wear two masks and tell everyone about this. The story on Twitter was that these people inflame each other but Mastodon, Parler and such show that "one side" can keep itself angry about chronic conditions even when "one side" has been successful about excluding "the other". Thus my ℞.

See

https://www.amazon.com/Anger-Kills-Seventeen-Strategies-Cont...