[spike021]

social media is only bad if you don't curate what you're looking at. most the platforms these days have features to block posts containing certain words or hashtags.

i've made a lot of great friends using social media over the years both where i live and in other countries.

[blharr]

Most social media is actively against that, feeding you recommendations to keep you on the platform.

[spike021]

The only site that actively funnels me with recommendations is Youtube at this point. In most cases that's fine for my taste because I use youtube as more of a learning platform for things like car mechanics, photography, etc. So it doesn't serve me anything toxic.

For the other social media platforms, my setup shields me from that pretty well.

[LtWorf]

It's bad because you can't curate it. For example on fb there is no way to disable reels.

[spike021]

I only use group pages on FB, so there are no reels.

[pndy]

Please. I have an extensive file with tags I've put into use to "curate" content on mastodon and bluesky. It works somehow on mastodon but the "main" server in their admins wisdom decided recently to remove live feeds to make experience supposedly more appealing. And now users are limited either to trending or manually searching posts or browsing by tags. They seriously limited exploration and interaction with new content there.

Bluesky on the other hand still serves me the content I tried to block or filter out. And whenever I go into other feeds in the end I'll be flooded with never ending stream of x-rated drawn content that I don't want to see. Interests set or not - I can't escape that stuff. My partner complains for same things.

Facebook in my last days there decided to limit posts from my friends because I wasn't active enough to feed the algorithm, and instead filled main activity stream with generated graphics. Instagram was somewhat fine up until bought by facebook - after that interacting with any content would poison your stream with stuff for months.

Reddit has become an interaction and content clown show once they started pushing for this "modern" interface. I won't create there account ever again due to how they started treating their users.

So there's this "curation" for me.

[spike021]

It seems like a lot of your issues with the major platforms are from years ago?

Instagram and X never show me political topics or hype-related things because I am quick to enter related keywords into the filtering mechanisms.

Instagram can sometimes try to force through things but in general my feed has been pretty clean to the extent that rather than showing me random garbage it'll just say I've reached the end of the latest posts from people I follow. Besides, most people I want to keep up with these days post more often to stories. If anything the issue with stories is more frequent ads/sponsored posts but those are different from just recommendation junk.