/r/newzealand is often remembered as having negative vibes, and tons of complaining. I think the major contributor to those bad vibes are the clickbait / ragebait articles from Stuff and NZ Herald.

For some reason people kept upvoting them, even though the articles clearly never added anything of worth. The discussions around the content didn’t go anywhere, and were often just people having a whinge.

Is there a way to filter them out on Lemmy?

Edit: The way I filter them out is by blocking anyone that posts links, but there might be another way.

  • gibberish_driftwood@lemmy.nz
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    1 year ago

    Mine is possibly an unpopular opinion but to me it’s seemed that a person’s view of whether something is clickbait can often depend a lot on what they think of the topic generally. There’s lots of crap posted in r/nz but, imho, it’s often more in the discussions in r/nz than in the articles being linked to which could be legit and comparatively reasonable for publication in media.

    I think social media doesn’t necessarily help itself, either. Sometimes stories can make a lot of sense in the context that a newspaper or website editor has originally published them. Maybe it’s printed nearby other related articles that explore different angles or add more context, or as part of a series of alternative opinions intended to give readers multiple perspectives, or buried in a section that in that publication’s context would normally only be explored by people looking for very specific stuff rather than on a front page.

    If you choose only to get your media with intermittent deep links served up by a social media portal, though, then not only is that context often lost, but we also often prioritise just reading a discrete and isolated headline before being directed into a stream of comments telling us what to think about something we’ve not even read.