What happens when you trade doomscrolling for hopescrolling

They felt that spending time intentionally seeking out solutions journalism about environmental problems being solved, human health and welfare advances, diseases being eradicated, renewable energy adoption rates, and advances in childhood education (and more!) was itself joyful.

Interesting how this reminds me of other conversations, both here and in meatspace, about intentionality. With so many services trying to spoonfeed users recommendations and algorithmic content (let alone the recent ever-growing onslaught of AI slop), I've also found a lot of peace in intentional consumption. I recently cleaned a lot of negative and spammy producers out of my RSS feeds, and it definitely helped my headspace.

The only problem I have with this 'hopescrolling' idea is that we're all still married to enshittified, engagement-juicing social media companies. Sure, you can try to push the algorithm in a different direction for yourself... but these companies are masters of manipulation and heavily incentivized to increase engagement. I'm not sure I would bet on "sleepy me" or "drunk me" continually outfoxing their attempts to enrage me through bait in the feed.

We need to somehow change the incentives of social media companies to better align them with mental health. That's why I like Mastodon, for example: instances are typically small, volunteer-run schemes that would rather you engage less so they don't run up the server bills too high. But obviously Facebook, Twitter/X, Instagram, Blue Sky, Threads, TikTok, etc all want users to spend more time scrolling, looking at ads and recommendations. And I'm not sure there's any way to change that, save boycotting those companies. But even that has problems, as I've experienced, because if you're not on Facebook, you don't see community and school events, if you're not on Instagram, you don't see holiday hours and special events at businesses, and if you're not on Twitter, you don't see official US government communications.

I'm a little curious to see how well this strategy works.

Not to contribute to the doom mysel, but I'm reminded of the fact that the few aggregators of positive news I have seen often fall into the pattern of featuring news like "Orphan-crushing machine plans to crush 3% fewer orphans per year by 2040". Like it's really incremental progress and/or it just serves to remind me of how bad some things in the world are in the first place.