It feels like the internet is a lot healthier when you pause before sharing or reacting to anything, I mean literally never doing instant shares or instant likes or instant comments.
Even a few minutes thinking time can help you avoid falling into the 😡 trap, not just about politics but things in general.
It would be interesting if there was a fork of Mastodon where you literally couldn't interact with a post for a few minutes after you've first seen it.
@feditips @stux when combined with sentiment analysis, you could probably compare two groups--one with a forced delay and one without--and see if the community becomes "healthier".
It would be interesting if toxicity/health of a community was optimized by social media companies as much as they optimize for engagement.
They would make no money from health so a for-profit organisation would never do this. It would have to be some kind of outside monitoring and regulation.
Also a lot of users (most users?) wouldn't want a delay like this, so there's danger of self-selection (people who want delay being more thoughtful anyway?).
Perhaps a basic problem of the internet that it allows instant information retrieval and transmission, depriving us of the healthy thinking time from older media :(
