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.
It's like instant reactions on social media bypass our intellectual capacity, channel some kind of primitive violent rage from before we evolved proper brains.
@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 :(