The "algorithm" most people use on lemmy is just most up voted, so controversial takes rarely rise to the top. A lot of the stuff would be considered controversial outside of here, but within lemmy there's a "hard left" consensus where the moderates are probably democratic socialists.

Right. And that is the radicalizing echo chamber effect - affective polarization - the article talks about.

That is to say, if I go to all, probably half of the top 10 or 20 posts will be low context memes or screenshots of Twitter talking about Republicans doing horrible things - because those are what's most upvoted. And if I go into comments I'm going to see calls for violence and censorship and rejections of compromise and common ground. And if I got my news and my understanding of the world from Lemmy, it would be easy to believe a whole bunch of people in the United States have given up on civil society and committed themselvesto political violence.

(Edit: I just checked the top ten posts on all, sorted by active. Three articles about tech (two about the new Steam hardware and one about Google's new side loading policy), two articles on the shutdown, four leftist memes and one anti-AI Twitter screenshot. I wasn't too far off.)

Sorting posts by most upvoted and most active is a simple algorithm, but it is an algorithm, and it does leads to the same harms the article discusses - because low effort content can be read and upvoted quickly while scrolling through Lemmy, so an unsourced meme or one paragraph Twitter post gets hundreds of upvotes, while longform articles only get a handful of upvotes because people don't want to take the time to read them while scrolling.

Of course, the most passionate, angry, dramatic, and emotion-provoking memes get the most upvotes and go to the top of the algorithm. And because Lemmy is full of leftists, the memes that make them passionate and angry are mostly about right wing people doing bad stuff.

There's a common saying on the left, "you are not immune to propaganda". Similarly, you are not immune to the harms of algorithmic social media, whether you use Lemmy or Reddit.

(And that's not even going into how certain instances post actual, literal, propaganda, which is a whole other story.)

It seems a lot of your critiques are more of the media in general and not social media.

if I got my news and my understanding of the world from Lemmy, it would be easy to believe a whole bunch of people in the United States have given up on civil society and committed themselvesto political violence.

Yeah and if I got my news from Fox News or the New York post it would be easy to believe the cities are full of gangs of maurading immigrants. At least lemmy doesn't pretend to be a "fair and balanced" representative of the US. Everyone here knows lemmy is far left relative to the US just like they know everyone's not using or interested in Linux .

As for the favoring of longer form more in depth content vs short form out of context content, that's just what people like and are drawn to regardless of the media type. More people will watch TV news with shorter segments and less content then a newspaper, and more people will watch late night with even shorter form and less context then TV news. And then there are people who don't watch or engage with the news at all because they have other things to do.

If anything lemmy is better then a lot of the other social media because it doesn't disincentivize links. Most other platforms the algorithm is optimizing for watch time / keeping you on the platform, so links to long form news articles get down rated because if you click on that link and go to that site for 5 mins, that's 5 mins your not spending on the platform. For that sample you took half of the top posts were links to articles, see how long it would take you to find one article link scrolling through tik tok.

Of course, the most passionate, angry, dramatic, and emotion-provoking memes get the most upvotes and go to the top of the algorithm.

Again this is a problem with all media, if it bleeds it leads has been an adage for centuries.

In general lemmy is showing people what they want to see, which media in general has always tried to do. Yes there are a lot of valid critiques of the behavior that this prerogative incentivizes, but that's different than the critiques of algorithmic social media that prioritizes engagement and staying on the platform, which brings in a whole new set of problematic incentives in addition to the standard problems of media.