this whole thing sounds like desert camel music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LR511iAedYU
Don’t worry, you don’t need to watch the whole thing. He repeats his point multiple times :
Basically, by catering to generic ideas instead of authentic ones, you are being robbed of cultural exposure and reinforcing biases and simple perspectives you have instead of growing.
Yeah, when someone does a stereotypical accent you associate with something, it conforms more to your ideas of how your language sounds when made by a foreigner. It doesn’t make you understand what the accent actually sounds like, and WHY it sounds that way. It’s nice for you, because it panders to you, instead of treating you like an adult.
Also, it’s disingenuous to bring french accents into this, since the main problem is that the stereotypes being presented of ethnic minorities are often used to ridicule them, and deny them prosperity. That’s the difference, the french guy is ,moving from one well of place to the next and people aren’t going to deny him promotions or whatever. However, to Indian people, or children of Indians, patterns of bullying and marginalisation still exist and are exasperated by the stereotypes.
Your ideas, and some in this thread are quite neat.
One thing to bear in mind when working with systems is that you need to use the right tool for the right problem, and to use people tools for people problems and technical tools for technical problems.
This is a people problem.
One of the things that have been successful is branching communities; a good example on lemmy is linux.
There are communities specifically for linux shitposts and memes and easy communication. There are ones for news. There are ones for noobs. And there are ones for discussion of linux in general.
This way, you have easy shit that doesn’t drown out the main idea, while still feeding back into and out of the main idea.
However, this can lead to mod burnout if too many people leak into the wrong area with the wrong posts.
Something that might work nicely is to allow the user to set up ratios of how often they want to see stuff from whichever theme/variation on that theme. 30% news, 20% memes, 50% general discussion.
Or they can set it to 90% memes and 10% general discussion, and see stuff that’s different.