(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)
We all know how awful Reddit was when a user mentioned their gender. Immediate harassment, DMs, etc. It’s probably improved over the years? But still awful.
Until recently, Lemmy was the most progressive and supportive of basic human dignity of communities I had ever followed. I have always known this was a majority male platform, but I have been relatively pleased to see that positive expressions of masculinity have won out.
All of that changed with the recent “bear vs man” debacle. I saw women get shouted down just for expressing their stories of being sexually abused, repeatedly harassed, dogpiled, and brigaded with downvotes. Some of them held their ground, for which I am proud of them, but others I saw driven to delete their entire accounts, presumably not to return.
And I get it. The bear thing is controversial; we can all agree on this. But that should never have resulted in this level of toxicity!
I am hoping by making this post I can kind of bring awareness to this weakness, so that we can learn and grow as a community. We need to hold one another accountable for this, or the gender gap on this site is just going to get worse.
the internet is a machine that turns attention into currency, it does this at the same rate for negative and positive attention, and negative attention is a lot easier to get. you just burst onto a platform unbidden and say something that will piss people off. You get rewarded, the platform gets rewarded, everybody wins except the users who have a gross toxic time in the comments. Lemmy may not run ads, but it’s structured the same way that other platforms are and we already have a way of using those types of platforms built into our cultural knowledge, so Lemmy just turns into a loose confederation of reddits.
pretty much.
I’ve been using this platform for 6 mos. and it’s getting worse and worse with the negativity… because that’s what drives interaction for the vast majority of users.
people who see a funny joke will laugh and move on, maybe upvote. people who get offended by it downvote it, reply, and hope that you reply so they can continue to harass you.
honestly? lemme is teaching me that it’s probably time to get away from social media as a concept. I’m having a tough time with it though. It’s too automatic to pop open a new tab and type “l” or “r” or “f” or “t” and then just hit enter and get sucked into the outrage and/or validation loops
social media sites worked when they were small networks of your friends and family and peer group. when you already have a common basic.
reddit was great 10 years ago because it was mostly nerds who agreed to redditique. i remember when i could argue with libretarians and feel like i was learning about shit, because people wrote in sentences and paragraphs.
then 2016 happened, reddit exploded in a few years, and it all went to shit. it became a meme/image/vid board, and comments were mostly stupid one liners or a few angry sentences shouting other people down.
you can only control a community by keeping it small.
social media was good when it was people shitposting, and it was algorithms promoting said shitposts. Now it’s all about engagement, if there isn’t engagement shits dead.
I went to valid social commentary town. They all knew you.
valid social commentary is determined by the group in which it takes place.
that’s why a group of traffic engineers decided how to best build a bridge for traffic flow doesn’t allow god to be part of the discussion.
social media is peak dead internet theory
So find a better instance, there is no singular Lemmy
ok, let me to go start my own internet.