It's the same on Lemmy
this post was submitted on 19 Nov 2025
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I mean Lemmy isn't very open to alternative opinion either, but most people here are even more similar that we don't notice
Very much this. There are some views that are so pervasive here that people don't realize that alternative views are even possible, that anyone who says otherwise must be faking or trolling in some manner.
I said something wrong about anarchism once here on Lemmy and an extremely friendly user took quite a lot of time to help me educate myself, clarifying my mistake, recommending reading material and engaging me in frank and friendly conversation about the topic.
On Reddit, I'd either have been upvoted to the sky by people as ignorant as me (or more) or get called a bunch of slurs and told to go fuck myself.
Well by my own experience I had discussions here that my opinion were pretty controversial, but I didn't see anyone whining to me, they just told me they disagree and that was all.
It's not rule but compared to Reddit it feels another universe.
That's why I think Reddit shouldn't migrate to here.
There are a lot of great communities on Reddit still. Lemmy users are a self-selected bunch, and one of the things we self-select for is intolerance to the toxicity common on mainstream social media platforms, including Reddit. So we're safe from a lot of the problems that larger subreddits have to deal with. But there are some excellent niche communities there that would fit in very nicely with the Fediverse.
That's people for you. Ain't just Reddit.
It's an environment that's mechanically centered around dunking on people. It's all upvotes, downvotes, and arguing. The design of the platform itself encourages it, because that's what it's built to do. Lemmy isn't really any different, it just hasn't had as long to develop the same level of toxicity. The same mentality is here too, though, and is growing pretty consistently.
A year ago Lemmy felt like a relative breath of fresh air in comparison to what it's quickly become. These threads are half arguments and the feeds are half people spamming 6 threads in five minutes to build up some sort of visibility.
Honestly I feel like Lemmy sort of tricked me into wandering into Reddit 2 after having mostly left Reddit.
There are so many users on both that exclusively (or nearly exclusively) contribute "gotcha" replies only. Never an original thought or comment. They only want to "call out" others. Sniper-camper mentality. You can easily see it in their histories. I block them aggressively.
I don't know what specific situation you found yourself in. It can depend a lot on the subreddit you post to.
I have not used Reddit in years at this point, but when I did use it, I definitely had some posts that were positively received. I had others that were negatively received or outright removed by mods. You need to be aware of the rules (written and unwritten) of the community and align with those rules if you want a positive response.
Lemmy definitely has some of that dynamic as well, but I think that it tends to be more personal because the community is smaller. On the other hand, there are some opinions which are so unpopular with the Lemmy community as a whole that they are unlikely to be positively received anywhere on Lemmy, whereas Reddit is big enough that any type of opinion generally has its own community.
It's such a sprawling conversation, it's difficult to capture it all concisely. I would like to add to your comment, the number of Cambridge Analytica style bots and disingenuous agents. Plus all the dummies who mindlessly parrot them.
There was a time where I would try to meaningfully engage with anyone to gain a wider perspective, being conscious of filter bubbles, but dissenting voices were always void of substantive reasoning, logic or fact. It was almost always disingenuous, spurrious fallacies.
Now I only engage with people who disagree and put up some evidence of consciousness and reasoned arguments up front. A well documented technique in online debate/disinformation is exhaustion. Control the narrative via flooding all chanels with bullshit, and the power of short simple repetition until lies become truth.
Edit: Exhibit A is the dumpster fire that is the Fascist States of America and the rise of the tech lords. AI only further serves to control the narrative.
I agree completely. I have always been a believer in good-faith debate, but it is rare to find someone who will engage in good-faith debate about their disagreements. Most people are either not willing to debate at all, or not willing to debate in good faith. You have to learn to recognize those situations and avoid wasting your time and energy on them because it's pointless.
Downvotes are inherently broken. They are a bad idea and they cannot be easily fixed.
Why are they broken? Because users with good intentions don't use them as much as people with bad intentions, yet the system actually rewards users for downvoting.
How are people rewarded for downvoting? Well, their votes count more. If I upvote a comment I agree with, it becomes more visible. But if I downvote all of the other comments, the one I agree with becomes even more visible. It's like giving downvoters double votes. And since votes are private on Reddit, it's impossible to know for sure what is happening. People may even have extra accounts just to get more ability to downvote.
If you reward people for acting in bad faith, then they will keep acting worse and worse.
They are marginally better on Lemmy than Reddit because they are public, but I think they should be completely gotten rid of. I basically don’t use them except on obvious trolls and for posts that I think should be removed by moderators.
From a moderating perspective, downvotes can act as a way to isolate for potential spam/rule-breaking content that isn't reported to instance owners or admins. It's imperfect and better solutions would be preferred, but they do have a janitorial purpose.
That part you quoted is the least important part of the comment. I put it in because I think it's important that everyone knows votes are public, but it doesn't really have anything to do with my point. But I'll just remove that paragraph so that it doesn't confuse people who only read the bare minimum.
I was just noting they do have some utility. I've also been on lesser-moderated platforms unlike blahaj that do not have downvotes, and trolls can trend and get much engagement because there's no in-system tool to degrade their post visibility. I imagine if downvotes were removed fediverse-wide, similar problems would take root on the fediverse.
I actually made the same point in the part that you quoted. I said that I only use downvotes for things that I think mods should remove. You stated it more clearly, though.
And I think your other point about removing downvotes leading to increased trolling would need to be investigated with better controls. You even said that the forums you're talking about are "lesser-moderated", so my mind immediately latches onto that as the reason for more trolls, while you see the differences in voting as the problem. I think moderation is the vehicle to decrease visibility, while votes are the vehicle to increase visibility.
It could also be related to something like the number of users and traffic. Likely trolling is encouraged by many of these factors combined.
And I think your other point about removing downvotes leading to increased trolling would need to be investigated with better controls. You even said that the forums you’re talking about are “lesser-moderated”, so my mind immediately latches onto that as the reason for more trolls, while you see the differences in voting as the problem. I think moderation is the vehicle to decrease visibility, while votes are the vehicle to increase visibility.
Well, yes - that's part of it. Blahaj and Beehaw (two examples to my mind) are notably stricter environments than most other instances networked up. Currently, most fediverse instances don't operate to their level - and I'm not sure that it'd be welcome for them to do so. The downvotes currently, because of them being public - function pretty much as Reddit originally intended - used as a tool to hide malicious/trolling/bad-faith content or even simply off-topic posts (that don't justify instance intervention) rather than just haterating.
It could also be related to something like the number of users and traffic. Likely trolling is encouraged by many of these factors combined.
Well I can assure you as a local instance staff that there's a lot of annoying trolling, spam and AI splatter right now that is mostly bought to my attention by downvotes.
I would like a better reaction-system than just up and downvotes though, but it would require Lemmy not being the major instance software.
That's why I like Blahaj - no downvotes to silence dissent or minority voices.
It wasn't uncommon on Reddit for me to ask an entirely on-topic question that I could not find being asked before and to get downvoted to oblivion. I later found I could delete these and repost verbatim a few hours or even days later and they'd often receive a positive response. The single biggest predictor of whether or not a neutral comment was inexplicably dogpiled upon was the first two votes. If it dipped to -1, it was typically done for.
I'd imagine it's due to such forums not having a big incentive to get their userbase oxigenated, as you'd need to create an account and invest on it, but at the risk of ignoring and eventually even dropping the social media you're already familiar with. And aggravating it, as userbase shrinks, certain behaviors cause more and more people to drop, leaving only those that are ok or that even replicate this behavior, causing a vicious cycle.
From what I observed, when forums start going that path, if they're small enough, they die from irrelevance. And if a given forum is big enough or is kept forcefully alive, they become some Karachay lake-style radioactive landfill.