Lemmy is a worse platform for women than Reddit was
Lemmy is a worse platform for women than Reddit was
(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.
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This is really the terminal issue with Reddit alternatives. They are just Reddit minus the most recent controversy as of foundation. Reddit is overall just a popular content aggregation website with poorly design discussion features.
Upvotes and down votes, while intended to help users weed out bad arguments and spam, only achive in promoting sophistry and tribalism. What ends up getting upvoted is what "wins" the argument, while good arguments that come from unpopular viewpoints get downvoted.
And with that comes all the toxic elements from old Reddit ruat we all hope just won't be a part of our replacements. Reddit's format works at a smaller scale, where users are typically more enthusiastic and therefor better informed, but as the sites get larger you'll notice they typical hyper-snarky "owned with facts and logic" attitude take hold of a community as more people with a weaker investment jump on the bandwagon and upvote everything that makes them feel smart.
Eventually, the site becomes just like Reddit, but for a smaller and more insulated community, and users begin to question why they're here instead of Reddit which has the established user base that can reliably cover more topics you are interested in.
We have not learnt from history, and we are doomed to repeat it. Maybe it'll be different in the future.
The one major advantage that Reddit alternatives on the Fediverse have over Reddit still is that nobody owns the platform wholesale. So while that doesn't solve the content issues you're rightfully bringing up, at least we've learned from Reddit's faults by removing the option of unilaterally making platform-level decisions that are undesirable for the end user.
Some people need to attack somebody and feel smarter than IRL, let them do it on Reddit or Lemmy and not on the street.
Nah. Lemmy is FOSS while Reddit is going to shit.
Being open source doesn't stop the inherent flaws of the Karma system or the increasing toxicity that correlates with platform population.
It's really cool that Lemmy is FOSS, don't get me wrong, but that's kinda irrelevant to the issues presented.
I know it doesnt fix toxicity but it has the potential to bring solutions. Users dont have any power over Reddit's management decision, they made sure to remind us last year. But wity Lemmy, we can always change the rule, experiment with new systems, etc. That's a huge difference.