Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.
In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.
It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.
You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.
Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.
So what do you end up with?
You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.
Then you get biased Ford stories under the "cars" community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won't show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.
Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.
Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?
Yeah and that is what I'm talking about. It is frankly disgusting to have to read all this dehumanzing one sided garbage. The comments in this thread are perfect examples of dehumanizing people and using that as a justification for bias. "No reasonable person supports Republicans" and "Republicans have never done anything to garner support from rational people." It is the shift from "we disagree about things that impact our lives" to "you are completely crazy and wrong about everything so you deserve whatever I do to you."
erase people from existence and force women to make health choices
Biased Republicans would say similar things. That you shouldn't complain if Republicans are shitting on Democrats because they're the party that wants to let drag queens molest children and start WW3 in Ukraine or whatever. Normally when two people talk they can realize that the other person is in fact just a person like them and you can be empathic towards each other. This isn't happening though because the people working themselves into a frenzy about "the other" are kept isolated and encouraged to keep going down that path of irrational hatred.
We have social media platforms actively separating people and promoting their thinking that the other side are deranged lunatics who need to be exterminated or severely restricted using the power of the government. This is really wrong and I'm hoping Lemmy can offer an alternative similar to the origins of social media where people could share and talk, that's it, we didn't have heavy handed moderators, admins, and algorithms getting in the middle of everything and creating isolated bubbles of people dehumanizing each other.
No. What I said is I don't like biased stories on my front page. If I see 7/20 stories hating on Trump I have to wonder, where are the Biden stories? I'd prefer to see 0/20 stories hating on Trump and 0/20 stories hating on Biden. I'd tolerate seeing 4/20 stories hating on Trump and 4/20 hating on Biden (or some ratio that isn't 100% biased in one way). I do not want one sided political propaganda being intermixed regularly into my feeds.
I mean if Biden was also being indicted for multiple felonies and being accused of basically selling out his country, you'd probably also see a few more stories hating on him no?
Who are you fuckin thanos? The world isn't balanced, both sides aren't equally shitty. Obviously you disagree, so if you don't like seeing opinions you disagree with make your own instance, or leave lol. Why you still here whining when you made up your mind the moment you posted? You can do what you want but this is just silly.
"Hey guys I don't like the content on the front page"
"Ok uh, well thats what users wanted to see so... You're outvoted"
"But I don't like it"
"You can curate your communities I guess?"
"But so many people disagree with me and I don't like it, it must be site wide collusion to manipulate the content because that's way more likely than people just generally disagreeing with me"
".... Ok bud well bye"
"But wait I don't like it it challenges my preconceived notions"
Actually I'm asking what I asked and interacting with Lemmy for the first time. Did I know it would be contentious? Yes, but that is part of the point. I wanted to see how contentious content is treated so you're somewhat right.
It looks pretty good actually. I was able to post and comment with a new account without being restricted 100 different ways even while posting something that might upset some people. I don't want platform level restrictions being driven by stupid group think and brigade activity. That's about it.
There aren't two sides to every issue, reasonable people can't differ on everything. Your trump example illustrates this perfectly: at this point no reasonable person has a positive view of him.
That may be but I do know that many reasonable people are sick of hearing about him. This isn't really about Trump it's about how Lemmy functions algorithmically being too closely modeled on Reddit resulting in a biased platform. The destruction of Reddit's politics subreddit occurred many years after its' launch and with a lot of active interference from the site owners and moderators whereas on Lemmy it is starting in a biased state. It also doesn't have to be about politics, it can be any number of contentious topics. My concern is that Lemmy is just copying Reddit and therefore will end up in the same place. What is new here? Why is Lemmy not going to turn into bought and paid for shill posts and comments astroturfing everything like Reddit?
You're observing the current state of american politics manifested in a discussion platform - one side is saying "hey maybe there are things more important than shareholder value?" and the other is banning books because they were written by minorities and taking kids away from their parents for providing them healthcare.
Regardless, you're the one who brought up posts mentioning trump. He's in the news a lot because it's finally looking like he'll see some consequences for all the criming he did.
Lemmy is not a single site owned by a single group. Each Lemmy instance is in effect its own website and they can communicate with each other which Is the federation part. Some instances cater to certain kinds of people and communities will skew towards a political direction.
If you are a hardcore right winger there are instances full of right wing extremist waiting for you to join their echo chamber. Same with the left wing nuts, there exist Lemmy instances specifically for them to congregate together. You can do some hunting and find them easily.
The only thing is that most other Lemmy instances will defederate from these kinds of instances since political extremist on either side tend to be hateful and zealous individuals who vocally express their violent fantasies of lynching anyone who doesn't 100% agree with them. Most lemmyverse instances deem this kind of hateful speech unacceptable and will block them from cross - communicating.
Here is an example of a right wing Lemmy community:
Which Lemmy instance is not biased? Also, algorithmically, how much is Lemmy going to produce bias? Like I said that is my primary concern. Reddit is designed to produce bias and suppress unpopular opinions. Is Lemmy modeled after this design or did it ditch the stuff like shadow banning and time locking commenting based on "karma"?
Heavy US bias on the site. There is nothing Republicans have done over the years to garner any support from rational humans. Sometimes things seem very one-sided because they fucking are.
That said, I installed the lemmy keyword filter userscript which has been doing a decent job of keeping shit I don't want to see (god damn reddit posts) off my feed.
There is nothing Republicans have done over the years to garner any support from rational humans.
This is the kind of over the top laughable bias I am talking about. That's fine if you're biased as a user because I'm talking about algorithmic and moderator/admin bias. This is a perfect example of the crazed bias I am referring to.
Honestly, it simply reads like paid political shilling. Who really says stuff like this? Who is so far down the political party rah rah that they couldn't even admit their opponent political party has done a single thing a rational person would support? It just reads like dehumanizing tripe.
I don't want to use a social media platform that exposes me to this kind of nonsense under the guise of being general political discussion and plasters the front page or my feed with it. Like I said, 7/20 stories attacking Trump on the front page. That amount of energy being expended to bias people in these extreme ways smells like paid advertisement not organic social media.
That's even fine to me. Feel free to pay people to shill your politics BUT I want a platform that isn't secretly biased in favor of this and putting their thumb on the scales anytime decisions get made. Not to mention invested in exposing me to this garbage in the hopes of vacuuming up political ad spend and working users into a hate frenzy because it increases page views.
People are pissed about the political situation in the US (imo for good reason).
Rolling up and immediately accusing people (who are imo righteously angry) of being paid shills sounds eerily similar to the bus full of paid protestors disingenuous dog whistle bullshit the right wing media uses to discredit and derail discussions about important matters.
Lemmy doesn't tip the scales, the front page is generally whatever is newest, or more upvoted/boosted/whatever. That's what users vote on. If you disagree vote against the posts you don't like, and if that doesn't help then the simple fact is that the majority of users disagree with you or want to see that content. At which point you can either complain about it, or curate your subscribed magazines/communities accordingly. Or leave.
Also why does it shock you that news about trump is big right now? He's a presidential candidate for the country with the biggest military in the world, and he's being indicted and charged on multiple federal crimes. Its just a big fucking deal regardless of your politics. And to be clear, fuck him, and republicans, but yeah. Of course people have an opinion on this, its world changing stuff. How can you be so naive lmfao.
As for fear of paid shills, you have that everywhere. I'd argue less so on something like lemmy considering its size. its always easier to just pay facebook to boost your anti vax post than build or buy a legit forum account for some random forum, then hand craft rage bait posts and use a bot army to upvote them. And on Facebook you'd reach billions of gullible mommy advice pages. Cost benefit wise I really don't think the fediverse is worth that cost yet.
Hey, you do you. For me, a party who backed a twice impeached president; the party who continues to back a thrice indicted ex-president; the party who takes away women's rights; the party who champions white nationalism; a party who backs anti-science rhetoric, and I could go on but you get the point. A party like that has nothing redeemable. Don't get me wrong. I used to disagree with conservative friends and we'd have great discussions over beers. But that was decades ago. If someone says they are conservative, OK, let's talk about things. A person who says they are Republican is no longer worth talking to. To be a Republican means you've swallowed all the nationalistic fascist bullshit.
And to be honest, that really sucks. The Dems suck. I hate the Dems. Just corporate stooges who only seem to pay lip service to the average Joes in the country. It's awful. As long as we are stuck with a two party system, it is much better to have dynamic, reasonable people leading those parties. That's not what we have.
So, finally, what have Republicans done over the past few years that should garner any support from rational humans? I'd be interested in hearing. Perhaps I am being overwhelmed by the crime and hate, and just missing the jewels in the rough. If you don't have anything, it's like getting mad at people saying shit smells, when you may be one of the few who actually enjoy the smell of shit.
But what you're asking underneath it all is simple enough.
Lemmy isn't a single entity. It's dozens of instances (well, dozens of public ones big enough to notice), with multiple communities on each.
There is a bigger section of users that reject alt-right matters, which is an "oh no. anyway" situation because most instances also reject the left equivalent (tankies) with similar fervor. But there's communities that are quite friendly to non extremists that are what you'd call conservative overall, if you go looking. But the major instances are run by folks that lean liberal, progressive, and/or socialist. It's just a fact.
I hate to break this next part to you though. Any political based community, subreddit, or forum is going to be a dumpster fire of biased bullshit. And that goes for any segment of political ideology. That's because people that are emotionally invested in identity politics are nigh unto religious zealots. And they're the most likely to make posts and comments in those places. They're also the ones most likely to shoehorn in political bullshit where it doesn't belong.
That last part is a much bigger issue because it's harder to avoid.
But, dude, don't get it twisted. The whole trump part is to be expected. Anyone not expecting high vitriol regarding him is silly. Like, he's divisive intentionally. He just got indicted, so it's current news everywhere. This means the posts about him are certainly going to focus on the crimes he's accused of, which is going to be "negative" if you're a supporter. If you're neutral regarding him, it's still going to read negative because the shit he's accused of is pretty fucking negative lol. You can't report on someone accused of serious crimes and it not skew negative unless you ignore anything about the news that's factual.
But I'm not going to get started on the whole "moderator and suppression" bullshit because it's utter bullshit.
That now not only do you need a different community within social media but an entirely different site catering to your in group. It is further fracturing people into small groups that refuse to interact with each other and are becoming unhinged and paranoid as a result.
Is it really so hard to have a social media site with politics discussion that is moderated without bias? Everyone seems to just accept that the bias is a given and you just have to find your own little bubble to be happy in. No. I want to discuss with people different than me. Not circle jerk people who already think like me.
This means whereas you used to have a biased politics within a social media site you at least had political groups interacting outside of politics there but fracturing across sites will speed this up rather than reduce the group think. Hopefully social media just dies.
The problem you're describing is different than the one Lemmy solves. Lemmy is just a federated, open source alternative to Reddit. It doesn't try to be anything else.
But the good news is this: If somebody wants to create "a social media site with politics discussion that is moderated without bias", they can just use Lemmy and make it happen. They no longer need to create a 50 person company to develop the software the runs the network. It can be done by a handful of people now, and that wasn't possible before.
I always wonder about these 'omg bashing on trump' questions. It's because he's a highly confrontational jerk who makes a living from being controversial. To extend your analogy, yeah, if Chevy uh, was constantly insulting 60% of the country while ripping people off and tried to overthrow the government, people would probably be complaining about them in the same way.
Nobody's telling you to not hate Trump as an individual (Used to be funny before getting into politics, now just an asshole), but calling the other half of the country fascist maneaters that will bring hell on earth is quite extreme
Well...Chevrolet does use patriotic imagery to sell (excluding their full-size vans and the Malibu) crappy cars, thus ripping people off. Their parent company, General Motors Corporation Company also did a sleight-of-hand trick that took all kinds of money from the American taxpayer we'll never see again. So that's a large contribution to our eventual default on the national debt, which will lead to an eventual overthrow of the government.
Also, your car analogy isn’t great. I can objectively say that the PT Cruiser is unsafe. That is hard to debate me on. I can objectively say Trump is a narcissist who throws his food on the wall and who is being indicted for multiple crimes both federally and in 2 other locations. It’s hard to deny those things.
That's the cycle of most new platforms. Early adopters are typically tech savvy and highly educated people, who in turn have a strong left tendency and also in general a tendency of questioning the status quo and wanting to improve and change things. It's fundamentally incompatible with conservatism overall, left or right leaning. A big part of conservative ideology is not just the usual fiscal responsibility yada yada, it's also resisting fast change and keeping traditions and existing lifestyles. Adopting bleeding edge platforms is bog change and trying out new things. New platforms also tend to reach the left worldwide before the right comes to it, so there will definitely also be a lot of anti-american bias before it essentially gets taken over by mostly americans. Even on Reddit you'd see people go like "Reddit is an english american site go back to your country" rhetoric that just wasn't there 5-10 years ago.
Facebook when it came out in the late 2000s also leaned very left, before it became mainstream and right wing people started using it too. Same with Twitter, same with even the very early Internet and BBSes and forums. Right wing people are the last to adopt new platforms, after hating on them for a few years.
That said, I think Trump is a bad example in this context. He's being charged with a third indictment, and done a lot of crime so even on Reddit and TikTok it's a huge flood of news about it.
Would also help for the right to not be seen as evil if they stopped attacking basic human rights and their stupid pointless war on "wokeness".
Lemmy isn't Reddit - there's no single central website. It's made up of instances that can have a whole range of political leanings (from the alt-right to tankies to no particular angle), if one doesn't suit you then look around for another. What you will find is that the general insurances tend to be more leftwing and anti-corporate because the bulk of members are here because they got tired of big business interfering with the more mainstream social media.
Also, you are presumably looking at the front page of lemmy.world and, considering Trump is currently in court on serious charges, it's no great surprise there are posts on him that don't show him in a flattering light.
And how is that any different from Reddit? If you waltzed into r/politics, you would have basically the same thing you just described.
OP, if you legitimately cared about getting a balanced view, then get a RSS reader and read news from either Associated Press and Reuters, or read news from outlets like Fox and CNBC. You can also just look for a right-leaning Fediverse instance because I can guarantee you that you can find one.
It's not different, that's my concern. I want something different and better and fragmented instances of biased social media sites isn't it. I want a politics discussion to be diverse and varied not "politics" on the republican lemmy instance, "politics" on the democrat lemmy instance, and so on. It seems to be impossible these days for moderators or admins to promote an unbiased forum even if they themselves are biased. Everyone just kind of accepts and admits the bias and stays in their little bubble thinking this is how it should be. It didn't used to be this way.
Any chance of that happening has pretty much stopped when the internet became monetized and corporations figured out echo chambers made the most money and most user engagement. It’s also harder in the US in particular because of how the corporate owners managed to make politics into a “support your sports team” theatre.
If you want discourse, best find it in person, because I an guarantee you that it’ll be very slim pickings, if any, to find that online.
Lemmy isn't a platform at all. It's a piece of forum software.
The platforms are the individual instances - lemmy.world or lemmy.ml or lemm.ee or whatever. There's well over 1,000 of them total. And they range all the way from extreme left to extreme right, and from rigidly constrained to entirely open.
And since it is the case that there are well over 1,000 instances, each of them privately owned and managed by whatever standards the owners prefer, there is no mechanism by which any particular bias can be maintained at anything above the instance level. That necessarily means that any lemmy-wide bias you might see can only be organic.
You might honestly think about that, and what it says about the ideology you're trying to pretend you're not defending.
You're also forgetting that the internet doesn't revolve around the US. There are all kinds of nationalities on here, a mich wider range than Reddit (proportionally), and by far, the majority doesn't care what Trump has done or hasn't done.
You will never be able to stop people having biases, I think we have learned that thus far. It is really hard to prevent no matter where you go. What Lemmy allows the individual to do is remove those constantly negative hate groups from being visible for them. Lemmy gives us options, you can block users, communities, and instances. Well that's great and all, but maybe you still want to see political content, just not negative stuff constantly.
Part of being federated is that we can have multiple politics communities of the same name on many different instances. If you have a power mod suppressing one community, you can go to another or create your own under your rules that you see fit. Some moderators and user dynamics do a really good job at removing biases as best they can for the sake of good journalism.
It is no easy feat to accomplish that, but Lemmy (and the fediverse in general) makes it possible to accomplish. You can't say that for many other social networks.
That's right. I'm not sure if anyone federates with them, but Gab runs Mastodon, which has some ActivityPub compatibility with Kbin on toots / microblogging.
Bud, a former president of the US has been indicted for 70 crimes in three different criminal cases, and is likely to be indicted with up to 8 additional crimes in a fourth case. This is the biggest set of indictments since Nixon. The notion that you would expect this not to be major news or that merely reporting on it suggests bias is mind-boggling.
It certainly leads credence to Steven Colbert’s claim, “Reality has a well-know liberal bias.”
I'm a trans woman. On the fediverse at large, transphobia isn't tolerated. It gets shut down hard. Here on lemmy and kbin, it can go either way. Some places are happy to let transphobia slide, which means we have to deal with more hate on the day to day than we do with the rest of the fediverse.
I'd be happy to see more bias towards not indulging transphobes and their hate.
I'm sorry at this point if you don't see that Trump is a harmful idiot at best then I don't know what to tell you. Also, fuck Biden too in case you think this is a US republican vs democrat thing because it's not. People here are mostly left leaning and that extends beyond US politics and their democratic party. Is that a bad thing? Possibly but prominent self identified right wingers on the internet don't really offer very compelling reasons to listen to them in all honesty.
"Bias" doesn't mean "I disagree with it". It means the speaker is being dishonest about their motives.
In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive
Probably not. But that has more to do with the insanity coming out of the Republican party than any sort of unfair "bias" against them. Lying down with dogs and so forth.
Server owners and admins, and communities creators and mods can set the tone of the communities they manage, of course.
If you think a car community is too ford-leaning you can look for or create another one, if it's the whole instance then subscribe to another instance cars community (I'm subscribed to the same communities from several instances, I guess it has to be pretty common), or even make an account in that other instance just in case the Chevy folk start hanging out with nazis, as they always end up doing, and the rest defederate from them.
Edit: oh! And you can block all the posts with a specific site as a source, so you can take away everything from fordnews.com and not see it anymore
I should point out (even though I converted to a Ford guy) that it was Henry Ford who was awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the Third Reich. He was a rabid anti-Semite.
On that note, everyone who, as a result of Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, is dumping their Teslas for Volkswagen EVs is supporting a company started by the Third Reich that used Nazi concentration camp slave labor.
Yes, 80 years ago. Todays Volkswagen has nothing to do with the original Volkswagen project beside the name and anyone who thinks todays Volkswagen is a Nazi company or any such nonsense is an absolute moron.
It's a cross-section of not of society but of the popular Lemmy instances' respective user bases. You could argue all day about merits of right-wing philosophies and policies and you'd still be heckled into oblivion for this reason.
I'll second what others have said: if you get heckled into oblivion by people who refuse to listen, go join or create another Lemmy instance and find some who will.
If you walk into a room and ask "hey, are you shit?", then someone's going to tell you to fuck off. That doesn't prove your point, because you had it coming.
No, it's more like walking into a room and asking, "Hey, is this a place where we can have free open discussions or are you a biased group of people who rely on authoritarian control to promote your views?" then getting the door slammed in your face and told something like the commenter who said "There aren’t two sides to every issue, reasonable people can’t differ on everything." A sort of smarmy response implying that there is no bias, only the truth, and this group is just reasonable people who accept the truth and anyone who won't accept their truth isn't reasonable and therefore isn't welcome.
That's fine and it answers the question. It is a group of people who rely on authoritarian control to promote their views. They do not want free and open discussion. They are happy to suppress and censor speech they deem "unreasonable" or similar.
The question was wherher "Lemmy" was deliberately and unnaturally biased, akin to a car forum that was biased entirely toward Ford and against Chevy.
There is no mechanism by which that could even be accomplished here, since there's over 1,000 individual instances, each subject only to the authority of their individual owners.
So the answer to the OP's question is and can only be "no," simply because it's literally impossible for it to be otherwise - there is no mechanism by which any such lemmy-wide bias could be imposed or enforced nor is there anyone with the authority to do so.
So clearly, if the downvotes prove anything at all it's something else.
I would say that, as far as the OP's thinly veiled concern-trolling goes, it's fairly obvious that what they prove, if snything, is that bias against right-wing ideology occurs naturally on internet forums, even in the absence of mechanisms by which it might be enforced or people with the authority to enforce it.
You might do well to honestly consider why that might be the case.
bias against right-wing ideology occurs naturally on internet forums
Is that why 4chan is the way it is? Is that why Twitter shifted hard to the right when people stopped being banned? I don't think it proved that at all.
All it proved is that Lemmy world is biased to the left which was already known. I found out that Lemmy isn't biased as a platform but also the userbase sadly thinks further fragmentation is the solution. Don't like the left bias here? Go find a right bias instance. Uhh.. No thanks to both? I want impartial authority and diverse participation not ANOTHER layer of bias on top of existing bias promoting mechanisms used in popular social media platforms.
That was the solution offered. Don't like the left bias? Go find the right bias Lemmy instances and some names were dropped. So obviously your theory is garbage if people are outright telling me where to go find "right bias" Lemmy instances.
Thanks, I didn't want to point it out, but yes. The mass downvoting with no response is a hallmark of Reddit and makes me think that yes, Lemmy is modeled almost identically after Reddit, and it will function in the same way as a result.
I remember back when downvoting was considered bad behavior because it was only supposed to be reserved for people breaking rules, spam, etc it wasn't supposed to be used to bury people that said things you don't like. Now not only is burying people with downvote brigades considered the thing to do but the site owners and algorithm actively uses that as a signal to terminate further participation by those users.
This is exactly proving my point. Algorithmically Reddit was designed to produce a biased echo chamber. Not from the start but slowly over time. Lemmy is just copying that design and sure enough it already appears to be a biased echo chamber. What I wonder though is algorithmically how much will this impact a user? Will I be unable to post as freely and as often now that I've been targeted by the hive mind?
I think that without those censorship aspects built into the algorithm impacting individual users then the bias actually can be reversed. It's hard to call people biased and bury them if they can freely respond and defend their positions and cite sources. Reddit relies on burying people so they can not defend themselves or cite sources which is what results in the echo chamber building in intensity.
Believe it or not, lemmy has become less of an echo-chamber. I remember like a month ago it was like x100 times worse at only accepting hivemind opinions and burying any unorthodox one in downvotes
"mass downvoting with no response" except for all the responses, it seems. Oh, but those don't support your victimhood narrative, so I guess those don't count.
Man have you ever considered that the majority of online discussion boards are against Trump because the majority of people are actually against Trump?