I think the reason behind that is that it's a new place and people are shy in new environments. Not only they behave more cautious but they lurk more (which leads to more lurking by others).
I hope Lemmy moves past this phase of directly measuring itself in every way, real and imagined, against Reddit. Doesn't seem like a healthy way to start the community. We need our own identity if we ever hope for this to take hold.
I'm wondering if it's the lurkers. Based on personal experience: I enjoyed Reddit from the sidelines for years--never made an account. Switch to Lemmy and few users means no conversation, so I figured I'd jump in. But it turns out I'm a pretty boring, literal, mild-mannered commenter. Nice, but no zing. I'm still kind of waiting for the banter.
So far my experience on Lemmy.world is more hostile than I was expecting. Very quick to downvote and troll here. Hoping I've only just had the misfortune of finding a lot of bad eggs quickly??????
I've encountered some rude people on Lemmy, but also a lot of people who love genuine discussion, helping others and want the best for the platform and communities.
I am currently in the middle of a lengthy political argument with someone on c/politics, and we fundamentally disagree on things, but both of us are being cordial about it and I appreciate that.
Aren't a ton of Lemmy users from Reddit? That being said, I've had more positive interactions here than on Reddit, but I haven't been on Lemmy that long.
Abortion should be illegal because that would help population grow faster, leading to more cheap labor that would benefit everyone. It should also be illegal to be gay, because gay people cannot have children and all major companies need more workers. Gay people are also not as fun to joke with during lunch. Therefore having gay people in your company will decrease the productivity of your workers.
What steps did you take today to prevent the spread of gay and abortions?
Just wait. The only reason why Lemmy is more polite is because it's smaller. I think that attitude comes with the territory, unfortunately. If you want to have a less toxic community, the first thing you need to do is get rid of the downvote button. Downvotes are inherently toxic. Lemmy is actually worse than reddit in this regard, because you can actually see the ratio of upvotes to downvotes. So, even if your comment has a high score, you can still feel shitty knowing that X number of people downvoted it.
I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of behaviour here soon if we aren't already. The Reddit attitude I hope we avoid as much as possible is that pointlessly aggressive tone though. Not just in arguments but responses to posts from people who seem to have only just learnt the word fuck and use it to add an extra condescending slant to their weirdly celebrated rant about how someone misread a paper or something.
Literally just re-uninstalled Reddit because some neanderthal (probably an insult to neanderthals) couldn't even argue properly without putting words in my mouth I never said or implied