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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.

577 comments
  • the challenge with lemmy is its immaturity with moderation, and many instances allowing pretty vile members and communities to flourish, which then spill over into other less extreme communities

  • Seems to me that the rage bait did it's job, but the only who won was the author and website that got all the clicks and ads serving, while lemmy got a shitstorm for nothing.

  • Yep. I agree. I’ve been bullied on Lemmy for sharing the fact that I have been bullied in my own home town because local law enforcement hired exes of mine who have abused their law enforcement powers. I now have a person, or group, that follows each of my posts and comments to immediately downvote them, even if they aren’t even controversial. I just receive an automatic downvote. That pales in comparison to the verbal bashing I’ve received from that group, or person. Each time I speak out, I have this one commenter that tells me that I’m crazy and need meds to make me shut up about having been abused by an ex that was hired by our local sheriff’s department. I wonder if they sniffed my phone to follow my account. I guess that would be crazy and just earn me more hateful comments from “random” people on Lemmy, huh? My question is, do I blame Lemmy as a whole, or will people on here finally admit that some certain local in my area is stalking my account?

    When comments have become as bad as “strangers” telling me to “get raped with a rusty lawn mower blade”, I have to wonder if it’s all coming from the same IP address and if the mods even care.

  • I think regardless of the platform it will get ugly when topics are controversial. How ugly it gets is mostly depending on the level of moderation. It doesn't need many trolls or ill willing people to derail a discussion among hundreds of good meaning people.

    We also tend to concentrate on the things we consider unfavorable. If among 100 comments 5 are sexist, these 5 will get far more attention than the other 95.

    I mean, I've seen people uttering death threads on YouTube, because the YouTuber used butter in a recipe, not margarine. One of several hundred comments under that video, but the only one I remember...

  • 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.

  • Everyone has a vested interest in 50% of the population feeling good about the other half. And certainly we should all feel safer about being with fellow humans than with a bear. The fact that some of us don't feel that way means we should try to make them feel safer.

    Thanks for the post. Does anyone have advice on how to become a moderator?

  • It was not interesting to see how different cohorts responded to the topic. It certainly landed the hardest in this one. More discussion to be had I guess.

577 comments