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Unpopular Opinion @lemmy.world
willis936 @lemmy.world

Lemmy is a bigger echo chamber than reddit

I find the quality and variety of discussions on the fediverse to be lower than what I had on reddit. Lemmings have strong preconceived notions and little interest in changing viewpoints from new information. I think I'll be switching back.

Edit: you'll find that most of the comments deny any shortcomings of the culture and go directly to invalidating my opinions via character assassination. If lemmy was a community that actually stood for the ideals which it espouses it would take constructive criticism in the spirit in which it was intended. QED.

156 comments

  • People are people, no matter where you are.

  • Yeah I'm sorry. I just don't give a shit about conservative, racist, pro-genocide point of views. I'm going to stick with the human rights, preferred pronouns, and star trek memed Lemmy. This place still has the fraction of users reddit currently has. You have to be patient for the user base to grow if you want more variety.

    • Look at their profile. If anything, their political views are extreme in a way that fits most of Lemmy.

      Edit: Nevermind, check @Stamets

  • I’m enjoying Lemmy more than I had enjoyed Reddit in a long time. Like everyone says, however, the niche discussion is the bald patch, that will get better with time.

  • Saying that "Lemmy" is an echo chamber is a bit ignorant. Lemmy is a platform; it can he used to spin up an instance with whatever values you like. The fediverse is the same. So saying Lemmy is an echo chamber is a bit like boycotting wood because a politician you dislike stood on a stage to speak.

    Having said that, there are instances with heavy political biases. You can block those from your instance and you can block them from you feed.

  • I see where you're coming from but I also get reddit-ass pandentic arguments here. People downvoting you for posting an unpopular opinion on unpopularopinion is peak reddit as well.

    Since I can get the wider reddit experience without spez, I will just stay. I use an alt front to see the smaller communities on reddit once in a blue moon. That's what works for me.

  • Counter points:

    On lemmy, using something like thunder or some other client that integrates with a wide swath of the lemmyverse and other things its connected to, you can easily join or leave not just subreddits, but different lemmy instances, which at this stage are often defined by userbases that sometimes have a broad consensus of opinion on certain things, but sometimes dont.

    Point 2: Maybe I missed this in reddit, but again using something like thunder, its not too hard to just block people who you witness demonstrate commitment to hive mindedness either in absurd, barely relevant scenarios, or in cases where its obvious the commitment to the hivemind opinion flies in the face of the actual facts of a discussion, or they demonstrate irrationally charged responses to only certain topics which are at best tangentially related to their hivemind triggers, or in cases where their hivemind triggers cause them to misread what was actually typed, assume malice, become irrational, and then refuse to back down after clarification.

    Yes this is far from an ideal solution to the hive mind / echo chamber problem, but at least as I am aware, it is /something/ you can do to mitigate the problem, at least for yourself personally, that you cannot do on reddit.

    Again though, as reddit has been a sad parody of human discussion for a while now, i have not used it much and may have missed it if you can basically twitter style completely block people entirely from you being able to see them at all, at a client, instead of subreddit moderator level.

    EDIT:

    To think that you can have a large, popular, diverse interaction with other humans, basically fancy, large forum on the internet without this also including large numbers of people with opinions or rhetoric you personally find objectionable, or who are very confident and very uninformed, is delusionally absurd, any actual objective analysis of the history of basically any large social media app or site or large internet community of basically any kind would evidence this.

    This is why i like the blocking ability. Puts power in the hands of the user themself to define their experience.

    Is it perfect? Obviously not. Is it better than not being able to do this? Obviously yes.

    Can biased people who themselves are very hive mindy use this to put themselves into echo chambers? Yes. It certainly does not solve that problem.

    But it does at least allow for more level headed users to choose who they engage with and personally make the call of, ok, this person is wrong, but not in an insane way, maybe theyre worth talking to or seeing further comments/posts from them, vs, nah, this person is obviously toxic and if i dont ban people like that, i am going to suffer mental health problems from seeing deragned nonsense all the time.

    Again, anyone whose been in any other large internet community for a while knows that mods are very often lazy, biased, and fall into personal popularity cults / dream worlds, and cannot generally be trusted to be objective, nor reasonably expected to be in a large community where they are basically volunteers, presumably with actual lives and responsibilities when afk.

  • haha never, here you can breath a fresh air of people and freedom, in reddit-twitter you have the freedom that a company "gives" to you. I am in both, but I am more proud to be here than to be on bruhddit.

156 comments