this post was submitted on 13 May 2024

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Unpopular Opinion

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Lemmy is a worse platform for women than Reddit was (lemmy.cafe)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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(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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[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago (4 children)

I want to put out there, that as a man I shared my story... And I was down voted and disrespected.

So you can probably remove 'for women' in the title. Lemmy is very much an echo chamber. You don't have to look around very hard to see that there's a large amount of intolerance on Lemmy.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

Yep. The gendered disrespect has gone both ways unfortunately. I am sorry to hear you went through that, no one should have to.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Except it's not an echo chamber. I've seen a great variety of comments on the issue at hand. If you haven't, check out some other communities. And downvotes are different from intolerance. Of course intolerance can exist (if you're getting blocked or direct messaged, for example), but that's not what you experienced.

And the question is not whether intolerance exists "here", because it probably does in some communities some of the time. That's not surprising. We're on the internet. The question is whether it's worse "here" than it was on Reddit, and if it is, what can or should be done about that.

I haven't seen any data indicating any trend on the issue. If people have different experiences, that's just to be expected, and we should sympathize with people getting harassed, but we shouldn't assume the sky is falling when it's not.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

You ended your comment with "but I'll get down voted because of the circle jerk" and ended up with a whopping -2. Seems reasonable.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

So I have to edit this because I thought you found a wrong comment cuz you said negative two and last I saw it was way lower negative two.

And it really does still point out, you included, that people just don't care if a guy is the victim. You sound out to judge me, to discredit me.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Haha wow you jumped to so many conclusions from just that sentence and down voted me. Yikes.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Because you're trying to push a different narrative. You're justifying it because of what I ended it with and I was right. If I'm wrong in my conclusion feel free to drop an actual conclusion... Or enlighten people what they were supposed to take from your comment. Because you reduced it down to a point I made...

I'm really curious what your plan was going to be if you found that comment in the negative but I hadn't made that comment about I'm going to be downvoted because I don't fit the narrative what was your plan? You're digging through my post history so you clearly have a plan a reason.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I didn't reduce anything, stop jumping to conclusions. I simply stated how those last words only combined to a total of -2, which I found reasonable.

I’m really curious what your plan was going to be if you found that comment in the negative but I hadn’t made that comment about I’m going to be downvoted because I don’t fit the narrative what was your plan? You’re digging through my post history so you clearly have a plan a reason.

Sorry, I don't engage in terminally online reddit behavior. I only looked up the one comment to check your claim is all.

e: for someone who can't shut up about narrative and circle jerking you sure seem to try REALLY hard to create a narrative about others. this is my last reply.