I think this is normal with a smaller community. Also we are the ones that care more about a healthy community. The bigger a community gets, the more dickheads will exist in it.

For the most part, yes. But I have noted lately that I do get some snarky people coming in with dishonest and bad faith responses. They're at least not as rampant as it would've been on Reddit. It's discouraging and demoralizing when you've got, what feels like, 100 people downvoting you to hell and 50 of them are swiping at you before deleting their accounts and doing it again because they're of the tribal mindset and you've somehow offended a part of the hive.

I feel some redditors have the downvote button as the sole mean of power in their lives. There are some who massively downvote to the point it's concerning

I know right! I often get more than 5 upvotes here, while on Reddit most of my comments would have only gotten 2, maybe 3.

Haha prove it, bitch! I'm upvoting the hell out of you...

I’ll admit, I’ve had far better experiences here than I have on Reddit; Lemmings aren’t as prone to argue on nonsensical topics as Redditors are.

That being said, there are still more than a few nasties here.

Even in the hay day of online discussion forum websites you'd have trolls that derail threads and bring nastiness to the forefront.

Good moderation, clearly defined rules and quality of content are key- contributes to a quality forum.

The karma farming and bridgading of Reddit is not missed here. Now if we can get some of the niche forums more population.

Oh how I wonder how the comments will be with this streisand effect

It's just social credit. Why care?

Nah, the main internet hive minds still exist.

I’m frequently downvoted for saying anything positive about my Tesla.

It depends where you go, surely?

I've met a fair number of numpties on Reddit but I've never had anyone tell me neckbeards are an oppressed group until I came to Lemmy 😂

Jokes aside, it's easy to avoid toxic people on here since they usually announce themselves loudly. It's easy to block users, communities, or even servers if you don't want to see something.

I just upvote to make the posts go away. I unchecked "show read posts" and upvoting keeps my feed fresh.

Typically, yes, but the brigaders have found their way here, so don't expect it to last long.

Going to add some negativity here and sorry in advance. I'm hoping I'm being more sensible than mean. The biggest problem with lemmy for my personal experience is that there are are too many posts about itself. We have enough users to thrive as something good. Let's just do it and enjoy moving on from reddit. If new people come here and all they see are posts about lemmy, fediverse, reddit, they will feel like it's one note, but I feel like we all have more to offer. I think when there's some news or something that impacts the platform it's great to discuss. (Or if there are discussions around actual development and stuff.) In my opinion, there are just far too many.:"Lemmy people are less toxic", "isn't it nice here", "reddit is not as good", "lemmy just feels fresh","loving lemmy so far vs x". clogging the feed with low quality content. I just feel there are already enough existing posts people can comment on instead of starting new posts. I know the platform is new so it's to be expected, and I don't think negatively of anyone making these posts (i usually think positively of them as nice people), but if I didn't think it was actually hurting first impressions I wouldn't say anything.