I’ve been here since the great Reddit Exodus and have seen some good and some bad.
What have you liked and disliked about being on Lemmy so far?
Do you see your usage going up or down?
I’ve been here since the great Reddit Exodus and have seen some good and some bad.
What have you liked and disliked about being on Lemmy so far?
Do you see your usage going up or down?
You summed up a lot of my feelings quite well on why I wasn’t sad to leave Reddit.
My personal dissatisfaction with a lot of what is going on on Lemmy is why I created this community now. Groupthink, even if it is correct, often does not understand the reasoning it is correct. They present weak arguments and straw man the opposition and frequently will even strawman undecided readers.
I don’t know where in the last 20 years this became the de facto way to convince people that you are correct, but it isn’t.
I ran a somewhat large forum for about 10 years from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s and we used to argue forcefully on there. If you argue even somewhat forcefully on any of these public-facing “forum replacements” now, you get absolutely shit on without anybody countering anything you said. At some point, it seems every group has just made the assumption that they are correct and will not ever discuss it.
That’s actually pretty much the issue I have with the discussion here, I hadn’t really seen it put to words. I’ve read what should have been respectful disagreements turned into what I feel are autopilot arguments with name calling peppered in. It often feels like people are waiting to get a response so they can go in, but they don’t always read the response first. I assume it’s for the benefit of the “audience,” but it frequently strawmans them too, as you noted. Compared to a point-counterpoint setup which is more interesting and actually has a chance of convincing someone, the oddly common Lemmy discourse feels kind of pointless. Like, who is it for?
When I first came here, I believed the talk about how the discussions were high quality so I said more. I don’t think I ever ran into the people who churn out dissatisfying arguments but I also only very rarely got good talks. That combined with the bottom-tier fights that happen with controversial subjects? I see why most people only lurk.
On the subject of controversy though, my current guess is that most people here are so similar that any deviation on strong subjects leads to a need to crush opposition as fiercely as possible. I sometimes feel it happening to me, which is the clearest sign that I need to step back and reevaluate to make sure I’m not falling into the same vice. It’s also part of why I don’t engage in controversial discussion— there’s no real point, and I’m here to have a good time not fight people.
Yeah, you seem as disappointed in the way things shook out the same as I did.
The intention for this community is to help to understand other views, not bury them. I feel that’s what makes us different. Hell, sometimes I want to make sure I’m correct on something and would like people to pick apart my view to make sure I’m logically consistent.
Problem is, most people are not logically consistent themselves and tend to not be able to articulate their position when pushed. It used to be perfectly fine to not have a stance on something, but as the internet grew, you HAD to have a stance on everything, even if you were deeply uninformed. Now people create a stance first and just get mad and block anything contradicting it.
I am somewhat disappointed, but I hope these are growing pains and that the community will improve. I don’t think Internet toxicity like I see is sustainable— who would want to only have interactions like that? It’s exhausting to read, participating must feel like a chore of unbelievable pointlessness. I can see a better Lemmy on the horizon where they get it out of their system, so to speak.
Commenters learning how to argue would go a long way. I took years of debate and honestly feel like one semester should be a requirement. There are respectful and effective ways to argue, but Lemmy users are more prone to unconvincing attempts to bulldoze. On Reddit that led to being buried, with quality arguments on the same topic getting upvotes. Here, the quality arguments are rarer so you only see the bad faith ones.
Still, I’m not giving up on Lemmy. I truly believe it can improve. But I can also see it driving away new users, or turning into an extremist platform like Voat. Now Lemmy is nowhere near the cesspool that Voat was so I’m optimistic.