Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.
In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.
It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.
You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.
Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.
So what do you end up with?
You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.
Then you get biased Ford stories under the "cars" community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won't show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.
Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.
Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?
If you walk into a room and ask "hey, are you shit?", then someone's going to tell you to fuck off. That doesn't prove your point, because you had it coming.
No, it's more like walking into a room and asking, "Hey, is this a place where we can have free open discussions or are you a biased group of people who rely on authoritarian control to promote your views?" then getting the door slammed in your face and told something like the commenter who said "There aren’t two sides to every issue, reasonable people can’t differ on everything." A sort of smarmy response implying that there is no bias, only the truth, and this group is just reasonable people who accept the truth and anyone who won't accept their truth isn't reasonable and therefore isn't welcome.
That's fine and it answers the question. It is a group of people who rely on authoritarian control to promote their views. They do not want free and open discussion. They are happy to suppress and censor speech they deem "unreasonable" or similar.
Oh no, Lemmy supports images like this? Garbage.
Also reductionist garbage anyway. How about the freedom of religion and being censored for protesting government mandated closure of places of worship while alcohol stores were allowed to remain open? Is that conservative? It's just one example.
I have Twitter blocked at the network level. Whenever I see a screenshot of a Twitter post I know it's literally the stupidest thing you could imagine. You didn't let me down. Also the whole screen shotted Twitted posts making a claim about conservatives that is easily refuted if conservatives were actually allowed to talk is peak Reddit.
Feel good, makes you laugh, hate your neighbor content. Just be sure you don't show it to your neighbor they might say some things that confuse you. Believe me this isn't unique to Democrats the same Twitter screen shot psy ops are run against conservatives. Look, some random person said this, let's talk about it like that is what all X's say and believe. Look, some random person said this, let's talk about it and how it's so true.
Screen shots of comments on Twitter being reposted is.. very disturbing. For reasons that go far beyond the stupidity of American politics.