I notice this especially with my Norwegian learning. People are rude, call me names, or make fun of me on Reddit for using the wrong word or “en” vs “et” or using a direct translation because I don’t know how they say it in Norwegian, like saying somethng like «Ingen av bedriften din!» instead of «Dette er ikke din sak» (according to the casual version of Bing Translate) whereas a Norwegian-speaking Fediverse member would just say something like “You’re doing good, but it’s actually _____.”
Bruh, I’ve been called all sorts of nasty things here. Your experiences are not universal.
You just haven’t found the right counts yet.
Watch this:
Firefox sucks donkey dick.
WELL I THINK YOUR BROWSER LIKES TO FELATIATE BIRDS!!
… YEAH! it sucks cloaca. How do you feel about THAT‽
Actually everyone on Lemmy hates Firefox now because AI
WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT FIREFOX???
I WILL KILL YOU!!!
Idk man, the first comment I made here got assaulted with hatred. It’s been fine since then but it definitely had me worried.
It’s because that is the end game of upvote/downvote communities.
All is them become whatever gets engagement. Enjoy lemmy while it’s good, but if we get big it will only be a few years until we are the same.
bingo.
already the ‘news’ communities are lemmy are full of shitty articles with misleading headlines and most of the comments never read the article. they are just ragebait being raged at, and when someone calls it out, they often get downvoted heavily by the rage addicts who just want to be angry at editorialized bullshit headlines.
and those threads have way more activity than articles that are more modest and truthful about their content. because that doesn’t illicit strong emotional reaction from the readers or play into their biases.
and often the people who post this stupid crap, go into the comments and just insult and harass the commentators that don’t agree with the raw emotional content being pushed. and if you look at their post history, they are spamming inflammatory bullshit all day. they are rage-addicts trying to promote outrage and enraged that others aren’t as outraged as they are.
That hasn’t really been my experience. Lemmy seems nicer on the surface because most of the userbase is ideologically aligned, so conflict is less likely. But once you make the wrong noises about something, plenty of people show up ready to prove just how mean and horrible they can actually be.
Also, on Reddit I never had anyone follow me around trying to cause reputational damage by spreading false accusations about me.
I think it just attracts the terminally onlines, I think most people on the fediverse are pretty cool and willing to argue stuff reasonably, but the insane people are so loud that’s what you’ll see very often.
This is true. The fediverse is unpleasant in occasionally different ways but is unpleasant. Part of it is human psychology that’s hard to avoid (not that people are trying particularly hard), and then it’s amplified by the demographics here possibly being somehow even worse at the whole “alternate view points” thing than Reddit is - which I seriously would not have thought possible, but here we are.
Maybe if the goal was making “reddit but less fuckfaced”, it was a mistake to settle on the rather shoddy work of a bunch of extraordinarily angry tankies (possibly false flag although it’s hard to separate one kind of dipshit from another kind of dipshit pretending to be the first kind of dipshit), and/or extraordinarily angry whatever else these… people… are - I’m sure spelling it out would be some kind of -ist, and whoo boy - no, sorry, that’s probably sexist, damn. No, sorry, that’s probably religious persecution, shit. No, sorry, ableism again because what if people have colostomies. Oh sorry, “colostomy” is Greek derived so probably also offensive to someone. And suggesting that is probably also possible to frame as offensive somehow, if one really puts one’s alleged mind to it.
Instead of being banned arbitrarily from a sub because some shithead didn’t like you criticizing Trump, you’ll be banned arbitrarily from an entire instances because people are actively hunting for excuses to be offended, trolling, or just wildly out of touch with reality.
“I don’t necessarily think Marxist-Len-” clearly fascist. Banned.“Hey, that’s crazy, man” - banned. That’s ableism, don’t’y’know.
“Some people get tricked into voting against their better int-” can’t even tell what you were referring to, but banned anyway, just in case. Or because voting is fascist, or some other scintillatingly intelligent reasoning.
“Sometimes you can’t get away from Windows-” fascist corporate something or other, banned.
“Sometimes people get offended, or pretend to, and it doesn’t automatically make them righ-” (waiting to see how this one pans out, actually :P)
Getting a break from the (overt) right wingers is jolly nice, actually. The depressing upshot, though, is that it turns out a lot of the psychology is pretty similar anyway. The very people whining the loudest about the Reddit Gestapo get over here and immediately start the Lemmy KGB, but it’s okay because their views are the right ones. Even though one of the main guys is still a blatant transphobic asshole, which is frankly pretty suggestive of something in this bastion of hyper zealous… “tolerance”.
All to enjoy much less and shittier content… maybe it isn’t 100% worth it, which makes the FV’s hysterical self-congratulatory attitude pretty funny. Hooray, we have a deeply flawed and impractical, gimmicky bullshit architecture, thought up by someone who drinks Russian and Chinese and North-Korean (etc) flavor-aid! You even get different excuses when some dipshit abuses the moderation system, woohoo! This is like, the best thing since we ran over those protesters at Tiananmen square!
Theres something called “morally lucky” where they didn’t really think things through that much but just ended up in the “more correct” group anyway. Some more common examples than what you gave would be things like “omg Ben Shapiro is so short what a gnome,” or “trump has a tiny dick lol!!” while saying body shaming is not okay and isn’t ever acceptable.
We have the same problems reddit does. It’s just that it’s a smaller userbase and downvoted comments don’t disappear here like they get pushed down on reddit. So you don’t get downvoted as much, but your controversial or unpopular take remains visible for opposing opinions to attack. And yeah, there are mini-brigades here too. Make a comment about a subject that has importance to a particular instance and you get insta-downvoted multiple times, but your post will probably recover as the rest of the groups view the conversation.
frankly at this point i just assume that anyone who is really obviously being stupidly aggressive isn’t a real person, it’s probably just a bot meant to push people apart.
But once you make the wrong noises about something, plenty of people show up ready to prove just how mean and horrible they can actually be.
This is true. Linux isn’t my platform of choice, and the “passion” of the responses that provokes is remarkable.
didn’t you know that Linux is the Jesus Christ of operating systems?
It will save us from our computing sins and heal the world and bring forth a computing paradise!
Also, on Reddit I never had anyone follow me around trying to cause reputational damage by spreading false accusations about me.
I’ve experienced it on both, but it was much more toxic and persistent on reddit in my experience
Yeah ive been jumped on hard here for referring to a she as a he when she was referred to as “CEO of x company”.
fwiw i would not assume those are real complaints, it’s wholly possible that those are just bots trying to polarize people.
Also, on Reddit I never had anyone follow me around trying to cause reputational damage by spreading false accusations about me.
Why would you use your real name or reveal any information about you here or on Reddit anyway unless you have to?
I don’t. That’s what makes it even more bizzare. I don’t get what they have to gain from trying to stain an anonymous account.
it feels good
I mean…that’s just Tuesday on the internet in 2026. Sadly.
“Wrong noises” is a good framing. But it can be good too, in enforcing careful posting hygiene (ala “belt and suspenders” - cross your t’s and dot you i’s).
It’s sad that we have to assume defensive posture as s.o.p…but yeah, here we are.
To say it in the language of my people: shit’s fucked.
PS: I hope you got squared away ok, cause that cyberstalking thing sounds all manner of bullshit.
I hope you got squared away ok
Nah, they’re still on it - and considering how much you’ve been discussing AI here too, it’s more than likely you’ve run into them as well.
Being careful with your words helps to some extent, but then there are people like this who don’t really care what you actually say. If they perceive you to be on the wrong side of an issue they care deeply about, they slap this cartoon-villain stereotype on you and treat it as fact. It’s not about what you said - it’s about who they think says those kinds of things. It’s intentional misinterpretation and ad hominems all the way down. No point even trying to engage with their insane troll logic.
Oh, I had my run in with anti-ai folks already. Probably we’re talking about the same “lobster”, non?
Wrt insane troll logic: I have on old friend who made a good distinction. “The difference between a glutton for punishment and a gourmand for punishment is that the latter can eat garbage and transmute it into energy.”
I dunno if he was right, but it does remind me to go outside, touch grass and wrestle with my kids from time to time.
I’d say part of it is likely raw userbase size. Like how even the most positive, well-meaning fandoms turn toxic at the edges when they get large enough.
Other commenters have made really good points (like the one about us self-selecting to be here after leaving more toxic social media, or the one about engagement algorithms on Reddit encouraging hostility.)
As a smaller site, each of us holds more sway in building what this community is. There are definitely people here that see that and want to continue fostering a more positive experience. A lot of users here have interests in science, especially computer science, and a lot of users come from around the world. Both of these create a space that encourages rationality more than US-based popular social media (like Reddit.) Logical fallacies are called out for what they are, and plenty of people here are of the mindset that pointless drama isn’t worth engaging with. It’s not absolute, no, but compared to Reddit? It’s like another planet.
I definitely feel the vibe of old school computer forums. Small communities where people remember each other’s usernames and backstories encourage us to find common ground. Reddit’s near-anonymity has the downsides of any large-scale online anonymity - people can get mean because they don’t recognize the humanity of whoever’s on the other end of the argument. Here, we are still somewhat anonymous, but you run across some of the same names over and again. Like a small town where people all know each other, you end up more accountable for your shit-stirring because you’ll encounter the same people more frequently.
Oh, and one last point, the average age here is higher than Reddit. IIRC we’re mostly in our 30s. Age and maturity may hold sway in our behavior here as well.
I think it has to do with community size. Even on reddit, the smaller and more insular communities are much more pleasant than the frontpage ones.
This has been my experience. Plenty if small subreddits I’ve perused where when they were small, they’re all politle (whether in humor, serious discussion, or sharing hobbies). In time as they grew it just brings in more and more uh, typical redditors. Thats when you knew either abandon ship and make /r/true[subject] or just cut it out.
yep the smaller subs feel like a whole different website. The main pages have so much political doom and rage bait in my experience.
I found that you get the biggest upvote response when you are either edgy or more black and white takes. Medium takes may be both more correct and nicer overall, but they don’t get the most engagement. I would find that after I had a “big comment” that did well, I would make edgier comments for a while after, chasing that high.
That’s not so much a problem here since a thread doesn’t have thousands and thousands of comments or is flights against for attention. Typically I read all the comments on a Lemmy post. Doing the same on Reddit would both suck away my time and my soul, haha.
When a small subreddits suddenly made it to front page (or I guess it’s /r/all now? Idk I hate new reddit), good luck to the mods
I totally feel this among small communities too. If you’re gonna be scathing and demeaning in a small community, you’re gonna run out of people to talk to real fast
Shitty people feel big by making others feel small.
Lots of people are shitty. Here and on reddit. And easy way to attack people is over typos and grammar.
1 . The extra steps to find a fedi instance and create a new account is usually too tedious for the post-first-think-later kind of guy.
2 . The like/dislike function are present, but the lack of shitty function like karma, medals etc. don’t push the users in some kind of frenzy “contest” where copy-pasted crap or Ai-slop flood the platform.
3 . The flow of new contents is too slow to encourage doom-scrolling types. The users who stays more of a week are usually people interested in discuss things and actually “read” other comments.
1 .
Bizarre. Did you mangle lists on purpose to impair web accessibility just because?
Nop
You could have done
1. The extra… 2. The like/dislike… 3. The flow…Instead, you went with the counterintuitive & unnatural
1 . The extra… 2 . The like/dislike… 3 . The flow…which takes special effort. This ain’t making sense.
Oh no, that’s terrible. So you must find that… very bothering, right?
So, you’re digging into breaking web accessibility. What did the disabled do to you to deserve this abuse? Do you kick crutches & obstruct service animals, too?
There’s plenty of rude people here are you kidding? People are rude to me just because I’m on lemmy.ml lmfao…
You could always switch instance though. That’s a thing you can do in the Fediverse. You can’t do that on Reddit.
Why would I change instances because people are misinformed about MLs?
I said could. We’re comparing Lemmy to Reddit.
Because they don’t want to be on a server that supports/is/touts/… XYZ?
rude disgruntled noises
As long as you’re not a tankie!
Aww. Can we be luxury gay space communists then?
first ml upvote in a very long time
now get back in your box
I meant less rude but I understand… that sucks so hard though 😭
I only hate you because of the color of your shirt!
We’re taking red back.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
I’m not sure why people are so intent on excusing reddit with “oh people are just inherently mean” or “it’s because there’s a large userbase”…
No it’s because most of the “people” on reddit are bots lol, it’s the same as all the big platforms. It’s just a fuckload of bots trying to make people as angry at each other as possible, because that drives more engagement and politically benefits the people running the bots and who own the platforms.
(and part of it is just that more “”““users””“” means you can brag to advertisers and get more money).People who aren’t angry and aren’t made to think everyone is a miserable shithead might do horrifying things like “become friends” and “help each other”.
Or truly horrifyingly they might talk to each other and be convinced that rich people kinda suck actually, and we should do something about that, like stop using platforms owned by rich people.ITS THE BOTS, its to create divisive in every reddit it goes to, so people will overreact. Also alot niche subs will gatekeep the subject alot.
Lemmy’s lack of bot protection is just laughable.
Not disagreeing with the other comments here but I’d add that hostility breeds engagement, and for sites like Reddit, engagement equals more time spent on the site and more opportunities to serve ads.
Whether intentional or not, the algorithms push more aggressive/rude/hurtful comments to the top. Reddits business is making money off you while lemmy is just there. I expect that accounts for some of what you see
