Unpopular Opinion

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319

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

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by spujb@lemmy.cafe to c/unpopularopinion@lemmy.world

576 comments fedilink hide all child comments

(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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[–] orcrist@lemm.ee 10 points 6 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.