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?
It’s not different, that’s my concern. I want something different and better and fragmented instances of biased social media sites isn’t it. I want a politics discussion to be diverse and varied not “politics” on the republican lemmy instance, “politics” on the democrat lemmy instance, and so on. It seems to be impossible these days for moderators or admins to promote an unbiased forum even if they themselves are biased. Everyone just kind of accepts and admits the bias and stays in their little bubble thinking this is how it should be. It didn’t used to be this way.
Any chance of that happening has pretty much stopped when the internet became monetized and corporations figured out echo chambers made the most money and most user engagement. It’s also harder in the US in particular because of how the corporate owners managed to make politics into a “support your sports team” theatre.
If you want discourse, best find it in person, because I an guarantee you that it’ll be very slim pickings, if any, to find that online.