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?
This is the kind of over the top laughable bias I am talking about. That’s fine if you’re biased as a user because I’m talking about algorithmic and moderator/admin bias. This is a perfect example of the crazed bias I am referring to.
Honestly, it simply reads like paid political shilling. Who really says stuff like this? Who is so far down the political party rah rah that they couldn’t even admit their opponent political party has done a single thing a rational person would support? It just reads like dehumanizing tripe.
I don’t want to use a social media platform that exposes me to this kind of nonsense under the guise of being general political discussion and plasters the front page or my feed with it. Like I said, 7/20 stories attacking Trump on the front page. That amount of energy being expended to bias people in these extreme ways smells like paid advertisement not organic social media.
That’s even fine to me. Feel free to pay people to shill your politics BUT I want a platform that isn’t secretly biased in favor of this and putting their thumb on the scales anytime decisions get made. Not to mention invested in exposing me to this garbage in the hopes of vacuuming up political ad spend and working users into a hate frenzy because it increases page views.
People are pissed about the political situation in the US (imo for good reason).
Rolling up and immediately accusing people (who are imo righteously angry) of being paid shills sounds eerily similar to the bus full of paid protestors disingenuous dog whistle bullshit the right wing media uses to discredit and derail discussions about important matters.
Lemmy doesn’t tip the scales, the front page is generally whatever is newest, or more upvoted/boosted/whatever. That’s what users vote on. If you disagree vote against the posts you don’t like, and if that doesn’t help then the simple fact is that the majority of users disagree with you or want to see that content. At which point you can either complain about it, or curate your subscribed magazines/communities accordingly. Or leave.
Also why does it shock you that news about trump is big right now? He’s a presidential candidate for the country with the biggest military in the world, and he’s being indicted and charged on multiple federal crimes. Its just a big fucking deal regardless of your politics. And to be clear, fuck him, and republicans, but yeah. Of course people have an opinion on this, its world changing stuff. How can you be so naive lmfao.
As for fear of paid shills, you have that everywhere. I’d argue less so on something like lemmy considering its size. its always easier to just pay facebook to boost your anti vax post than build or buy a legit forum account for some random forum, then hand craft rage bait posts and use a bot army to upvote them. And on Facebook you’d reach billions of gullible mommy advice pages. Cost benefit wise I really don’t think the fediverse is worth that cost yet.
Hey, you do you. For me, a party who backed a twice impeached president; the party who continues to back a thrice indicted ex-president; the party who takes away women’s rights; the party who champions white nationalism; a party who backs anti-science rhetoric, and I could go on but you get the point. A party like that has nothing redeemable. Don’t get me wrong. I used to disagree with conservative friends and we’d have great discussions over beers. But that was decades ago. If someone says they are conservative, OK, let’s talk about things. A person who says they are Republican is no longer worth talking to. To be a Republican means you’ve swallowed all the nationalistic fascist bullshit.
And to be honest, that really sucks. The Dems suck. I hate the Dems. Just corporate stooges who only seem to pay lip service to the average Joes in the country. It’s awful. As long as we are stuck with a two party system, it is much better to have dynamic, reasonable people leading those parties. That’s not what we have.
So, finally, what have Republicans done over the past few years that should garner any support from rational humans? I’d be interested in hearing. Perhaps I am being overwhelmed by the crime and hate, and just missing the jewels in the rough. If you don’t have anything, it’s like getting mad at people saying shit smells, when you may be one of the few who actually enjoy the smell of shit.
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Defending any of your two geriatric parties against the other makes all of you look like toddlers fighting over what standard football is the best.
They’re literally the same party, and as long as you don’t realise and vote third parties you’ll rot in this vicious cycle
Voting third party is a waste until we get ranked choice voting. That’s the shit system we have. Implementation of ranked choice voting enables third parties, or cooperative relationships between parties. Until then its one or the other and while they both suck one is objectively worse.
Well, thoughts like yours are what’s keeping that system everyone seems to hate going
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If you think that “enlightened centrist” thing is bad, maybe you should be the one leaving the cave of caricatures shown by your echo chamber
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Oh sorry, did I break your poor extremist heart?