(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.
honestly? lemme is teaching me that it’s probably time to get away from social media as a concept. I’m having a tough time with it though. It’s too automatic to pop open a new tab and type “l” or “r” or “f” or “t” and then just hit enter and get sucked into the outrage and/or validation loops
social media sites worked when they were small networks of your friends and family and peer group. when you already have a common basic.
reddit was great 10 years ago because it was mostly nerds who agreed to redditique. i remember when i could argue with libretarians and feel like i was learning about shit, because people wrote in sentences and paragraphs.
then 2016 happened, reddit exploded in a few years, and it all went to shit. it became a meme/image/vid board, and comments were mostly stupid one liners or a few angry sentences shouting other people down.
you can only control a community by keeping it small.
I went to valid social commentary town. They all knew you.