Unpopular Opinion
Welcome to the Unpopular Opinion community!
How voting works:
Vote the opposite of the norm.
If you agree that the opinion is unpopular give it an arrow up. If it's something that's widely accepted, give it an arrow down.
Guidelines:
Tag your post, if possible (not required)
- If your post is a "General" unpopular opinion, start the subject with [GENERAL].
- If it is a Lemmy-specific unpopular opinion, start it with [LEMMY].
Rules:
1. NO POLITICS
Politics is everywhere. Let's make this about [general] and [lemmy] - specific topics, and keep politics out of it.
2. Be civil.
Disagreements happen, but that doesn’t provide the right to personally attack others. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Please also refrain from gatekeeping others' opinions.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Shitposts and memes are allowed but...
Only until they prove to be a problem. They can and will be removed at moderator discretion.
5. No trolling.
This shouldn't need an explanation. If your post or comment is made just to get a rise with no real value, it will be removed. You do this too often, you will get a vacation to touch grass, away from this community for 1 or more days. Repeat offenses will result in a perma-ban.
Instance-wide rules always apply. https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/
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This is really the terminal issue with Reddit alternatives. They are just Reddit minus the most recent controversy as of foundation. Reddit is overall just a popular content aggregation website with poorly design discussion features.
Upvotes and down votes, while intended to help users weed out bad arguments and spam, only achive in promoting sophistry and tribalism. What ends up getting upvoted is what "wins" the argument, while good arguments that come from unpopular viewpoints get downvoted.
And with that comes all the toxic elements from old Reddit ruat we all hope just won't be a part of our replacements. Reddit's format works at a smaller scale, where users are typically more enthusiastic and therefor better informed, but as the sites get larger you'll notice they typical hyper-snarky "owned with facts and logic" attitude take hold of a community as more people with a weaker investment jump on the bandwagon and upvote everything that makes them feel smart.
Eventually, the site becomes just like Reddit, but for a smaller and more insulated community, and users begin to question why they're here instead of Reddit which has the established user base that can reliably cover more topics you are interested in.
We have not learnt from history, and we are doomed to repeat it. Maybe it'll be different in the future.
The one major advantage that Reddit alternatives on the Fediverse have over Reddit still is that nobody owns the platform wholesale. So while that doesn't solve the content issues you're rightfully bringing up, at least we've learned from Reddit's faults by removing the option of unilaterally making platform-level decisions that are undesirable for the end user.
Some people need to attack somebody and feel smarter than IRL, let them do it on Reddit or Lemmy and not on the street.
Nah. Lemmy is FOSS while Reddit is going to shit.
Being open source doesn't stop the inherent flaws of the Karma system or the increasing toxicity that correlates with platform population.
It's really cool that Lemmy is FOSS, don't get me wrong, but that's kinda irrelevant to the issues presented.
I know it doesnt fix toxicity but it has the potential to bring solutions. Users dont have any power over Reddit's management decision, they made sure to remind us last year. But wity Lemmy, we can always change the rule, experiment with new systems, etc. That's a huge difference.