Unpopular Opinion

6369 readers

148 users here now

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/

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

301

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

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

573 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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't believe there have been studies on irl reddit meetups, but usually there is a photo posted. With image recognition tools you could probably get a rough distribution, but my theory that most who show up will be male is based on anonymous polling data, which I don't believe women would hide their gender on. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1255182/distribution-of-users-on-reddit-worldwide-gender/ Many women use Instagram or snapchat or tiktok etc, but I think you'd agree those aren't general conversations focused. Most (all that I have seen) that focus on discussion are majority men. You could say the discussions that happen on these sites are just more appealing to men, or that women get pushed out, and I can neither prove or disprove that. If you know of any websites that focus on general chatting that are mostly women I'd be curious to hear about them. Omeggle I know actually was pretty neutral on gender.

I'm not arguing that women don't look for online spaces, the statistics aren't even that lopsided and I know many women IRL who spend much more time online than I do. It just seems to me if men are more likely socially isolated, they are more likely to become outcasts, and hence more likely to spend all their time online. Not that women won't be in these spaces, or some communities aren't majority women.

Evidently online usage for the younger generation is almost exactly even across the two sexes, but I'm not sure how much of this is for conversation vs how much is watching tiktok/posting on Instagram.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't believe evey meetup posts pictures of their entire groups, nor do I think there's a database for that, or that, if that database existed, it would be a good tool for assessing whether or not men are more likely to be outcasts. Reddit is only one social media site, like I said, and has a shrinking market share. Whether or not other social media platforms are conducive to conversations was never my point, it was the one-sidedness of saying men are more likely to be social outcasts. I don't think looking at a few pictures of reddit meetups proves anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I don't see what other outcome being socially isolated can produce...? I suppose you could be isolated but not rejected by society, but the person who comes out of that isolation is not going to be a normal person (depending on the length of isolation), and likely won't be accepted by most normal people, which would make them an outcast no?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10409601/ this is a recent study showing social isolation by gender and age, and it turns out after age 55 women are more likely to he isolated, so what I'm saying only applies to young and middle aged men.