https://lemmy.nz/post/18610200/13255360
This user describes how most of the women-centered communities on Lemmy were shut down due to harassment of their members.
Another user adds “We need a safe space, but most of the women I know on here don’t have the time or energy to moderate it. And there’s so few of us, it feels like it’s not worth the effort anyway.”
I run a few communities that I would consider to be fairly women-oriented, or at least I would expect them to be interested. I do not expect many men to be interested, and hey that’s okay. I welcome anyone who wants to, but no harm if it’s not your thing.
But any post that gets made gets downvoted to hell. I routinely have to moderate and remove posts of “Why is this here” and “This is stupid” even though there are people who enjoy it, they are just swarmed by other commenters, and it’s made my members less active.
It’s pretty clear how people vote and act here, I’m coming up on 2 years here and it’s been like how you’d expect. Downvotes don’t mean “I don’t think this adds to the conversation” or “This is appropriate”, they mean “I personally don’t like this” here, and I think that kills a lot of our smaller communities.
Very disappointing to find out the real reason why women-oriented communities aren’t exactly thriving here. But not surprising, I guess, although I was expecting better from a platform that seems so generally left wing. Can’t even expect the men here to stomp that shit out. And now I’m waiting for someone to come and respond something along the lines of “not all men” while not addressing or confronting the issue or taking any steps to push for change.
Edit: aren’t admins able to see who is downvoting? So basically the admins of your instance are just sitting back and allowing certain people to ruin things for others in communities that don’t concern them?
I was devastated from the most recent US election as I learned a similarity between all political views is hating women. On another note, it’s been 17 hours and I am immune to sarcasm; NoT aLL mEn
Downvotes don’t mean “I don’t think this adds to the conversation” or “This is appropriate”, they mean “I personally don’t like this” here, and I think that kills a lot of our smaller communities.
Yet another nasty redditism inherited by Lemmy… and frankly that’s why I think that we should have multiple types of downvote, this way people can express their disagreement in a fast and pseudo-anonymous way without fucking everything up.
It’s just the internet, not necessarily a redditism.
And instead of a rainbow of downvoting options, just disable showing the vote counter.
This way, you can still downvote, but nobody sees the end result except maybe mods and admins for moderation purposes.
You can still use the upvote/downvote ratio to sort comments or posts in your feed, but it would be working under the hood instead of out in the open.
I like seeing it, this site has less value without it, why are you on lemmyworld when it has upvotes/downvotes? You have other options without them.
Also you can always hide them, most apps allow hiding them (that ive tried)
Apparently mods can and do ban people who just downvote everything they see, there’s even been posts here about it.
Perhaps this is the solution?
Yes. The correct solution is to kick them out. Why are they even there if it isn’t to participate? If the topic is inappropriate, make a report and let the mods handle it.
Drag’s philosophy on content policing is this:
The mods choose the rules and remove content that breaks the rules. The users downvote and argue with content that disrupts the space without breaking the rules. If actions that disrupt the space without breaking the rules create a pattern, the mods create a new rule. The users decide if they agree with the new rule. If they don’t, they create a new community and the two compete.
Downvotes are absolutely essential to this ecosystem. Platforms without downvotes, like Twitter, suffer for it. The algorithm can’t tell the difference between hostile engagement and positive engagement, so comments that damage the space and provoke arguments are boosted as long as they don’t break the rules badly enough for the admins to get involved. Some platforms try to solve this problem by having mods and admins do three times as much work to remove all the comments that would be downvoted. This causes mod fatigue and over-moderation.
Downvotes are a disagree button BUT your disagreement is public, and if your disagreements form a pattern, the moderators should be able to action it.
What Lemmy needs is better mod tools to show analytics on downvotes (technical problem; could be solved by any determined programmer), and better action on downvotes from the admins (social problem; requires the community to dump instances that don’t moderate their users)
Better mod tools are a repeatedly requested feature. The question remains whether it’s being ignored or it’s difficult to implement and cover the entire fediverse.
It is, I just wish it wasn’t. I don’t want to ban people for having negative opinions, but there are a lot of people who only downvote, and for them it’s the only option. There also aren’t tools to easily automate it.
If it would really help, hit me up, I can write something to automate it.
I mean, if they only downvote, it’s kind of a mercy ban. They weren’t enjoying themselves anyways.
Not good. We need Lemmy and the fediverse represent all people as a whole if er hope to become the standard backbone of internet communication.
One of my first experiences on Lemmy was a bunch of mens rights activists celebrating a women’s tech job fair being overrun by men.
I’m not surprised that this is a problem. Lemmy’s main demographic is the tech obsessed, that’s always going to be filled with misogynistic neckbeards.
Don’t say always.
It’s defeatist.
You’re a man quipping back on a post about men forcing themselves to women’s spaces.
I used to think differently, but men who force their way into conversations just to say “not all men” are part of the problem.
There’s no actual understanding, just correction and dismissal.
the tech obsessed, that’s always going to be filled with misogynistic neckbeards.
Generalizations are hateful.
No reason to out yourself lol
It’s a good job misogynists aren’t people. I might feel bad otherwise.
It seems to be one of the problems where Lemmy feeling a bit like old Reddit is really, really bad. Remembering from back then, it took many years of concerted effort and dedicated subreddits attacking sexism (that were in turn harassed and hated on by the “mainstream” Reddit audience, like SRS for example) to slowly change the culture. And it’s not like Reddit is some sort of safe haven even now.
Yup, that’s a problem. Specially because, once the gender ratio gets too skewed towards one side (it is), the Petrie multiplier kicks in; then the sexism targets each woman more and more frequently.
Potential solutions that I see for the problem:
- Perhaps creating a few instances for women? I don’t mean instances to talk only about feminism, but for general stuff. With higher standards against harassment.
- Better mod policing against harassment. Collective action, so it’s easy to say and hard to do it, I know.
The admins could try banning sexist men, but that’ll never happen
The admins of what? There is no singular “admins” of the Fediverse. That’s kind of the whole point.
I understood “the admins” as “a meaningfully large amount of the admin teams of the Fediverse”. Collective action.
I still don’t read it that way, but assuming it is, that is still unreasonable. There are simply too many differing viewpoints, by design. The best option for this sort of thing is to start a female focused instance. It won’t be able to affect the wider fediverse directly, but it would be able provide the space that is seemingly absent atm.
I think that it would be a good start. But only a start; sexism is a social problem, so even if you ban the individuals saying sexist stuff, you still see sexism elsewhere.
And even if you ban overtly sexist users, others will keep:
- focusing on topics typically enjoyed by men, and typically disliked by women;
- interpreting what each other says based on masculine social norms;
- assuming that they’re dealing with other men unless explicitly told otherwise;
etc.
That’s still aggravating, you know? You can’t pinpoint why but it still makes you feel unwelcome.
Is there anything others can do to help? Feddit.uk wouldn’t tolerate this but I’m not sure what a regular user can do apart from look out for harassment, call it out and report promptly
I would moderate it :(
You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to create a Lemmy community.
Tbf, i wouldn’t recommend Lemmy to anyone i know either for more reasons including this
Examples please?
wait, what? we have women in here? where?
I do get the joke; Even so, to this post’s credit, that this comment [at time of writing] is +3 is a great representation of their challenges.
The whole point is about people feeling legitimate using the platform. Jokes feeding on the trope “there aren’t women on the Internet” reinforces alienation. It makes sense they wouldn’t feel comfortable if dismissal is the community upvoted response to them -already- feeling unwelcome.
Thanks for the enlightening thread. And that puts a dampener on the enthusiasm that I was feeling for this place. Not that I should be surprised or anything.
I might misunderstand how things work here but it sounds to me like if entire communities are getting bombed by downvotes, then it’s the various admins across instances that are allowing this to happen. And it puts a bit of a dark cloud over this place now for me.
Blahaj.zone has disabled downvotes, so at least that part can’t be weaponised against folk on our instance.
As for the rest of it, yeah, lemmy is better than reddit, but it did get a lot of users from reddit, so its still closer to reddit culture than I’d like. But, it’s also got a lot of better aspects than reddit ever did, and hopefully that trend will continue
Another issue that’s starting to pop up in “inclusive” communities that don’t have active enough mods and admins is users had to start policing their own spaces, and then the admins get upset with the vitriol directed at the trolls and force the community to repsect the trolls and wait until the reports eventually get through.
Fuck off with your targeted bullshit drama.
Not only are so you juvenile as to to bring it up in this context, you’re clearly more interested in being a passive aggressive little bitch about the thing or you would never have seen this post in the first place after you blocked OP like a responsible adult.
Back when I used Reddit, one of my favorite subs was TrollX. If we had a sub with that spirit, it would be a good start.
Are there secret communities on Lemmy? Not that secret communities should be a default, but I was invited to a secret sub on Reddit years ago that was all women. It was a true safe space from harrassment, where we could talk about feminine things that we knew wouldn’t gain traction in main subs. I have no idea how it started, but I knew that users who were invited to join had previously been vetted by the sub’s mods - they saw that I’d made feminist posts and multiple comments about being a woman, and didn’t go around picking fights. It was like a background check.
I don’t believe there is any one solution, but starting with dedicated communities (in the spirit of TrollX), with mods that smack down misogyny and (actual) trolls, sounds like the best way to start.
Let’s get away from the “X chromosome” bit now that we’re not stuck with Reddit’s bad names
It doesn’t need to be called the same thing.
I’m also not sure if it matters, but Troll X and Two X Chromosomes were very different subs. Troll X was more of a spin-off, and was never strictly for XX women - it was trans-inclusive by default. That’s what I’m hoping for here too.
It’s especially jarring coming from Mastodon, which is broadly more diverse than Lemmy. I’ve witnessed some really questionable comments here during the last year. I really hope something can be done to improve things. I think a feminist-specific instance might be the best option, much in the way someplace like Hexbear has managed to create a fairly strong community bloc with strong core beliefs.
I don’t think creating more echo chambers is the right thing to do tbh
Echo chambers of…gender equality?
Sadly hexbear doesn’t have a ton of really active comms specific to women. Though at least they’re very aggressive removing misogyny across the instance. It’s been categorically less stressful posting on hexbear vs the rest of lemmy simply because I’m not then checking an inbox with replies/dms calling me ‘removed’ or ‘it’ or other charming insults.
Removing downvotes makes sense too, though I also like keeping them and using them to ban people abusing it. The voter is only visible to admins though.
Hexbear might be safe for binary women, but as far as drag can tell, they’re still sexist against a few million other gender identities. Drag went to Hexbear and searched for discussions about dragself pronouns. It wasn’t good.
relevant discussions:
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world true colors: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10574267
- incredible find: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10217719
- epic ratio: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9597634
- lemmy is a worse platform for women than reddit was: https://lemmy.cafe/post/4821164
this issue of such a massive proportion can only be solved with intention—it’s not getting fixed by accident. recognizing the problem is the first step.
I’m not quiet about being a woman, but have yet to receive dms or inappropriate responses or dismissals due to that fact (via lemmy).
EDIT: although elsewhere in this post’s comment section I just received such a dismissal by someone who thought I was a man. Indeed, this is the direction in gender space along which I am used to experiencing such behavior, and it is why I have chosen to emphasize the fact that I am a female with a vagina so much in recent years: to get women to stop harassing me.
So I’ll shout it out here: I’m a woman, if anyone has a problem with that or just wants to talk about it, please reach out.
I want to help solve the problem but I need to see it better first. I only ever see cherry-picked examples like you have collected here instead of seeing it in the wild. Don’t get me wrong, the cherry-picked examples are bad, but I need more than a handful of outliers to really understand the problem and where it comes from before I can understand what I can do to help.
I am a male with a penis but it is a very feminine penis and I stand in solidarity with your vagina. In fact,. Ny.penis’ name is Cassandra, which is neither here nor there but it is indeed a fact.
Being serious for a moment though: I agree with your rational approach here. I have found Lemmy to be more hostile than reddit overall, and while I condemn hostility based on gender or race (I very much applaud hostility based on religion though) I think we NEED THIS SO FUCKING BADLY.
The entire internet has become a bland cesspool of meaningless garbage. I think the current state of things has proven that what inevitably begins as a laudable attempt to stomp out hhate speech (which I condemn) the window invariably gets wider and wider until meaningful dialogue is silenced.
We should be very fucking hostile towards Nazis. We should be hostile towards avaricious governments and unchecked human greed. We should be hostile towards proselytization, and anyone that cant understand that freedom FROM religion is as, or more important than, freedom OF religion. And while I can see the need to ban outright calls for violence as being necessary, the ubiquity of iron-clad moderation makes me very concerned about what will happen when there is a legitimate need to react against violent acts from entrenched power systems towards the oppressed.
While the comments here about “go make your own instance” are dismissive, I do agree with then in spirit. I want to participate in communities that eschew group think and promote real dialoguue. Especially dialogue I don’t agree with.
The power of the fediverse is that if someone wants to copy the bland corporate safe space that is the rest of the internet there is fuck all stopping them.
these aren’t cherry picked? these are quite normal—that’s why i started collecting them because they were so easy to find.
i respect your expression of experience of not having been on the receiving end of this that much—i will thank you to respect mine!
I do want to respect your experience and help to address the root problems leading to it.
That’s why I am asking and engaging in this conversation: to be better informed and to help others subvert hate in this hate-filled time.
I’m also an odd case, as an intersex person who was socially raised (predominantly) male but in recent years transitioned to female mostly to avoid harassment. I get so much less hate when I’m perceived as a woman that your experience is somewhat foreign to me. Whether presenting as a man or as a woman, I get hate overwhelmingly from women. Women in our society are hate-filled and angry and don’t know how to process emotions like discomfort caused by their intersexphobia nearly as well as men do.
A curated collection of the worst examples meets the definition of cherry picking. Cherry picking doesn’t mean that your argument is invalid, just that there is missing context from the rest of the distribution of interactions. Any sufficiently large community will have enough assholes that bad behavior can be cherry picked from the extreme end of the distribution to be used as examples if someone wants to paint the whole community in a bad light.
That said, the extreme and cherry-picked examples are still a problem that need to be taken seriously. My life is an extreme and cherry-picked example that runs counter to the common narrative from “feminists” who think that blocking and ostracizing dissenting voices is a solution, instead of recognizing that reaction as exclusive and anti-diversity. I understand that extreme/unusual or cherry-picked examples need to be taken seriously and considered as edge cases. I am not trying to dismiss you, although my word choice last night maybe could have been more explicit on this point. I’m sorry. What I’m trying to communicate is that I need to better understand the problem (in context) to be able to help be part of the solution.
We need a better solution, and I want to help work towards that. I believe that starts with discussions like this one.
Yeah okay thanks i guess it just comes off really not nice for you to say that.
if you posted a list of the worst incidents in your experience of abuse, i truly doubt you would love my response to be calling you a cherry picker. even if you don’t mean it, it looks like siding with the abuser. it’s NOT cherry picking to tell my literal own damn story of what i deal with. if you truly mean differently, maybe choose different words
Any list of my experiences of abuse is a fundamentally cherry-picked list because my experiences are so far outside (what feminists claim to be) the norm.
I am explicitly calling myself a cherry picker and would have no problem with you doing the same. Everyone else sees my problems that way. It’s just the truth.
I mean what I said.
EDIT: and to be clear, that includes my statement that even cherry-picked examples need to be taken seriously, however within proper context. I see that you’ve already downvoted me and probably moved on. I’m taking your lived experiences seriously, and you aren’t taking mine seriously. I hope you will reconsider if you actually want to solve the root of the problems that we both are experiencing.
This situation seems to have spiraled a bit—I logged off for a few hours and came back to a bunch of DMs from you.
I want to make it clear that I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. However, this conversation has reached a point where it’s no longer productive.
You wouldn’t go to the comments of a person of color as they share their experiences and feelings about racism and say, “I only ever see cherry-picked examples like you have here.” But that’s essentially what you said to me about gender-based abuse. That kind of comment is: a) dismissive and encourages others to doubt the stories of victims, and b) a conversation-ender.
What you communicated to me is that my lived experience isn’t enough for you. As someone with a normal life and not a researcher, I have no way to provide the additional “data” you seem to require.
Ok, since you brought up my two short DMs, I’ll post them here for public consumption.
I am very much trying to continue the conversation that you started about experiences of gender-based abuse by adding variety of experience from a very different perspective that contrast with the cherry-picked list that you provided of things you read online that resonated with your preconceptions. My examples are cherry-picked from my life; yours are cherry-picked from lemmy.
I am repeatedly echoing the sentiment of your original post: that we need to talk about and understand these things if we want to learn and grow. It’s how humans share data.
You claim that I am being dismissive only because the cherry picked examples from my life experience come from an opposite tail of the distribution of gender-based abuse as your list. I can’t help where my life experiences lie on this distribution, but I can share them (as you did) to provide some additional data that helps to fill out the range of the population.
You are dismissing me by saying that my experiences must be shared in bad faith to be dismissive/encourage doubt/end conversations. Please re-read my words. They are trying to communicate that I DESPERATELY want a conversation on this topic so that we can all learn and grow from each others’ experiences. Just because my experiences are different from yours does not make them bad-faith.
From your behavior, I’m starting to suspect that this is projection and that you are a bad-faith troll who refuses to engage with others if they have different life experiences. However, I don’t believe that yet because you and I have had several other conversations in various other comments sections over the past year which have been good and productive and I have grown to like you.
I want a productive conversation on this topic, yet you only seem to want to dismiss my perspective. This runs contrary to our past interactions. Please, I’m trying to have a productive conversation.
That said, the examples you give aren’t your personal lived experience as much as extreme examples of sexism that you’ve stumbled across on this site and curated. The examples that I’m giving are genuine and personal lived experience as a gender minority (neither male or female) rather than things I read online. I don’t think that that makes one set of examples more valid than the other, just that these fact make your most recent comment seem highly hypocritical. You are replying to a minority trying to share their experiences and feelings by dismissing me, encouraging others to doubt me, and ending the conversation without engaging with our differences of life experience. Then you accuse me of doing that instead of actually engaging with my perspective. Please reconsider. I’ll end this here, but if you want to have an honest and genuine discussion about how to solve the issue of gender-based abuse that you brought up, my DMs are always open.
Hard agree about it being worse then Reddit. It’s gotten to the point where I don’t engage as much as I want to and thinking about going back to Reddit. I’m sure there are people that would like that.
