(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.
Yep. I agree. I’ve been bullied on Lemmy for sharing the fact that I have been bullied in my own home town because local law enforcement hired exes of mine who have abused their law enforcement powers. I now have a person, or group, that follows each of my posts and comments to immediately downvote them, even if they aren’t even controversial. I just receive an automatic downvote. That pales in comparison to the verbal bashing I’ve received from that group, or person. Each time I speak out, I have this one commenter that tells me that I’m crazy and need meds to make me shut up about having been abused by an ex that was hired by our local sheriff’s department. I wonder if they sniffed my phone to follow my account. I guess that would be crazy and just earn me more hateful comments from “random” people on Lemmy, huh? My question is, do I blame Lemmy as a whole, or will people on here finally admit that some certain local in my area is stalking my account?
When comments have become as bad as “strangers” telling me to “get raped with a rusty lawn mower blade”, I have to wonder if it’s all coming from the same IP address and if the mods even care.
I’ll be honest with you: based on your comment scores, I don’t see anyone following you and downvoting all your comments. I can almost guarantee that there’s no “group” doing it, as very few people care that much.
Although I have seen people on Lemmy randomly downvote things for no discernable reason. Like I will post a comment and it will be negative for a few hours. Then when more sane people show up, it’s upvoted so it’s positive. My comment didn’t change, the people looking at it did. Don’t worry so much about votes.
True, there are some people that just downvote everything, for no reason. I get that. I guess what made me worry was the fact that I had comments in Lemmy News telling me they hope I get raped with a rusty lawn mower blade, followed by someone downvoting all of my past comments in succession after that comment. I figured it was the person who made that comment.
Actually I have had an argument (don’t remember if that was still Reddit or already Lemmy, but my old account on an instance which went dead) with every my comment N days back getting the same 2 or 3 downvotes (don’t remember, but it was the same number with every of them) and the other side at some point saying that it’s “the community showing you the door”, making it clear that it’s them trying so hard, but that was actually funny.
Lemmy is very small. When I run into the grandparent poster, if their comment is benign I don’t vote for it either way. But if it taps into paranoid fantasies, or is fanciful, or factually incorrect I down voted. But I would do that for anybody not just because it’s them. They just have a really really high degree of going off the rails in their posts.
wtaf ? from that same post I just replied to yesterday ? Can you take it to the admins of your instance ? perhaps they can do something about it I don’t know