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.
Exactly why my instance has downvotes disabled
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?
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?
Yes.
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)
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.
I mean, if they only downvote, it’s kind of a mercy ban. They weren’t enjoying themselves anyways.
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.
the tech obsessed, that’s always going to be filled with misogynistic neckbeards.
Generalizations are hateful.
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.
So, something like Hexbear’s the_dunk_tank, but against bigotry? Not sure any of the admins on the Fediverse would allow a community like that. Everyone in charge here seems very anti-drama, which is another word for pro-status-quo
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.
One of our admins was banning people if they saw you only downvoting. This place is so much better than reddit, that growing pains are fine with me.
Hello the based dept called they want to speak to that admin
I would moderate it :(
You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to create a Lemmy community.
I think it’s much better then literally anywhere else on the internet. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, but unfortunately everywhere else is worse. As such, I’m not sure whaz the solution is for Lemmy in particular.
Everywhere where it seems “better” is just moderation making it seem like that.
There’s many internet spaces that are better than lemmy regarding misogyny, any platform that does not have a strong majority of cis men is probably better than lemmy.
Which platform exactly is that :D
Most social media? Instagram, youtube, tumblr, bluesky. And I bet there’s tons of forums by and for women.
So you’re saying the moderators on Lemmy aren’t making the space seem safe for women?
I haven’t seen any comments not removed by moderators. Unfortunately there’s a time discrepancy between comment made and action taken.
If this time discrepancy didn’t exist, I think we’d be perfectly fine.
I don’t think there is a way to have real time moderation without having bs like pre-approval of messages or AI snake oil. Which I am strongly against.
In Mastodon, this is typically solved with defederation, block lists, and admins enforcing mod policies. How come this approach doesn’t work for Lemmy? Is it not decentralized enough?
Yes. Just look at .world. As long as world is still federated into other communities, the fediverse is not federated.
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.
There are simply too many differing viewpoints, by design
The instances which support women don’t have to federate with the instances whose viewpoint is that harassing women is fine.
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.
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.
The one that I saw was positive, and if there was some negativity, it was far less than posters over on sjw and .world.
I wasn’t able to find posts drag is referring to, as near as I can tell both instances drag uses defed hexbear. Feel free to send me a link.
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
The is why dull_mens_club gives me really bad vibes. Any similar community aimed at women would be harassed into oblivion.
Any similar community aimed at women would be harassed into oblivion.
And why is that a problem with dull men’s club? I mean I’m not subbed to it but it occasionally appears in my feed (I browse /all) and it seems to be just what it says on the cover: A dull men’s club.
Drag has had mixed experiences on that community when it comes to sexism. Not what this post is about, though.
