Hi new user here. I’ve been checking out Lemmy but the amount of bias is ruining it for me. For example the front page right now has 7 out of 20 submissions that contain the word Trump in a negative context. I don’t care about Trump but when the front page is all political posts attacking Trump I have to wonder about the health of the site.
In the most simple sense, could Republican submissions survive on Lemmy politics community ignoring the voting behavior or would the site and moderators itself actively suppress it to “keep the peace”? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isn’t political to me, it’s purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called “politics” that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isn’t being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.
It’s like if you had a community named “cars” but you’re only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the “cars” community it “just so happens” that everyone there likes Ford.
You can post about Chevy but you have to be careful about how reliable the information is. You have an article that says Chevy’s new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isn’t reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isn’t a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we can’t just give people information and let them decide for themselves. That’s dangerous. We can only give them our rock solid Ford sources in order to protect humanity.
Did you comment that you sometimes prefer Chevy for certain things? Well, in this Ford biased community that’s not going to go over well. Now you have 1000 downvotes and 100 comments calling you an idiot. Try to defend your opinions? Too bad, you can only respond every 15 minutes. You have too many downvotes. Well, look at that, the dumb Chevy poster realized he is a moron and had nothing to say in response. Clearly the Ford posters were right again. After all, just look at all those downvotes and comments and the Chevy poster didn’t even reply.
So what do you end up with?
You get a “cars” community, a “ford” community, and a “chevy” community but you’re not allowed to talk about Chevy in cars. You can only organically talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. That is until the site administrators start getting involved and deciding that really it isn’t safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. They’ve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. It’s a dangerous hate community so we’re going to shut it down. You can talk about Chevy in the cars community if you want.
Then you get biased Ford stories under the “cars” community showing up on the front page. Anyone who prefers Chevy will never have their submissions seen because it is relegated to a smaller community that algorithmically won’t show up. If it somehow does get big and popular enough the admins step in and boot it or artificially step on promoting it.
Again, I don’t care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. I’m simply asking if Lemmy is offering anything different with regards to this situation.
Can someone explain how it is different from the Reddit moderator and suppression rules? So far Lemmy is producing the same biased garbage I see on Reddit so I’d like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if it’s just echos of Reddit that could one day go away. Is Lemmy something new or is it just for people who loved NuReddit but are mad about the API changes?
How is that proving their point?
The question was wherher “Lemmy” was deliberately and unnaturally biased, akin to a car forum that was biased entirely toward Ford and against Chevy.
There is no mechanism by which that could even be accomplished here, since there’s over 1,000 individual instances, each subject only to the authority of their individual owners.
So the answer to the OP’s question is and can only be “no,” simply because it’s literally impossible for it to be otherwise - there is no mechanism by which any such lemmy-wide bias could be imposed or enforced nor is there anyone with the authority to do so.
So clearly, if the downvotes prove anything at all it’s something else.
I would say that, as far as the OP’s thinly veiled concern-trolling goes, it’s fairly obvious that what they prove, if snything, is that bias against right-wing ideology occurs naturally on internet forums, even in the absence of mechanisms by which it might be enforced or people with the authority to enforce it.
You might do well to honestly consider why that might be the case.
Is that why 4chan is the way it is? Is that why Twitter shifted hard to the right when people stopped being banned? I don’t think it proved that at all.
All it proved is that Lemmy world is biased to the left which was already known. I found out that Lemmy isn’t biased as a platform but also the userbase sadly thinks further fragmentation is the solution. Don’t like the left bias here? Go find a right bias instance. Uhh… No thanks to both? I want impartial authority and diverse participation not ANOTHER layer of bias on top of existing bias promoting mechanisms used in popular social media platforms.
That was the solution offered. Don’t like the left bias? Go find the right bias Lemmy instances and some names were dropped. So obviously your theory is garbage if people are outright telling me where to go find “right bias” Lemmy instances.