Hi new user here. Iāve 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 donāt 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 ākeep the peaceā? I think this gets to the heart of the question and again, this isnāt political to me, itās purely mechanical. I think that if a social media site has a community called āpoliticsā that is solely made up of stories promoting one party while shitting on the other then the entire site is inherently flawed. It isnāt being genuine in what it offers and is incapable of providing it.
Itās like if you had a community named ācarsā but youāre only allowed to talk positively about certain manufacturers. Imagine most people either like Ford or Chevy but on the ācarsā community it ājust so happensā 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 Chevyās new SUV produces 500 horsepower? Well, that source isnāt reliable. In fact this Ford biased source did a study showing it only produces 400 horsepower. You think that isnāt a reliable source? This Ford biased bias checker agrees that your Chevy source is biased but our Ford source is not biased. No, we canāt just give people information and let them decide for themselves. Thatās 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 thatās 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 didnāt even reply.
So what do you end up with?
You get a ācarsā community, a āfordā community, and a āchevyā community but youāre 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 isnāt safe for humanity to let Chevy people talk about Chevy in the Chevy community. Theyāve been posting unreliable sources in there, using bad language towards Ford posters, and so on. Itās a dangerous hate community so weāre 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 ācarsā 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 wonāt 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 donāt care about politics and you can substitute Biden for Trump and make comparisons to other social media sites. Iām 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 Iād like to know if this is a function of Lemmy itself like it is on Reddit or if itās 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?
Who are you fuckin thanos? The world isnāt balanced, both sides arenāt equally shitty. Obviously you disagree, so if you donāt like seeing opinions you disagree with make your own instance, or leave lol. Why you still here whining when you made up your mind the moment you posted? You can do what you want but this is just silly.
āHey guys I donāt like the content on the front pageā
āOk uh, well thats what users wanted to see soā¦ Youāre outvotedā
āBut I donāt like itā
āYou can curate your communities I guess?ā
āBut so many people disagree with me and I donāt like it, it must be site wide collusion to manipulate the content because thatās way more likely than people just generally disagreeing with meā
āā¦ Ok bud well byeā
āBut wait I donāt like it it challenges my preconceived notionsā
Well, that isnāt at all what happened, but okay. This was a platform discussion and probably beyond most users here even understanding. Not because theyāre stupid but because they donāt really understand how social media algorithms and rules work to curate content in certain ways.
If you wanted to ask about algorithms or if mods/admins can manipulate content then you can just ask that. Instead you asked if the platform was biased, and brought up negative trump posts as an example. Of course people thought you were upset because the dear leader was being smeared. Just ask the damn question without all the āok but the biden stuff is just as bad and also this isnāt about politics, now lets talk about politics as an example of the bias Iām seeingā
Can you see how taking the question of ādoes this website allow vote manipulation by admins or have algorithms biased against certain viewpointsā and framing it around āI see a lot of negative posts about the man being indicted for an attempted coup, and that feels wrongā might give people the impression your just upset people are shitting on trump?
We know how social media works thatās why many of us are here. To avoid the algorithm rage baiting bullshit. And you walked in like āhey folks do you guys just manipulate information here? I feel like you do. Hereās a highly controversial example where I feel you are. But please donāt bring up my example, because its not about politicsā