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 had much more toxic behavior at reddit, but it is hard to imagine any safe space online anywhere.
it definitely depends where you go on all platforms. blahaj zone is good, world is bad. places moderated by mods with actual experience are generally good, places moderated by jordanlund and similar get pretty toxic pretty fast. :(
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
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.
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.
If I’m reading it right, I also disagree with it, on a practical level; it’s like herding cats and not enough. I also think that an instance for women is the way to go, at least at the start.
However, to be fair with drag those actions aren’t mutually exclusive, and even if only a few admin teams keep a closer watch on sexism, it’s already improving the situation.
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.
Maybe they should, but it’s not going to be a black and white issue for most admins. There’s a reason instances like blahaj and yiffit exist. A space like that for women would be the most realistic way to get the protections for female users in the fediverse that you’re saying should exist.
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
I would moderate it :(
You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to create a Lemmy community.
Drag you killed blahaj, you are an extremely impressive troll.
Off topic drama farming. Nobody asked.
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.
I’ve experienced this (though on a much smaller scale), Lemmy should have the option to disable downvotes for users not subscribed to a community, or at least not members of the instance
I really like the idea of having to be subscribed to a community in order to be able to vote. It would encourage people to use the correct tools (subscribe/block) if they like or don’t like a community itself.
I would love this
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 can, but the problem is how do you sort out genuine downvoters from as you put them, the stompers? I’ve been working with a few other admins to have a more automated solution. Right now I have to go into the database and do queries about once a month to find trends
If it’s a particular community being targeted, I’d probably start with people who aren’t subscribed or don’t contribute but camp out downvoting everything anyway. I mean, to me it sounds very much like this user’s community is being blatantly targeted, so I’m not sure I understand why trends still need to be researched before anything can be done about it.
But I’m not an admin and I actually don’t know what tools you have available to you. I was just under the impression that you could see when people who don’t actually belong to a certain community go there just to downvote everything. Reddit managed to make people fear consequences for downvote brigading though, not sure how they pulled it off.
If this really is something that admins on various Lemmy instances are just too helpless to do anything about, then I apologise for directing my anger towards admins. And then I don’t know what the solution is either because without any sort of assistance in the matter, women are just going to give up even trying to set up spaces here (actually seems like that’s already happened for the most part). And so the culture will just never change.
From the UI, we get to see who downvoted a post, but nothing more than that unfortunately.
Trying to see who consistently downvoted posts, or who does who isn’t subscribed is not available in the UI and requires going in the database and running scripts. Which I do, but it’s a whole other later that I need to automate but haven’t had time to do.
I’d be happy to write a bunch of sql for this type of thing and throw it on github if you have any more specific requests / if instance admins would find it helpful
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.
I feel like fucking rioting now lol. Hopefully one of these days there’s enough of us here that see red over this shit to do exactly that.
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
I think I understand why one of your communities is getting downvoted, it probably attracts some dedicated megas. I’ll try to go in and upvote to counter act. I’m not a fan, but I’ll try to help out.
Reddit used to have a rule that you couldn’t downvote more than 3 or 4 posts in any community for a certain period. They went inactive while still showing as active. I think that might have been the beginning of fuzzy votes, but turned into so much more shittyness. It still might be a good solution for here. I still think mods should also be able to tag users as default, it’s really hard to remember who was hateful yesterday and troll baiting, but acting all nice today.
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.
My guess is a bit of a mixture of both - but it at least can’t be a trivial thing to implement, or else it probably would already have been added to the project by someone, it’s free software and open source after all.
Not necessarily. As free and open as it is, not everyone can add to it. There have been some caught, yet almost successful attempts to insert malicious code in open source software.
Also, the contributors might be passing on the torch thinking in the same way. And far as I remember, the original devs did a similar thing by letting others add in whatever.
So I’d say that until someone says they’re specifically working on it, nobody actually is.
That’s a good idea. Make a “irrelevant to me” button separate from downvotes by those who participate.
Which will in fact just be a combined “block user + hide post” action in the backend 😏
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.
If it would really help, hit me up, I can write something to automate it.
Exactly why my instance has downvotes disabled
I deeply appreciate your decision to do that :3
Thanks for running those communities. I try to post to one of them where I can (I.e., make memes), but I’m not really a content creator. I just like to lurk in comments and respond when I feel like it’s worth me putting in my opinion or effort.
I’m aligned with your perspective. Hard to create or promote content when people downvote it due to hive mind. It’s discouraging and unwelcoming because it sends the signal “why is this here, you don’t belong in Lemmy”.
Thank you, Zoomies, that means a lot, honestly. I’m not one either, but I try to keep them going. I see the upvotes, people enjoy it, but I think many are a bit nervous to comment, but it’ll grow eventually. I’m going to put some time on this over the next week to automate something I think
One thing I need to do is try to comment more. Hard to come up with stuff to say. And I’m one of those folks that types stuff, then second guesses it and backs out from posting.
I upvote what I can, but that’s always bare minimum effort. Consistent commenting is much more effort. And the extremely hard part is making original posts along with memes. I have no idea how Picard Maneuver does it. Bro carries Lemmy on his back alone lol.
I appreciate when you do, and I think others do too. One of the things I had to do was just stop caring about what other people thought. If they liked it, they’d upvote, or maybe they’d downvote, but no matter what you’re adding to the conversation. I just dump out whatever I’m thinking now!
I do have to step up my meme game tho
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.
Also you can always hide them, most apps allow hiding them (that ive tried)
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.
Kind of like slashdot modding of yore? I don’t recall if they still do it, but they had multiple positive and negative tags for moderation.
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.
I don’t think creating more echo chambers is the right thing to do tbh
Echo chambers of…gender equality?
Not exactly the point. Spaces reserved for a specific community of people alone tend to be breeding grounds for extremist viewpoints and toxicity
Not sure you can call half the population a ‘community’ but OK. Women come from all walks of life and ideologies as I’m sure you’ll have to imagine.
Also, even in the majority of women-centric spaces in the internet, men are still allowed s long as they aren’t assholes. The only purpose would be to make a specific spot where women can post without fear of being harassed.
If you’ve participated in any women-centric sub on Reddit you’ll know what I’m talking about. Try r/Askwomen or r/feminism. The toxicity on those subs is over the roof.
Something similar might happen if women-centric instances (not even communities) are created. Kinda like a hexbear-esque situation.
I have for years and haven’t seen any of the toxicity you’re talking about, except towards men showing up being right cunts. I’m guessing that’s how you encountered it, too.
Nope, there’s toxicity there and it’s widely complained about on Reddit (including women themselves) - especially concerning the first two subs i mentioned. Have you considered you’re one of the toxic participants?
Keep in mind that this is probably very instance dependend. I am from Beehaw which generally does not tolerate this sort of thing and this expectation is stated very clearly. For us down voting is not even possible. We also do not federate with nodes that cause the biggest issues. So there are things that can be done but it is not perfect and has consequences.
Just mentioning.
Edit: Even with that, there has been discussion of Beehaw leaving the threadiverse due to these issues and lack of mature moderation tools. Not sure where that stands.
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.
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.
Lemmy is a relatively small and niche platform, imo small platforms tend to be like that. First men show up, then transfems, and then cis women. We seem to be at the second stage and while things can be done better (like a female only instance) I do think things will get better.
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.
Something like automod might work, but then you’re just playing the linguistic cat and mouse game with the people who want to be shitty and are willing to test boundaries.
Yes. It does not work without severely limiting what people are allowed to say. I do believe anonymous communities don’t work without moderation, but I also believe blanket censorship is bad.
I have no good answer :(
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?
it’s not decentralized enough is exactly the answer. lemmy.world holds a huge portion of users and communities despite having middling at best moderation. illustrating this, one of my favorite communities (196) just recently tried to force everyone to migrate to .world. fortunately, the community at large openly rejected that absurd move, but it definitely exemplified the centralizing forces at play.
Yes. Just look at .world. As long as world is still federated into other communities, the fediverse is not federated.
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
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
I think it would be interesting to see how the experience of women pans out by instance. I can imagine it being a fundamentally different experience on blahaj or beehaw, when compared to more generalist instances like .world
Which is a problem, IMO. Maybe the solution is to have a women focused instance and I would be all for it. But also, that’s a little bit like India having a women only train because the men are too rapey on other trains. It allows safe passage for women for now but doesn’t actually fix or address the problem of rapey men.
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.
This is part of the history of this space
Sorry if I don’t agree with your revisionist take
You’re the one whining like a little bitch here
Yap yap yap says the barking dog, desperate for attention and not self-enacted solutions.
come up with new drama dude this is so tired
No u
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.
I was on trollx and it was a nice community. A community with a name derived from two X chromosomes will never be fully trans inclusive though.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a new name?
Femmy? Might be a bit obvious, but that’s how I roll.
I feel like community names should be obvious.
Neither was twoxx arent many of the mods trans? Or is that a lie ppl say, I’ve seen that said a lot on redit
It does sound like something “conservatives” would make up tbh
Yeah private communities on Reddit are an actual delight. /r/centuryclub was an unexpectedly fun community to be a part of. I kinda miss the memeing that went on in intro posts on there.
