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
I deeply appreciate your decision to do that :3
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?
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’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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 do agree that the reports and downvotes of topics geared toward women are very widespread which is exhausting, and can make it hard to talk about the things you want to. Most of the virulent, misogynistic comments get removed quickly but often the damage is already done by then. I have learned over the years on the internet that sometimes I should let womens’, trans’ and other races’ people’s spaces be their spaces, and check carefully if whatever I have to say really adds to the conversation or just minimizes/drowns out the opinions of the minority audience the community is for. So I have had the urge to participate but have backed off. I’m a bit torn because the lack of activity can also make a community feel unwelcoming, but I am concerned that even my most well-intentioned comments could have a blind spot or inherent bias that makes it also unwelcoming.
The solution I see is that a woman safe-space instance is needed, whose admins ban misogony, unhelpful comments and reports, mass downvoting etc., to the point where some might feel the actions are like PTB. Beehaw has a strict moderation stance, they even defedded from lemmy.world due to the amount of toxicity they had to deal with, but they are able to curate a more welcoming experience. We are still “early days of Reddit”, it will take time and effort from users of all genders to make it a better place.
Keep in mind that this is probably very instance dependend. I use 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.
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.
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.
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.
relevant discussions:
- !lemmyshitpost@lemmy.world true colors: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10574267
- incredible find: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10217719
- epic ratio: https://lemmy.cafe/post/9597634
- lemmy is a worse platform for women than reddit was: https://lemmy.cafe/post/4821164
this issue of such a massive proportion can only be solved with intention—it’s not getting fixed by accident. recognizing the problem is the first step.
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
Is there anything others can do to help? Feddit.uk wouldn’t tolerate this but I’m not sure what a regular user can do apart from look out for harassment, call it out and report promptly
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- Call me Lenny/Leni ( @shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee ) English8•2 months ago
I would moderate it :(
You don’t need to ask anyone’s permission to create a Lemmy community.