Or do people think that Lemmy is a neutral, open-minded, safe community? Not like evil Reddit.
EDIT: Talking about mainstream instances like ml or world.
See examples of violent comments towards me and instead of mods removing their comments, they removed mine.
The comment that the all caps person was replying to was me saying that there are non-human targets. Users were assuming I want to kill people and turns out they are the ones that want to kill.
The problem is that if that toxicity is widespread enough, and accepted enough, it does interfere with any discussion of opposing viewpoints. When helpful comments that advance the discussion are consistently burried under dozens of unhelpful ones, it makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion, and incentivses those whose opinions that go against the ingrained group-think to leave. Akin to the Nazi bar allegory, allowing that sort of toxicity to fester just chases off anyone who doesn’t want to join in, leading to a echo-chamber.
Fair point. But how to distinguish it from unpopularity? If the “toxic” waste is disingenuous, bad faith, bot based flooding, we have the tools to suppress it. If something is just genuinely unpopular, you have to be careful calling it an echo-chamber. Lots of folks think toxic of anything that disagrees with their obviously superior opinions.
There is no perfect answer. Garbage in, garbage out. Welcome to humanity.