this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2026
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No Stupid Questions

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I notice this especially with my Norwegian learning. People are rude, call me names, or make fun of me on Reddit for using the wrong word or "en" vs "et" or using a direct translation because I don't know how they say it in Norwegian, like saying somethng like «Ingen av bedriften din!» instead of «Dette er ikke din sak» (according to the casual version of Bing Translate) whereas a Norwegian-speaking Fediverse member would just say something like "You're doing good, but it's actually _____."

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[–] DarkFuture@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

When you know your account can and will be temp/perm banned by a fucking bot, you kind of stop caring about your account and your behavior on that account.

I was pretty careful until I had my 13 year old account perm banned without warning for saying "it's ok to punch a Nazi". Now I'm probably on my 40th account and I could care less about calling a Trump supporter a product of incest who should play on the freeway.

Ban me. I'll be back in 5-10 minutes.

[–] GuyIncognito@lemmy.ca 4 points 4 hours ago

I'm plenty rude on here, motherfucker

[–] Jomega@lemmy.world 10 points 7 hours ago

Bruh, I've been called all sorts of nasty things here. Your experiences are not universal.

[–] garbage_world@lemmy.world 6 points 6 hours ago

You haven't been to political communities

[–] entropiclyclaude@lemmy.wtf 11 points 8 hours ago (5 children)

You just haven’t found the right counts yet.

Watch this:

Firefox sucks donkey dick.

[–] Jakeroxs@sh.itjust.works 5 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

Actually everyone on Lemmy hates Firefox now because AI

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago)

yep. and if you point out that firefox AI features are entirely optional and you can turn them off... you get told to go fuck yourself.

or if you recommend another browser, you get told that browser is also awful and shitty and you should go fuck yourself for suggesting it. ALSO YOU ARE CLEARLY A NAZI FOR NOT THE SAME LINUX DISTRO AND BROWSER THAT I DO.

because I am fighting facism by using Debian and Librewolf!!!!! And if you aren't too then you are on the side of the fascists!

[–] garbage_world@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago
[–] SippyCup@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago

WELL I THINK YOUR BROWSER LIKES TO FELATIATE BIRDS!!

... YEAH! it sucks cloaca. How do you feel about THAT‽

[–] sefra1@lemmy.zip 1 points 7 hours ago

WHAT DID YOU SAY ABOUT FIREFOX?????

I WILL KILL YOU!!!!!

[–] uberdroog@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

Bots trained off Twitter and facebook

[–] chahn.chris@piefed.social 8 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

Idk man, the first comment I made here got assaulted with hatred. It’s been fine since then but it definitely had me worried.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

I have been on here 2 years. First 1.5 years it was pretty fun.

Now I barely go by 3 days without someone telling me how shitty and awful I am for having a different opinion than them, or that I'm boomer because think AI doesn't belong in the classroom.

[–] daychilde@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

Your opinion is different than mine. Fuck off, shitty boomer!

;-)

[–] innermachine@lemmy.world 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

The novelty wore off, now this place is just as much an echo chamber as any other dank corner of the internet lol.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

there are still some pretty cool posts with interesting comments, a lot more than reddit.

but there as it grows there are more and more stupid people who are just here to be angry and hateful, who think anyone who doesn't agree with their biased agendas is hateful and angry and who just sling personal attacks at other commenters. because they aren't interested in the issues at hand or discussion of them, they are just interested in feeling superior to the 'enemy'. and their post histories are usually quote pointed in regurgitating whatever grievances they have, like thinking everyone who doesn't agree with them 100% is a Nazi, and deserve to be subjected to violence...

my first sitewide ban from reddit was 5 years ago and it was because I have an outdoor cat, and the 'cats must always been indoors' nutbags reported me for promoting animal abuse. was a real wakeup call to how incredibly toxic people can be over other people being different than them and how willing they are to use violence and harassment to silence others... over a difference of animal care choices. God, I own a dog now and I have had 'raw food only' idiots lecture me how I'm abusing my dog for feeding her regular dog food... and then they go on and on about if you can't spend $500/mo on BARF (Biologically Appropriate Raw Food) you shouldn't' be allowed to have a dog...

to me it feels like the idiot nutbags I knew in college who would come into the cafeteria and scream about how they were on hunger strike and if you weren't too you were evil, are now literally everywhere.

[–] krisevol@lemmus.org 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's because that is the end game of upvote/downvote communities.

All is them become whatever gets engagement. Enjoy lemmy while it's good, but if we get big it will only be a few years until we are the same.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 3 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

bingo.

already the 'news' communities are lemmy are full of shitty articles with misleading headlines and most of the comments never read the article. they are just ragebait being raged at, and when someone calls it out, they often get downvoted heavily by the rage addicts who just want to be angry at editorialized bullshit headlines.

and those threads have way more activity than articles that are more modest and truthful about their content. because that doesn't illicit strong emotional reaction from the readers or play into their biases.

and often the people who post this stupid crap, go into the comments and just insult and harass the commentators that don't agree with the raw emotional content being pushed. and if you look at their post history, they are spamming inflammatory bullshit all day. they are rage-addicts trying to promote outrage and enraged that others aren't as outraged as they are.

[–] Iconoclast@feddit.uk 32 points 1 day ago (14 children)

That hasn't really been my experience. Lemmy seems nicer on the surface because most of the userbase is ideologically aligned, so conflict is less likely. But once you make the wrong noises about something, plenty of people show up ready to prove just how mean and horrible they can actually be.

Also, on Reddit I never had anyone follow me around trying to cause reputational damage by spreading false accusations about me.

[–] starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago

I think it just attracts the terminally onlines, I think most people on the fediverse are pretty cool and willing to argue stuff reasonably, but the insane people are so loud that's what you'll see very often.

We have the same problems reddit does. It’s just that it’s a smaller userbase and downvoted comments don’t disappear here like they get pushed down on reddit. So you don’t get downvoted as much, but your controversial or unpopular take remains visible for opposing opinions to attack. And yeah, there are mini-brigades here too. Make a comment about a subject that has importance to a particular instance and you get insta-downvoted multiple times, but your post will probably recover as the rest of the groups view the conversation.

[–] amio@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

This is true. The fediverse is unpleasant in occasionally different ways but is unpleasant. Part of it is human psychology that's hard to avoid (not that people are trying particularly hard), and then it's amplified by the demographics here possibly being somehow even worse at the whole "alternate view points" thing than Reddit is - which I seriously would not have thought possible, but here we are.

Maybe if the goal was making "reddit but less fuckfaced", it was a mistake to settle on the rather shoddy work of a bunch of extraordinarily angry tankies (possibly false flag although it's hard to separate one kind of dipshit from another kind of dipshit pretending to be the first kind of dipshit), and/or extraordinarily angry whatever else these... people... are - I'm sure spelling it out would be some kind of -ist, and whoo boy - no, sorry, that's probably sexist, damn. No, sorry, that's probably religious persecution, shit. No, sorry, ableism again because what if people have colostomies. Oh sorry, "colostomy" is Greek derived so probably also offensive to someone. And suggesting that is probably also possible to frame as offensive somehow, if one really puts one's alleged mind to it.

Instead of being banned arbitrarily from a sub because some shithead didn't like you criticizing Trump, you'll be banned arbitrarily from an entire instances because people are actively hunting for excuses to be offended, trolling, or just wildly out of touch with reality.
"I don't necessarily think Marxist-Len-" clearly fascist. Banned.

"Hey, that's crazy, man" - banned. That's ableism, don't'y'know.

"Some people get tricked into voting against their better int-" can't even tell what you were referring to, but banned anyway, just in case. Or because voting is fascist, or some other scintillatingly intelligent reasoning.

"Sometimes you can't get away from Windows-" fascist corporate something or other, banned.

"Sometimes people get offended, or pretend to, and it doesn't automatically make them righ-" (waiting to see how this one pans out, actually :P)

Getting a break from the (overt) right wingers is jolly nice, actually. The depressing upshot, though, is that it turns out a lot of the psychology is pretty similar anyway. The very people whining the loudest about the Reddit Gestapo get over here and immediately start the Lemmy KGB, but it's okay because their views are the right ones. Even though one of the main guys is still a blatant transphobic asshole, which is frankly pretty suggestive of something in this bastion of hyper zealous... "tolerance".

All to enjoy much less and shittier content... maybe it isn't 100% worth it, which makes the FV's hysterical self-congratulatory attitude pretty funny. Hooray, we have a deeply flawed and impractical, gimmicky bullshit architecture, thought up by someone who drinks Russian and Chinese and North-Korean (etc) flavor-aid! You even get different excuses when some dipshit abuses the moderation system, woohoo! This is like, the best thing since we ran over those protesters at Tiananmen square!

[–] starelfsc2@sh.itjust.works 2 points 20 hours ago

Theres something called "morally lucky" where they didn't really think things through that much but just ended up in the "more correct" group anyway. Some more common examples than what you gave would be things like "omg Ben Shapiro is so short what a gnome," or "trump has a tiny dick lol!!" while saying body shaming is not okay and isn't ever acceptable.

[–] Quicky@piefed.social 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But once you make the wrong noises about something, plenty of people show up ready to prove just how mean and horrible they can actually be.

This is true. Linux isn’t my platform of choice, and the “passion” of the responses that provokes is remarkable.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 1 points 9 hours ago

didn't you know that Linux is the Jesus Christ of operating systems?

It will save us from our computing sins and heal the world and bring forth a computing paradise!

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 1 day ago

frankly at this point i just assume that anyone who is really obviously being stupidly aggressive isn't a real person, it's probably just a bot meant to push people apart.

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[–] rodneylives@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago

I'd say part of it is likely raw userbase size. Like how even the most positive, well-meaning fandoms turn toxic at the edges when they get large enough.

[–] cattywampas@lemmy.world 79 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I think it has to do with community size. Even on reddit, the smaller and more insular communities are much more pleasant than the frontpage ones.

[–] JayGray91@piefed.social 5 points 1 day ago

This has been my experience. Plenty if small subreddits I've perused where when they were small, they're all politle (whether in humor, serious discussion, or sharing hobbies). In time as they grew it just brings in more and more uh, typical redditors. Thats when you knew either abandon ship and make /r/true[subject] or just cut it out.

[–] SomeAmateur@sh.itjust.works 21 points 2 days ago (2 children)

yep the smaller subs feel like a whole different website. The main pages have so much political doom and rage bait in my experience.

[–] tea@lemmy.today 12 points 2 days ago

I found that you get the biggest upvote response when you are either edgy or more black and white takes. Medium takes may be both more correct and nicer overall, but they don't get the most engagement. I would find that after I had a "big comment" that did well, I would make edgier comments for a while after, chasing that high.

That's not so much a problem here since a thread doesn't have thousands and thousands of comments or is flights against for attention. Typically I read all the comments on a Lemmy post. Doing the same on Reddit would both suck away my time and my soul, haha.

[–] JayGray91@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

When a small subreddits suddenly made it to front page (or I guess it's /r/all now? Idk I hate new reddit), good luck to the mods

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[–] Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Other commenters have made really good points (like the one about us self-selecting to be here after leaving more toxic social media, or the one about engagement algorithms on Reddit encouraging hostility.)

As a smaller site, each of us holds more sway in building what this community is. There are definitely people here that see that and want to continue fostering a more positive experience. A lot of users here have interests in science, especially computer science, and a lot of users come from around the world. Both of these create a space that encourages rationality more than US-based popular social media (like Reddit.) Logical fallacies are called out for what they are, and plenty of people here are of the mindset that pointless drama isn’t worth engaging with. It’s not absolute, no, but compared to Reddit? It’s like another planet.

I definitely feel the vibe of old school computer forums. Small communities where people remember each other’s usernames and backstories encourage us to find common ground. Reddit’s near-anonymity has the downsides of any large-scale online anonymity - people can get mean because they don’t recognize the humanity of whoever’s on the other end of the argument. Here, we are still somewhat anonymous, but you run across some of the same names over and again. Like a small town where people all know each other, you end up more accountable for your shit-stirring because you’ll encounter the same people more frequently.

Oh, and one last point, the average age here is higher than Reddit. IIRC we’re mostly in our 30s. Age and maturity may hold sway in our behavior here as well.

[–] TubularTittyFrog@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Shitty people feel big by making others feel small.

Lots of people are shitty. Here and on reddit. And easy way to attack people is over typos and grammar.

[–] Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 day ago

I'm not sure why people are so intent on excusing reddit with "oh people are just inherently mean" or "it's because there's a large userbase"..

No it's because most of the "people" on reddit are bots lol, it's the same as all the big platforms. It's just a fuckload of bots trying to make people as angry at each other as possible, because that drives more engagement and politically benefits the people running the bots and who own the platforms.
(and part of it is just that more """"users"""" means you can brag to advertisers and get more money).

People who aren't angry and aren't made to think everyone is a miserable shithead might do horrifying things like "become friends" and "help each other".
Or truly horrifyingly they might talk to each other and be convinced that rich people kinda suck actually, and we should do something about that, like stop using platforms owned by rich people.

[–] ekZepp@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (5 children)

1 . The extra steps to find a fedi instance and create a new account is usually too tedious for the post-first-think-later kind of guy.

2 . The like/dislike function are present, but the lack of shitty function like karma, medals etc. don't push the users in some kind of frenzy "contest" where copy-pasted crap or Ai-slop flood the platform.

3 . The flow of new contents is too slow to encourage doom-scrolling types. The users who stays more of a week are usually people interested in discuss things and actually "read" other comments.

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Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.

[–] JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 23 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Probably just the law of large userbases. The more people around, the more rude people there are likely to be. Rude people are always a minority, but they tend to be more vocal.

A large portion of fediverse users have abandoned Reddit for moral or ethical reasons. So while occasionally people will be rude here, it tends to skew more towards polite discussion.

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[–] Tollana1234567@lemmy.today 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

ITS THE BOTS, its to create divisive in every reddit it goes to, so people will overreact. Also alot niche subs will gatekeep the subject alot.

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[–] rossman@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I think some bots are trained to be controversial and mean. Controversial take would be that age verification roots out the young pranksters from certain communities.

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[–] SuspciousCarrot78@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Theory:

People on Lemmy self select to be here, usually as a direct backlash to prevailing Reddit culture, management or behaviour.

Evidence: https://lemmy.world/post/41398418/21528414

Reddit is mainstream, discoverable, friction free for the masses.

OTOH, there is small (albeit deliberate) friction in engagement here, that hearkens back to USENET days. It's analog, messy and human. There are some bots here (to be sure) so I don't know how long the Golden Age of Lemmy will exist, but clearly this space was designed by someone who knows the old magics. It shows.

Therefore, if you posit an inverse correlation between "is an utter cunt" and "wants to interact on niche social media forum called Lemmy", I think you'd have a safe bet.

It's not a hard gate by any means, but it gambles (correctly IMESHO) on friction keeping the biggest trolls away. The ROI for being a cunt is demonstrably higher on Reddit, Tiktok etc. Bigger bucket.

Result: Lemmy is a nicer place to visit. For now.

Also, yes: I am Australian. Does it show? Cunt cunt cunty cunt cuntington III.

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[–] Griffus@lemmy.zip 5 points 1 day ago

You're doing good, but both "ingen av bedriften din" (no one of your company) and "dette er ikke din sak" (this is not your case) is equally wrong. Both are saying English phrases in Norwegian, which makes it sound strange. This is the closest I can think of in the early morning fog of mind: "Ha'kke du no' med" - østlandsk "Har ikke du noe med" - bokmål

Instead of translating English phrases, I'd recommend trying to look up Norwegian phrases and see if any fits your need.

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