As I'm sure most of you are aware, Reddit is now censoring Luigi's name entirely and have been giving out warnings and bans as they are considering it to be promoting violence.
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I found an article here for anyone else looking for a source that's not just a clickbait image.
This kind of thing has been a long time coming, it's why I started looking into decentralized social media in the first place. It actually feels less dangerous today than it did before the plague of GPT bots that make everyone wary of whether they're reading something written by a human or not.
I left facebook for diaspora in the early 2010s because I felt like an algorithm could influence my opinions too easily. If I see a bunch of my friends voicing one opinion, but all of my friends who voice the opposite opinion don't make it onto my feed, that will influence my own opinions regardless of how mindful I try to be about that. I was kind of addicted and it took strength to delete my account.
I started looking for reddit alternatives a couple years later for similar reasons. I'm really glad lemmy has finally taken off but things had to get a lot worse for that to happen.
Don't forget, you're subject to the same content manipulation here. Mods of many communities are biased if not outright propagandists. The echo chamber is very real. It just isn't as centralized due to the nature of the technology.
I actually don't really care about "content manipulation" per se, I'm just trying to avoid astroturfing. Every online community has moderators. I'd prefer that the moderators are people, and people have beliefs and viewpoints that they might want to push.
If Jerry the mod from Minnesota is removing posts that don't align with his beliefs I don't give that the same weight as when it's done by a multibillion dollar corporation whose belief is more profit. If fifty mods are influencing my beliefs in the exact same direction without coordinating with each other, maybe I was actually inclined to believe that in the first place. It's coordination that makes it dangerous, and there really isn't a return-on-investment for astroturfing a community of a few thousand users.
You could make an argument that this is a reason to be wary of admins of big instances like .world, but I'm skeptical even that has enough users yet for astroturfing to be worth investing in.
I actually think lemmy took off because the "content manipulation" the devs/admins were engaging in through the early years prevented it from becoming a toxic environment. Almost all the other alternative platforms were focused on minimal moderation and they became awful places as a result.
Wow. You...don't care? If someone is pushing lies on you?
I will never understand zoomers.
Everyone is going to draw their line somewhere. If I can't grapple with the idea of anyone de-emphasizing ideas that don't match their beliefs, I'm not going to be on the web at all and am probably going to be withdrawing from society. I'm drawing my line at having an underlying agenda that goes deeper than simply what a mod wants and does not want, based on genuinely held beliefs, to allow in a community. Some dude moderating an online community is very unlikely to be a master of manipulation without organizational backing, which for tiny communities isn't going to be worth investing in.
I'll explicitly say I'm fine with a mod silencing the viewpoint that immigrants are destroying my country. I genuinely don't want to read those viewpoints in my downtime, regardless of how that gives me a biased view of the world. I don't log onto websites hoping to find an oracle of truth, I'm shooting the shit as an outlet.
All moderation is silencing some viewpoints they don't want to hear from. I don't consider that problematic unless it's deliberately manipulative.
Thanks for the article link. The additional drama around the "popculture" sub subreddit just adds to the absurdity of the situation.