Image text (Morpheus meme format)
Red pill:
Let people who pretend to know nothing about vaccines decide who can get what vaccines
Blue pill:
Let people who pretend to know nothing about guns decide who can get what guns
Red pill:
Let the weapon industry dictate gun policy
Blue pill:
Let big pharma dictate vaccine policy
I don’t know if political memes are allowed in this community. So far, I’ve mainly just gotten psychological abuse for posting this. I’m usually braced for this stuff after a past of over a decade on reddit, but some of the responses have gotten to me a bit.
That’s enough venting, sorry.


I think it’s important to remember that votes are nothing more than a knee jerk reaction to the content, and that doesn’t inherently infer anything about their feelings towards the OP. It’s also important to remember that while most of Lemmy/PieFed migrated from reddit the culture here is quite different for better or worse. Opinions will vary significantly from instance to instance. Some are more serous than others. 😜
To be clear, it’s the psychological abuse that’s more problematic, not the votes.
Comments like yours help a lot, but are outnumbered by others gaslighting me, etc.
I’m sorry to hear that. People suck sometimes.
My personal belief is that drive-by downvoting leads to a lot of undesirable stuff like that. Removing the slight negativity as an option forces people to converse about their feelings instead of getting in the habit of being negative any time something they aren’t used to hits their feed. Over time I think that leads to a more positive and friendly environment than the standard up/downvote system, but there are a lot of people who feel like they should be allowed to downvote as a right or something. I think it’s weird and counterproductive to building communities, but everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Lemmy also tends to be pretty up its own ass sometimes so to a certain extent you just have to accept some people are never going to be hospitable for one reason or another. Reddit has a similar problem but it isn’t so glaringly obvious at first because of how much larger the user base is. I think a lot of people migrated from reddit expecting a drop in replacement only to find that things are just different here. Instead of embracing something new and different a lot of people have reverted to the same toxicity they were exposed to on reddit while simultaneously complaining there’s nothing here and everyone else is a insert whatever derogatory label is hot right now.
There will always be haters and trolls and toxic personalities online. The less time you waste on them the better imo. The world is toxic enough offline, no reason to allow yourself to be subjected to that online when you’re just trying to have fun and relax. Block the clowns as they show themselves and enjoy the time and interactions you have with others IMO.