A few days ago I made an account and posted a few joke/meme comments that got a lot of engagement. Unfortunately, the replies seemed to be mostly personal attacks on me disguised as jokes, when all I was doing was trying to be funny in a harmless way. I deleted that account and this one will be temporary. You people complain about this site lacking content compared to Reddit, about communities with only one person posting regularly and there not being enough niches, but how do you expect any growth to occur if the first thing someone experiences when posting on a new account is getting dogpiled on?
It wasn’t my first account either, it was my latest attempt to reenter the fray after feeling like I was becoming the butt of the joke on an account before that, just engaging with the community in the way that I like to. It almost felt like on both accounts my comments were being deliberately mass upvoted just as a setup to be humiliated. Some people have horrific lives IRL that would make any reasonable person want to kill themselves, and are stuck in those soul crushing situations for years and years with no way out. It would be nice to find a place to joke around and feel even just the simulated warmth of human connection without the same kind of nastiness I encounter in everyday life, so I’ll keep looking.
You say Reddit is toxic? I deleted my account there a long time ago, but my experience was that Reddit is like a big metropolis and Lemmy is more like a small town. Yes Reddit has jerks, but they don’t tag you with their third party app and follow you around, giving you the illusion of being accepted with (probably fake) upvotes while subtly mocking everything you say and passing it off as a joke. You can blend with the crowd there and not become a target. I really, really don’t want to give Reddit and OpenAI my data, but if I want a real social media experience that isn’t being gatekept by assholes who enjoy bullying on the internet because they’re too scared to do it IRL I may have to.
I hope Lemmy can fix itself, but my experience with small towns in real life is that those “big” (small) fish in their small, stagnant pond don’t want anything to ever change because the status quo suits their mediocrity and reinforces their egos. Which would be an ironic fate for the supposed “future” of social media. Almost none of the content, all of the toxicity. Why is it so hard for people to be respectful of others?
Mandatory img:
Edit: After consideration, I’ve decided to provide the context. I really don’t want to but here, username was TheRealSlimShady: https://lemmy.world/post/31011364
Basically I used a Trump gif ironically as a response, someone zoomed in on his mouth and called me gay for it looking like a loose butthole. The original comment was the classic green text “fake and gay”, and they turned the joke on me and made it personal.
Bro. The amount of harassment I get is fucking unreal, it just happens to usually be from admins more than anyone else. But me and Picard have both had to deal with our fair share of lunatics users. Hell, I’ve got a straight up stalker who won’t stop harassing me with new accounts and shit. We just both kept posting and ignored the douchebags. Now we get regularly pinged by people saying thanks or some other compliment my autistic ass has no idea how to process. Things change.
Dude, I went through your post history (trying to find something star trek related I vaguely remember that I’m pretty sure you had comments on, nothing to worry about) and holy shit. ALL of your comments are upvoted pretty high and deleted by moderators, whose punch bowl did you piss in?
The head admin of your instance permanently banned me a year ago for no reason. I only just found out yesterday and messaged them asking what gives. They had no idea either, couldn’t remember and unbanned me. Everyone else on basically any other instance had no issue. More info on what happened.
I saw that thread, I didn’t notice that was you. Glad it got sorted out.
I noticed I was recently banned from a couple star trek comms about a month ago over the mod not reading the sarcasm in a comment of mine they must have seen (I assume, I only made one comment on the day I was banned). I’m really bothered by it though, none of the posts from those comms seem to get the numbers for me to see them in normal browsing, otherwise I would have noticed a month ago.
I was pretty active on my old account. I had some real banger comments, you know? But I drew the line when someone called me a clown in the form of a meme and fucking everyone upvoted it. I refuse to be the punchline to anyone’s joke again.