this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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I tend to hope for the best, but you actually hit the nail, I've had the exact same thought at the back of my mind about lemmy for quite some time. Much of the community is made up of people who have been banned or disliked elsewhere, so this is their refugee. The very first thing I noticed is how toxic users are with downvotes. It is no longer a community tool about moderating quality discussions, it's essentially used as a "fuck you", so I had to disable (hide) it and disregard vote system on this site, especially after seeing how easily it is for people to mass downvote lemmy profiles with multiple accounts (happened to me 2 times, even highly upvoted plain humor comments were suddenly downvoted). My guess is that we're getting downvoted here, but do you really care?
I've used reddit forever---stopped caring about downvotes long ago. You have to realized that the main demographic of any site like reddit or this, specifically the people with accounts, who vote, and comment, are like 50% autistic college age kids (at least on reddit). Those autistic college age kids are now 30+ here on lemmy since reddit has been banning for a while now (remember the ellen pao bans? the chapotraphouse ban? The Voat exodus that turned into lemmy users as well?). Yeah, people suck on the internet. They downvote for no reason. You just develop a thick skin and stop complaining about downvotes or you ban yourself.
No, because I know that the people who are downvoting me are probably autistic 20-somethings. I'm superior to them---I'm an autistic 30-something. I know they're probably stupid because they have yet to develop their frontal lobe enough to participate in normal society so they downvote on lemmy/reddit. I know this because I was that person 10 years ago on reddit---I made my account when I was 17 and I said a ton of stupid shit on there. Who cares.