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2 yr. ago

  • As I've already explained, you're talking about the general case of assuming where someone is from. Because otherwise, you're suggesting that we should assume someone is from a different country than the US? Which country? I honestly don't understand what your point is.

    they all share the trait of being… you know, not American.

    Yes, this is the most important trait among humans, it is known.

  • 49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

    The assumption that the 51% of reddit constitutes a monolith of non-Americans is wildly reductive and offensive /s. The majority is irrelevant, Americans still constitute the plurality of users, and thus inevitably become the default.

    I absolutely agree that it's a symptom of dysfunction, but I just think it's unfair to blame on the average American. We didn't ask for this either.

  • Mr Blott really really really likes to denigrate Americans. Don't rain on his parade

  • Don't ever talk about kilometres in here. Are you trying to spark an international incident?

    FWIW ich habe Deustch gelernt. Aber ich habe die meistens vergessen 😔

  • That's interesting, thanks for sharing. I don't mean to diminish your experience, but the world is simply too massive for anecdotal knowledge to apply when attempting to make sense of it. In other words, it's impossible to gather a balanced understanding of global phenomena via primary experiences. I'm not as well traveled as you, but I'm analyzing the statistics rather than relying on personal experiences, which is much more informative when trying to recognize the big picture.

    I'm not reflexively lumping anything in, I'm simply recognizing the reality that the cultural life of anglosphere countries is heavily mixed, and that US culture dominates that mixture due to its size and economic position. It's not a controversial statement to say that Canada and the US are peas in a pod.

    I left the original assumption unchallenged, but I don't agree with it tbh. There are a ton of Europeans on Lemmy and also reddit, and it's quite obvious to notice as an American. Furthermore, the entire premise is faulty. Rather than ask why people default to the US, the question is why people are assuming anything at all about anonymous accounts. And the answer is because of human nature, which isn't something unique to Americans.

  • instantly popular globally

    There are 8 billion people on this planet, nothing happens instantly.

    Facebook took a long time to spread around the globe. Same for reddit, this is a quote from the Wikipedia article:

    As of August 2024, Reddit is the 9th most-visited website in the world. According to data provided by Similarweb, 51.75% of the website traffic comes from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.15% and Canada at 7.09%.[6]

    More than two thirds of reddit traffic still comes from Anglophone countries to this day, and that percentage was surely much higher back in the early days.

    I think you're severely overestimating how many people from other countries actually use Western social media. Between the language barrier and the technology barrier, most people on this planet simply don't have any opportunity or desire to use a site like Reddit or Lemmy. Facebook has slowly but steadily made global inroads, but by the time it got popular in non-western countries, Americans had largely moved on.

  • Hard agree, DC sucks ass. I actually strongly prefer Baltimore, which feels much more like a real city to me. DC is so artificial and bland.

  • Between 2 and n “hexbears” (understood to mean “humans afflicted with hexbear mind virus using other servers”) are behaving in some coordinated way. You were pretty clearly implying that it’s some conspiracy rather than simply other users disagreeing with you.

    Lol what are you on about? People who use hexbear (i.e. hexbears) share similar traits, interests, and behaviors. They use hexbear because they fit in on hexbear, and in order to fit in on hexbear you need to pass an extensive series of ideological purity tests, which result in the homogeneity and cult-like behavior that occurs.

    Hexbear is quite explicit about this, they don't want anyone with any sort of divergent political views on their server. They clearly revel in "dunking on libs" by chain downvoting and harassing people when they say things that the hexbear hive mind disagrees with. And yet always claim innocence when their obvious brigading is called out, as you are currently doing.

    It is a real problem for everyone who's not a hexbear, because it means that we can't have sane, civil conversations about certain political issues on Lemmy, because CCP apologists and edgelord larping teenage "leftists" constantly butt in and derail the discussion with their potent combination of ignorance and self righteousness.

  • I never asserted that "anyone downvoting must be a hexbear alt". There you go again, misrepresenting my point just to feel like you're winning.

    I'm quite sure that non-hexbears are downvoting OP also. But that wasn't what you said, was it? You could have said that originally, but instead you decided to mock OP and act like he's crazy and there's no way he is getting downvoted by hexbear users, which is disingenous and lame.

    You know what you're doing, I don't need to explain your own bad faith tactics to you.

  • It's possible to turn off local community creation, image uploads, etc.

    Lemmy.myserv.one doesn't host any local content but you can easily browse the rest of the fediverse. Having a diversity of server sizes and formats is definitely a benefit of Lemmy that we should be trying to take advantage of.

  • Lemmy, famous for not allowing alt accounts 😅

    This is why people don't like hexbear, because they consistently try to gaslight and use disingenous arguments such as this. How are you disputing the fact that OP is getting downvoted by hexbears right now? That's insane.

  • You don't need those commas in that sentence. It makes you sound like Christopher Walken 😅

  • That sub is trash also. I think the whole conspiracy theorist subculture has been taken over by the alt right and is highly politicized at this point.

  • Really? Damn that's crazy.

  • For cost per user, it's only 3 cents. A few others are around 10 cents per user, and the rest are significantly higher.

    The instances with lower total cost also have much lower activity, lemmy.ml has 2.4k active users but still only 80€ per month. Impressive.

  • Rage against him when he does evil things, by all means. But when you start raging against him 24/7 for no particular reason, it serves no purpose. In fact, it lessens your ability to actually call him out when he does bad stuff, because you sound like the boy who cried wolf.

    And more importantly, it also affects the quality of discussion on Lemmy. One major advantage we have over reddit is that people tend to actually read the articles and make insightful comments that add to the discussion. "Hurr Durr Muskrat bad" is the opposite of that, it's a reddit style pandering comment that ultimately has no substance or meaning. When these circlejerky comments become more common than good comments, the value of this site as a forum for legitimate discussion falls off a cliff.

  • It's baffling how people on Lemmy hate Musk so much and yet can't stop mentioning him in every random, unrelated thread.

    The starlink was privately bought as per the article, it wasn't officially procured using federal funds. So the comment I responded to doesn't really make any sense in the context of this post.

    But it gets 50 upvotes because Musk is very bad man. I guess that answers my own question about why people can't stop mentioning him on Lemmy: it's free upvotes to shit on him. That's fine I guess, but it can be annoying when it clogs up the discussion in unrelated threads.

  • What dude are you referring to? I'm confused how your comment relates to the article.

  • A few things.

    • Admins can and do ban accounts that downvote rampantly
    • Obvious bot brigading is obvious. It became harder to tell on reddit when they started fuzzing the vote numbers, but could frequently still be figured out. It's easier on Lemmy, someone just has to report some unusual voting pattern to the admin and they can check if the voting accounts look like bots.

    • I was once told that the algorithm is less weighted towards upvoted comments and more weighted towards recent comments on Lemmy, when compared with reddit. I am not sure if this is true, but I have noticed that recent comments tend to rise above the top upvoted comments in threads when viewing by Hot.
    • Without any way for bad content to be filtered out, you just end up with an endless stream of undifferentiated noise. The voting system actually protects the platform from the encroachment of bots and the ignorant mob, because it helps filter them out from the users who have something of value that they want to contribute.