Michael

I did see those examples and of course I commend you for those and empathize with you. I feel it’s best to just not engage with very polarizing topics, and from my experience, changing people’s minds is very difficult if they are firm in their position and feel very strongly about a topic - even if your arguments are sound. If you think or feel differently than the consensus and feel strongly enough to talk about such subjects, just calmly eat the downvotes in such topics as you did. I promise you’ll be stronger for it.

Listen, I was just trying to explain why some of the downvotes might be happening generally and I’m certainly not attacking you or against you. You’re free to see things however you’d like and hold whatever views you like. Again, if it were my choice votes wouldn’t appear at all.

I just know people are very sensitive to tone, and I understand that it’s difficult to always be on your best behavior when people don’t give you the respect you deserve, but I assure you there’s a balancing act where you can not be a doormat and also assert yourself.

I see that you frequently employ laughing in discussion, that you are pretty confused about different ideologies (such as seeing communism as being inherently authoritarian), and that you are frequently sarcastic and dismissive to others. You consider anybody suggesting change outside of capitalist philosophy as radical and you mock others for blaming capitalism for their problems. I apologize if I’m mischaracterizing you, I quickly skimmed a few pages.

Be respectful, debate in good faith, perhaps stop typing your laughs and other perceivably rude remarks if you don’t want backlash. Or just do you - you are allowed to have gripes with various systems and ideologies and express them and discuss them with others.

Pay less attention to the downvotes. The downvotes don’t hide your comment as on Reddit. There is also no collapsing of comments done by mods. Myself, I’m personally not a fan of the upvote/downvote systems and if I continue using this service I’m likely going to zap the upvotes/downvotes and all vote counters with uBlock Origin (as I don’t participate in voting anyway).

There are plenty of people on the fediverse that are clearly free and independent thinkers - as in not operating from inside a bubble where they get fed opinions and views from others and them regurgitating those views ad nauseam. On Lemmy, I see a lot of curiosity and a lot of people who were probably censored or effectively buried by downvotes on other platforms, despite their good faith and interesting (and sometimes radical) perspectives.

Discussion flows well, there’s less focus on upvotes/downvotes and there is no karma. There doesn’t seem to be a tradition of dog-piling people who wrong-think according to the group consensus (or whatever neoliberal narrative is prevailing) as there is on Reddit. Moderation is much less heavy-handed and there are no shadowbans/comments that don’t show up for others (but only for yourself). There are significantly less bots and almost zero astroturfed content, as well.

Worry less about the labels, I say. If you want mainstream or conservative opinions, it’s very easy to seek them out - the internet is full of those perspectives. If you’re curious, you could play devil’s advocate and discuss current events or other hot topics from a mainstream perspective and ask others why they think differently to better understand the userbase on the fediverse and how things generally go down here. I’m sure plenty of people would be happy to weigh the pros and cons of different viewpoints and perspectives and entertain a discussion about certain issues in good faith.

Not everybody is filtering everything out from a polarized lens and is focused on being an absolutist or purist with their preferred ideology.