(Content warning, discussions of SA and misogyny, mods I might mention politics a bit but I hope this can be taken outside the context of politics and understood as a discussion of basic human decency)

We all know how awful Reddit was when a user mentioned their gender. Immediate harassment, DMs, etc. It’s probably improved over the years? But still awful.

Until recently, Lemmy was the most progressive and supportive of basic human dignity of communities I had ever followed. I have always known this was a majority male platform, but I have been relatively pleased to see that positive expressions of masculinity have won out.

All of that changed with the recent “bear vs man” debacle. I saw women get shouted down just for expressing their stories of being sexually abused, repeatedly harassed, dogpiled, and brigaded with downvotes. Some of them held their ground, for which I am proud of them, but others I saw driven to delete their entire accounts, presumably not to return.

And I get it. The bear thing is controversial; we can all agree on this. But that should never have resulted in this level of toxicity!

I am hoping by making this post I can kind of bring awareness to this weakness, so that we can learn and grow as a community. We need to hold one another accountable for this, or the gender gap on this site is just going to get worse.

  • spujbOP
    2014·
    2 months ago

    it may not be representative of the whole, but it is certainly representative of underlying failures of moderation policy, as @breadsmasher said.

    you are encouraging me to just be quiet about people being harrassed when moderation failure is a fixable problem. i can’t in good conscience do that.

    • Bone@lemmy.world
      111·
      2 months ago

      I definitely do not want to quiet anyone. Other than maybe myself from time to time (you know, before I’ve said it; maybe I’m too late this time, maybe not). I just don’t see how you fix this ultimately. But, since I don’t know the specific harassment you are referring to, I’ll simply refer to your comments. I trust what you’ve said. I don’t want you to hide what you want to say, but I also want to say how I feel about it.