Did you ever have that feeling on reddit of “I better word my post just right, otherwise AutoMod will take it down”? Some subs had such strict auto moderating that it was a crap shoot to post something. Not so here. I know there’s value in moderation, and I’m sure Lemmy/kbin/etc. will add more of it with time. But, for now, it was just nice to not be nervous when I was submitting a post here.
I didn’t post a lot but I was definitely anxious about commenting because if it wasn’t worded just right, someone would take it out of context and be offended by it or downvote it to hell. I remember telling someone that I loved their poems - downvoted. I corrected someone about the difference between ESAs and service dogs - cue arguments when they can just literally read the ADA (law). I apologized for getting something wrong - insults and talked down to. I also remember being told that latinx is what trans Latinos want people to use, I used it and was greatly talked down to and told I’m not a real Latino. It felt like reddit was just really hostile no matter what I did. There were many times I wrote a comment but then discarded it.
The secret to commenting fearlessly is to not read your replies. Most reply-thread conversations are people aggressively talking to themselves to feel like winners. The alternative to engaging like that is to embrace the tendency to self-talk, turn a sensitive thread into an essay prompt for yourself, and don’t look back, unless you really feel like getting in an argument that day.
Sometimes you miss good faith engagement that way, but if it’s important to keep that, you can add another point of contact.
Or read it but if you feel it’s being too aggressive just (try to) ignore it. Don’t reply and feed into their arguments, no matter how right you may actually be.
This is what ended up happening to me. I ended up going almost an entire year without checking my inbox, instead I would only read replies by revisiting a thread and manually checking comments, and only if I was super interested in a reply or discussion. It was tiresome, and I basically ended up treating reddit as a journal for myself to gather my thoughts on a variety of subjects, to find out how I really felt. In that context, reddit succeeded, but so far, my lemmy experience has been much more social, while also being a place to sort my shit out.
Debate bro culture is real. It has permeated every form of social media we currently have, and in time it will be here as well, if it isn’t already. The best thing to do is to figure out when people are being disingenuous when engaging with you, and if they are, ignore them. Of course that’s easier said than done.
You’ve got a bunch of nerds whose sole positive trait they ascribe to themselves is being smart, so they’ll do anything to prove that - it’s the only thing keeping them going. That was reddit.