I dunno - at first it was promising, but today I was actually thinking of leaving Lemmy and trying to find a larger site.

I’m not sure if the entire Internet has somehow become addicted to groupthink or if this is just a symptom of Lemmy’s smaller size and a selection bias, but it’s been getting worse and worse over the past nine months and it’s definitely turning me off to the community here.

What I loved about Reddit was that on any given story you saw a number of well informed opinions debating the nuances of those opinions. You’d learn so much more by engaging with the comments than just reading the article itself.

But here it seems more and more to be turning into a confirmation bias machine, where discourse and nuance takes a back seat to conformity to locally populist narratives. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been downvoted for linking to multiple recent research papers (from places like Harvard and MIT) because the implication of those papers was contrary to popularly held beliefs here.

While I’ve had a few good interactions, it’s become less and less of a signal to noise ratio on those interactions.

It’s possible this is a larger trend, but I haven’t noticed it to nearly the same degree on other less generalized forums I spend my time, so I suspect it’s just a Lemmy thing.

A shame, as I think the tech is outstanding. But as is often the case, good tech is only part of a product, and in the case of social media it’s the community too, and I’ve been growing increasingly disappointed in Lemmy’s community who likes to pat themselves on the back for a welcoming spirit with the apparent unmentioned footnote in small print that it’s a welcoming spirit that only extends to people regurgitating their own opinions back to them.