I originally joined Reddit in 2011, and in the beginning it was dominated by cat content. It was rare to see a post about dogs. Sometime in the mid 20-teens this phenomenon reversed. It’s always been a “pet theory” of mine that this reversal was due to Reddit becoming mainstream, and that it’s initial nerdy/techie user base preferred cats to dogs.

I think my theory is further supported by Lemmy. It’s pretty clear that most of Lemmy’s user base are techies, and currently it’s dominated by cat content. Just a shower thought. May be wrong.

NOTE: I love dogs and cats. This post isn’t arguing favoritism.

  • GONADS125@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    For sure… but I think the percentage of extremely toxic users (e.g., racist trolls) on Lemmy pales in comparison to reddit. But this sort of defensive emotional arguing transcends social media and is so pervasive in our societies now…

    People have grown conditioned to segregating themselves into echo-chamers thru various social media over the last 2 decades. But I see that in the real world now (in the US) in work settings, families, fucking beer brands…

    We have grown to insulate ourselves from opinions and information we don’t like. We’re conditioned to believe that disagreement in conversation is a bad thing and unhealthy. We have grown to both struggle to differentiate opinion from fact, and to internalize our opinions/beliefs so deeply ingrained into our personality, that we interpret any challenges to our beliefs as a personal attack.

    This makes dissenting on the most trivial issues immediately devolve into emotional reasoning, personal attacks, and just toxic behavior… Our society needs to deprogram the dysfunctional thinking instilled in us largely thru social media. Our levels of empathy in our societies have deteriorated in conjunction with the growth of social media into what it is today.

    I don’t know how we change this when it’s so pervasive throughout our world… I guess acknowledging the problem exists is a start…

    • galloog1@lemmy.world
      2·
      1 year ago

      Completely agree on all points. I think that cities dealt with this quite a bit early on as they grew and they largely have not solved internal conflicts outside of causing people to leave and go to other cities/areas. If we cannot solve it or mitigate it in real life outside of creating dedicated spaces, how can we get after it virtually? Maybe there are some lessons learned from real life that would be easier to implement on the internet.