What do you think Lemmy is most biased about? Which opinions do you think differ most from the general internet?
(Excluding US politics, due to community rules)
Commonly mentioned biases:
| Subject | Mentions |
|---|---|
| Pro-Privacy | 2 |
| Left-Wing | 9 |
| Anti-Capitalism | 5 |
| American | 5 |
| Older | 2 |
| Pro-Linux | 3 |
| Tech people | 5 |
| Anti-Ai | 4 |
| Pro-LBTQ+ | 3 |
| Anti religion | 3 |
| Pro-Communism | 3 |
Bonus: Gaming Biases
| Subject | Mentions |
|---|---|
| Nintendo hate | 3 |
| Pro-SteamDeck | 1 |
| Anti-GOG | 1 |
| PC over console | 1 |
I’ll go first.
- I think there is a strong pro-Linux bias. It wouldn’t surprise me if 40+% use it on here.
- People from the US seem over-represented, but less so compared to Reddit
- There is a far stronger anti-capitalist sentiment on here than other social media
- The average age seems to be much higher. I joined when I was 16 and feel quite young unlike on other social media.
Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.
I agree that the average age is higher. You’re the only other confirmed teenager that I have encountered while on Lemmy. I joined Lemmy when I was 17 during the Reddit emmigration.
I think you’re right on all these points, though it depends a bit on what part of the Fediverse you’re exposed to.
On the point of anti-capitalism, I agree, but (again, depending on the part of the Fediverse) there’s also an incredibly high amount of open-minded people here, compared to other more mainstream social media (like Reddit). I speak much from my perspective of being from lemmy.zip, which I’m impressed by the healthiness of the community since I joined. But there are also less “healthy” instances like lemmy.ml which is considered by many to be infested with tankies (anti-capitalism?).
And yes, the average age seems to be around mid-30s to me, based solely on how people speak and what they reminisce about.
I think what muddles the water on the “Leftwing” character of Lemmy is that there are two kinds here: those whose personal Principles (mainly around the importance reducing the suffering and increasing the happiness of others, rather than just themselves) which lead them to support leftwing policies and those support Political forces or ideologies which are deemed Leftwing, and hence see themselves as Leftwing.
IMHO it’s last group that explains in Lemmy things like authoritarian leftwingers (i.e. tankies) and people who think they’re leftwingers because they tribalistically support certain mainstream political parties who claim to be Left but are at best moral liberal and even that second to their very rightwing broader stand on general Equality and quality of life for the many (such as the US Democrats, UK Labour, German SPD and so on).
My impression is that Lemmy has a much higher proportion of Principled Left-wingers than the wider society.
This is probably why if you’re not in an instance that blocks the tankie instances, in between the tankies, the principled types and the mainstream “leftwing” party tribalists it almost feels like there are 3 kinds of “Left” in Lemmy.
I’ll add:
- AI bad
- Piracy ok
- Political posts are more frequent (Bias towards political expression)
- More tech enthusiasts
- Piracy ok
I’m not sure how true that is for the largest instance (lemmy.world) but apart from that it seems quite on point
“AI bad” overrides “Piracy ok”, though. I’ve seen threads in the main piracy community where the general consensus seemed to be that copyright should be used as a weapon against AI.
Copyright good unless it’s major companies/brands whatever (basically if not indie = bad)
Just a guess. Because piracy advocacy isn’t about not paying, it’s about not supporting megacorporations and anti-artistic business models. It’s a form of protest, I suspect most advocates would buy media legally when it doesn’t feel enshittified.
Because piracy advocacy here on the Fediverse is about that, yeah. You’re saying the same thing I am, that the Fediverse’s pro-piracy bias is “overridden” by its anti-AI bias.
It’s the same thing. It’s about protesting against big companies that hurt workers and artists.
Yes, exactly what I’m saying. People on the Fediverse hate AI more than they support piracy, because when there’s a situation that involves both enabling piracy and helping AI they will side with the anti-piracy side in order to hurt the AI side. The Fediverse has more of an anti-AI bias than it has a pro-piracy bias.
Hmm I still think we’re saying different things. Enabling piracy for consumers and rejecting it for big business come from the same beliefs. It’s not about piracy itself or hating AI more than liking piracy. It’s not about piracy at all but who is allowed to use it. It’s about content being controlled by the public, and not corporations. I think.
- The average age seems to be much higher. I joined when I was 16 and feel quite young unlike on other social media.
Enjoy. Less echo bubbles. This goes in both directions, but mainly I value that younger people are able to be part of “mature conversations”. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to underestimate your worldview or anything. It’s just that I’m remembering when I was around your age, the Internet was in a raw form, and it felt much like this. I was amazed to be able to talk with other adults and learn about their tastes on say books or movies when I joined some theme specific chat channel (via protocol IRC). At some point this changed drastically (e.g. Facebook connecting people from real life/ schools)… and I think nowadays TikTok, Insta, and for the most part, even YouTube are just centered around being young, pretty… very much like mainstream TV.
Yeah, I enjoyed that about reddit at that ave too. As an isolated teen it’s all I had
Depends where you look. I also have no idea whats that ‘general Internet’ you mention. I mean, what are its biases?
Holy shit, what aren’t? It would be a shorter list.
Linux/SteamDeck = Good Anything else = bad
Porn games should be available for all, but GOG sucks because they did something shitty years ago.
The only thing worse than a right winger is the wrong kind of leftist. (I feel this is a global thing not only US)
Anyone who supports the current governments of Russia or China are not really leftists.
I see a lot of disestablishmentarism
Not a whole lot of antidisestablishmentarianism though.
Nintendo is worse than EA, Activision, Konami, Ubisoft, Epic, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, Nestle, and the IDF combined.
There may be some things they do that annoy me, but there also a lot of things they do that I like, and I don’t think they’re anywhere near the worst in the industry right now. It is just so very tiring that it is seemingly impossible to discuss anything related to Nintendo at all without threads immediately devolving into a circlejerk about how much some of y’all hate anyone who dares to even enjoy their games.
I don’t think Nintendo sucks. I’m also older and remember what they did to gaming when it started. They still put out title after title of quality games.
They still put out title after title of quality games.
Me doubt
Thinking we’re better than everyone who’s still on Reddit
It’s not bias if you’re right
Reddit is full of Russian fuck bots arguing over which chump to pull one over. I don’t think it’s a high bar.
R/ conservative is the most obvious one, where they completely suppressed the Epstein files discussion
Reddit is mostly bots, so yes it’s better. Like 50% bots, and not the good kind, the one that steer the narrative to pro-right and pro Israeli . Plus reddit has done massive amounts of purges.
Lemmy is not neurotypical and it shows up with various discussions. Discussions here tend to assume autism or AuDHD as typical behavior, when it is only typical for the group of people assembled here.
Also half of all lemmings are transgender. No idea why.
The chemicals in the protocols are turning the nerds gay
Trans people are almost attacked or banned all other platforms or at least astroturfed, it does make sense
Yep, I’m not trans but one of the main reasons I stopped even visiting reddit was how much transphobia there is everywhere. Like I used to be in a ton of LGBTQ+ subs and it was even showing up in there. I’m not about that life.
Woke and DEI, is why. Now put the damn socks on and get to work. Once Arch is installed, you may indulge in one Blåhaj
Yes! Meow meow.
Ok, uh… is this, like, a… catgirl thing? That’s a thing, innit? Catgirl femboy? Catboy? Catfemboy? Just a catgirl?
Honestly, this is what I get for making too many references not applicable to me.
I did try Arch at some point. Didn’t work out, even though I was following instructions online. Probably because I didn’t have the socks. I still don’t have 'em.
You should get the socks and try again.
Eh, I’m not that interested in Arch. I have Pop!_OS, and it just works (unlike Manjaro, that broke at least once every six months). I was installing it on an older laptop, just for the sake of it (not sure if I would’ve used it later on)
Also, I’m sure it’d be hella sus to get striped thigh-high socks. Especially with such warm days (we have coloured heat warnings 'round these parks!) Installing Arch I can explain, and no one would care. Just tech nerd mumbo jumbo, who gives a shit. Why I need long, colourful socks?! …
Other than that, yeah, I’d do it. Fun socks and computers? Fuck yeah! I mean, not with this heat. But come colder days? Fuck yeah!
The hivemind has a doublethink of “Guns are bad, police should be allowed to confiscate them” and simultaneously “Abolish the police”.
Also, purity testing. The Lemmy hivemind has decreed that: if you haven’t committed an assassination against a dictator, you’re not a leftist, you’re complicit, and you deserve to be oppressed.
This probably sounds like a dodge of an answer, but…
It depends on the Lemmy instance. Some are anarchistic, some are very left wing anti-establishment, some are hardcore tankies, and I’ve heard somewhere there’s a right-wing instance? Some hate certain technologies, some love those technologies, etc.
I don’t think it’s realistic to lump all Lemmy instances (and users) together under a single ideological umbrella. That’s like lumping everyone from America or any other county together for their opinions.
.world is the right wing instance
I wouldn’t put it that far, they are closer to reddit
I mean, liberalism is on the right-wing.
This brings up another facet: when it comes to ideological biases it’s all subjective.
I consider lemmy.world slightly left of center overall, but again with important caveats that some communities within it are pretty left wing and some are pretty right wing. But maybe to someone pretty far on the left of the political spectrum the instance seems very right wing, while to someone pretty far to the right it seems like almost everyone are ‘rabid pinko commies’.
Basically, things are more complicated than they may look.
I just joined Lemmy and then I discoverd what .ml is. Now I don’t care about instances anymore
Wrong, because of what words mean and the context implied by the .world domain itself
What implication is that?
That it shouldn’t be US or any other nation defaultism, putting the left/right argument squarely in the realm of the relatively objective socialist/capitalist economic scale.
I think youre reading way too much into what tried to be an inclusive name.
Or I’ve read the instance info and framing references beyond my personal status don’t scare me.
Not particularly surprised that Americans are defensive about .world not being their personal property that must conform to their worldview though.
Usually the right wing instances are almost always blocked?
We certainly do have our fair share of Zionist scumbags.
I’ve been on .world for over a year now and haven’t really seen anything I’d call blatantly right-wing. But if this is right wing and the rest of lemmy is even more leftist, I’ll gladly join the rest of yas elsewhere.
I’m on .world, and I’d happily throw all the billionaires into an industrial shredder.
Let the record note that Scott_of_the_Artic is an outlier and a comrade yet remains statistically a minority
You and me Scott! We’ll take on the .world!
Samesies!
IMHO Lemmy feels similar to how Reddit felt 10-15 years ago. The community seems closer to my age. The population is smaller. The content is less formulaic.
The biases shown here feel like a distillation of the broader internet (similar to what Reddit used to be). We like animals and nature, we hate intrusive powerful forces like large corporations or invasive governments. We share a shit-post-y sense of humor. We tend to lean left politically. We love to feel like we know more than we actually do.
On any given subject, if you ask “What would the internet think about this?” you will probably find that same opinion reflected strongly here.
The community seems closer to my age.
I feel like the community is split between 25~40s and pre-teens, lol
Though to be fair, it feels like a 70:30 split.
There are a lot of Reddit refugees here. Many came over because Reddit sucks. Others came during the API debacle. Some seem to have come here because they were banned from Reddit due to not really knowing how to follow the social rules of the internet.
The AskLemmy Community, for example, will have posts like this next to each other (if you sort by New):
What’s the biggest issue you’ve seen when someone tried to shift to Linux?
Why do older people say im mature for my age but my friends still say things like hey buddy/pal??
It just struck me from the comments on this thread, but I think there’s a correlation between the feeling of reddit 10-15 years ago and the average age here.
If we go by the estimates that most people are 25-45 around here, that’s all of us that were probably hanging out on early reddit 10-15 years ago. Like, I joined reddit when I was about 17, I’m 33 now and moved here a year ago and definitely feel those early reddit vibes. It feels similar because that was us. Am I talking crazy?
Clearly a severe leftist bias. Not just in the context of US politics.
It’s not a bias if you’re right
No, we’re left, please pay attention 🙃
You know what? Fuck it. The fascists are leftists and we’re far right, because we’re the ones who are actually right about things like reality.
Plus it would be completely hilarious to watch happen as we flip the script on them and call them leftys.
Most of Lemmy is anti-AI, especially generative AI.
Yes, a lot more compared to other social media. Especially LLM’s and other generative AI ran by big corporations. There are some AI communities on here, but they’re all mostly focused on hosting/running it yourself.
If you get all your info from Lemmy you’d probably think that AI is a worthless hype bubble that can’t do anything right and will collapse and go away in a few years.
At this point I’d believe AGI already exists and “AI Slop” is just a psy-opp.
Like how do people reconcile recognizing how AI is negatively effecting society but denying that it could get exponentially more harmful?
AI-agents (not AGI) will change cyberwarfare like nuclear weapons changed convetional warfare.
Meanwhile true AGI almost certainly presents an existential threat to humanity. If for no other reason than our own laziness.
Which seems uninformed and ridiculous as Deep Learning for classification and regression problems is an absolute valid tool that cannot be replaced anymore in many domains. I don’t care about LLM bullshit, but being “against Deep Learning in general” is stupid.
Nobody* is talking about machine learning when they say “AI” these days. They mean LLMs and generative AI and especially the way it is being forced into everything and destroying the environment to do so.
* not literally; there is certainly at least one person out there who objects to machine learning, deep learning, or whatever you want to call it. However this is not the general sentiment.
Biases are indeed usually uninformed and ridiculous.
Oh are those the ones being shoved into all our orifices?
Anti ai nowadays almost exclusively means the over insertion of llms into ordinary life and/or the over trust of a blackbox computer program. People aren’t throwing hands because of alphafold as much as they are a prime minister using a language model to make policy decisions
I think the biggest issues Lemmy has with it, which are valid, boil down to environmental impact, AI being used to replace working class people instead of making their lives better, and the way it’s being used to erase art as a part of human culture. If those three things weren’t an issue I’d be less wary of AI.
It’s hard for me to feel that the environmental impact is the big reason, there are MUCH bigger fish to fry when it comes to the environment.
Bitcoin ~65 Mt CO₂/year LLMs <10 Mt CO₂/year (est.) Holiday Flights ~900 Mt CO₂/year
If the people crying about AI being bad for the environment isn’t also very upset about people taking flights to go on holiday or crypto, then that’s not really what they’re upset about.
Look, to be honest I wish LLMs were never invented, because I think it will just strip more money away from the poor and feed the rich, but yea, cat is out of the bag. and AI is VERY useful, we can’t deny that.
This isn’t even taking into consideration eating red meat which has a far great impact than any AI query ever will, but most anti-AI peeps aren’t ready for that conversation.
Are people anti non-generative AI? Or is broader AI just getting dragged in to the justified anti genAI sentiment?
I think it’s both. Some people dislike all AI because of generative AI like LLM’s, but many people seem to care about making the distinction between generative AI and traditional ML.
I suspect a lot of the former group is don’t that out of ignorance or forgetfulness - I do it all the time, because I often assume people are talking about GenAI. Which is probably a reasonable assumption about 90% of the time these days, but it is better to be clear about it.
Also, a friend who has a background in AI draws a distinction between ML and non-generative AI: ML is basically tools for overpowered statistical analysis and pattern finding, AI is attempts to partially recreate aspects of intelligence, and can include evolutionary algorithms and stuff. Still not sure I see the distinction (and there is overlap), but they’re way more informed than me…
Are people anti non-generative AI? Or is broader AI just getting dragged in to the justified anti genAI sentiment?
I formed this question to myself and was about to post it, but then I remembered Lemmy also hates self-driving cars which are likely Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) or Recurrent Nerual Networks (RNN) which are not part of Generative AI at all.
I think the hatred there is completely disconnected from the fact that it’s AI.
Both of them have in common that the technology is being forced upon us at the cost of lives, livelihoods, and the environment upon which we all rely to survive.
I’m not sure I follow your logic. Those reasons you give are still hatred of AI because of those results (job loss, etc). How is that not hatred of AI?
I agree with Hawke, I think people are against the use of technology in such a way that it exploits workers and customers, not fundamentally against the technology itself.
Basically like the Luddites - they smashed weaving looms, not because the technology was fundamentally bad, but because it was being used by capitalists to worsen working conditions and destroy livelihoods.
I agree with Hawke, I think people are against the use of technology in such a way that it exploits workers and customers, not fundamentally against the technology itself.
I agree with that statement too. Where Hawke and I are disagreeing is I believe Self Driving cars can be used to exploit workers and customers. We already have Waymo robot taxi cabs that are displacing human drivers.
The self-driving cars are not hatred of AI. Nobody* cares that they use machine-learning to enable the cars to drive themselves.
It’s not hatred of AI there.
It’s not hatred of AI there.
I still disagree, but let me create another hypothetical example that may highlight where we might disagreement further:
What if Deep Learning (not Gen AI) was used in missile guidance systems specifically to aim toward “people shaped targets”? Would the hate be for AI or just for missiles? If missiles is your answer, where is the distinction in your mind between that and the self-driving cars example?
GenAI being used in missile guidance makes zero sense - the technology is not applicable there, because you need precision and reliability. Normal AI, sure.
Isn’t the dbzero Lemmy instance pro AI?
Since the rules preclude it, we can’t discuss what Lemmy is most biased about. The remaining biases tend to be in the tech/nerdcore genre, which makes sense, since many average Joe users have problems navigating the registration/instance selection process, keeping their numbers down on the platform.
Im still pretty unclear on the whole instance selection thing. I just tried a few until one worked.
If in doubt, just try it until it works. If it still doesnt work either learn why or give up.
The secret is that it doesn’t matter all that much beyond who that instance is federated with. Any of the popular ones will feel similar from the get-go and only more and more so as time goes on.
The rules specifically target US politics and I feel a lot of political bias on here goes beyond the US IMO.
+1 for:
Left-Wing
Anti-AI
Tech People
Anti Capitalism
Coming from someone left wing, messing with tech since I was a kid, terrified of late stage capitalism, and who hates Sam Altman’s lying, con artist guts even more than I hate Musk.
But… jeez. I’m like a far right tech bro on Lemmy.
