It had become, over the course of years, ground zero for groups trying to launch their propaganda into the main stream. You see right-wingers and holocaust deniers, homophobes, tankies, russian trolls etc. all trying to launch their social engineering campaigns via reddit.
It's an environment that offers anonymity and unlimited alts, they're basically begging to be sock puppet central. Being in those kinds of idiot pressure cooker communities rots the brain, so it's not a great wonder that it becomes toxic.
Well I mean, they are at least okay with it. They are after all the ones who remained after Rexodus.
Some are actual heroes - nursing subs in particular, trying to help anyone who goes there for advice.
But most are bots and people who enjoy conversing with bots. And people who enjoy conversing with people who enjoy conversing with bots... which is perhaps the majority answer to your question.
There are a lot of nice people there, but there are far more who are not so nice. I always got so defensive there. Tbh I may be starting to get that way here too, but like 0.1% of what I experienced there.
You cannot fix them - they seem to like it that way - your only choice is to decide whether you want to hang out there or not.
Oh .. that happened numerous times to me in the past on several unrelated subreddits, ive also seen it happen to other users, but my comments in particular are clearly unprovoking. Im sure most Reddit users have experienced it already.. ive just kept silent until now
Ok, but there's no context for us here and with the premise of your post, you're expecting us to judge an entire community based off of a single comment that has received practically no engagement in comparison to the community at large.
You might as well be asking for us to explain to you why you are being downvoted.
People can downvote you for any number of reasons, my assumption here is that your comment didn't carry the discussion forward in any meaningful way.
Absolutely. Some aspects are unavoidable, being an anonymous thread based forum, so trolling, flamebaiting, brigading and the like happen here just like Reddit.
Luckily on Lemmy we do have workarounds to some of these issues. You can join instances that disable downvotes for people who are bothered by it. Federated, publicly visible moderation has its ups and downs but at least you have all the information and you can decide to move to an instance where you fit in better.
