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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • 49% of Reddit is not American, so even with its more US-focused audience the assumption that users are American unless proven otherwise is wildly ethnocentric.

    The assumption that the 51% of reddit constitutes a monolith of non-Americans is wildly reductive and offensive /s. The majority is irrelevant, Americans still constitute the plurality of users, and thus inevitably become the default.

    I absolutely agree that it’s a symptom of dysfunction, but I just think it’s unfair to blame on the average American. We didn’t ask for this either.





  • That’s interesting, thanks for sharing. I don’t mean to diminish your experience, but the world is simply too massive for anecdotal knowledge to apply when attempting to make sense of it. In other words, it’s impossible to gather a balanced understanding of global phenomena via primary experiences. I’m not as well traveled as you, but I’m analyzing the statistics rather than relying on personal experiences, which is much more informative when trying to recognize the big picture.

    I’m not reflexively lumping anything in, I’m simply recognizing the reality that the cultural life of anglosphere countries is heavily mixed, and that US culture dominates that mixture due to its size and economic position. It’s not a controversial statement to say that Canada and the US are peas in a pod.

    I left the original assumption unchallenged, but I don’t agree with it tbh. There are a ton of Europeans on Lemmy and also reddit, and it’s quite obvious to notice as an American. Furthermore, the entire premise is faulty. Rather than ask why people default to the US, the question is why people are assuming anything at all about anonymous accounts. And the answer is because of human nature, which isn’t something unique to Americans.



  • instantly popular globally

    There are 8 billion people on this planet, nothing happens instantly.

    Facebook took a long time to spread around the globe. Same for reddit, this is a quote from the Wikipedia article:

    As of August 2024, Reddit is the 9th most-visited website in the world. According to data provided by Similarweb, 51.75% of the website traffic comes from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom at 7.15% and Canada at 7.09%.[6]

    More than two thirds of reddit traffic still comes from Anglophone countries to this day, and that percentage was surely much higher back in the early days.

    I think you’re severely overestimating how many people from other countries actually use Western social media. Between the language barrier and the technology barrier, most people on this planet simply don’t have any opportunity or desire to use a site like Reddit or Lemmy. Facebook has slowly but steadily made global inroads, but by the time it got popular in non-western countries, Americans had largely moved on.


  • Between 2 and n “hexbears” (understood to mean “humans afflicted with hexbear mind virus using other servers”) are behaving in some coordinated way. You were pretty clearly implying that it’s some conspiracy rather than simply other users disagreeing with you.

    Lol what are you on about? People who use hexbear (i.e. hexbears) share similar traits, interests, and behaviors. They use hexbear because they fit in on hexbear, and in order to fit in on hexbear you need to pass an extensive series of ideological purity tests, which result in the homogeneity and cult-like behavior that occurs.

    Hexbear is quite explicit about this, they don’t want anyone with any sort of divergent political views on their server. They clearly revel in “dunking on libs” by chain downvoting and harassing people when they say things that the hexbear hive mind disagrees with. And yet always claim innocence when their obvious brigading is called out, as you are currently doing.

    It is a real problem for everyone who’s not a hexbear, because it means that we can’t have sane, civil conversations about certain political issues on Lemmy, because CCP apologists and edgelord larping teenage “leftists” constantly butt in and derail the discussion with their potent combination of ignorance and self righteousness.


  • I never asserted that “anyone downvoting must be a hexbear alt”. There you go again, misrepresenting my point just to feel like you’re winning.

    I’m quite sure that non-hexbears are downvoting OP also. But that wasn’t what you said, was it? You could have said that originally, but instead you decided to mock OP and act like he’s crazy and there’s no way he is getting downvoted by hexbear users, which is disingenous and lame.

    You know what you’re doing, I don’t need to explain your own bad faith tactics to you.








  • I don’t think anybody is expecting women to do administrative work on behalf of men’s rights. It’s more that women tend to react with outright hostility when men advocate for other men.

    It’s actually the feminists who frequently argue that men need to be fighting for women’s issues. I haven’t seen the reverse from male advocates, partially because it’s quite obvious that such a request would be summarily denied. Men generally just want:

    • funding for men’s shelters

    • sympathy & aid for male victims of domestic violence and sexual assault

    • solutions for the growing educational achievement gap

    • a discussion about various legal discrepancies when it comes to conscription, marriage, and parental rights and responsibilities.

    None of this requires women to assist or flex their institutional power. But when men are systematically denied access and funding for various forms of governmental aid, it seems like certain women are flexing some of their institutional power to prevent men from having access to the same kind of social safety net that women enjoy.

    It’s emergency airplane crash logic. Put your own supply of air on before you help the person next to you.

    This is a faulty analogy, because men’s issues are women’s issues and vice versa. It’s impossible for women to actually solve their own problems without also solving men’s problems. How are women ever going to keep their oxygen masks on if they are surrounded by men who are suffocating and trying to rip the mask from their face? In order to help anyone, you need to help everyone.


  • To be fair, the men’s rights movement is absolutely characterized as alt-right by the mainstream media. People tend to assume all sorts of things about you when you bring up any kind of men’s issue. Most people (including other men) have difficulty empathizing with grown men, and thus they subconsciously expect that men’s advocates are motivated by something else, such as misogyny. It’s hard to move past our biological and cultural tendencies and view men as vulnerable and in need of support.

    Don’t hate the player, hate the game.


  • I dunno what that guy was thinking, but it seems obvious to me that nuclear fusion is the long term solution for energy generation.

    Nuclear fission not so much, but it’s definitely debatable which has more fundamental flaws between fission and wind/hydro/solar. All renewable energy sources ultimately depend on natural processes which are not reliable or permanent. And they also tend to disrupt the environment to some extent.

    Nuclear fission has no such limitations, but instead trades long term risk for short term stability. Basically renewable sources are and always will be somewhat unreliable, and Nuclear fission is the least bad reliable energy source to pair with the renewables. So in the medium term, fission makes a lot more sense than fossil fuels, and in the long term we should be looking to fusion.