How is Lemmy better than Reddit?
I am a reddit refugee. Keep seeing that this is supposed to be somehow better than Reddit. As far as I can tell, it follows a similar format, less restrictive on posts being removed I suppose. But It looks like people still get down vote brigaded on some communities. So I'm curious, how it's better?
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For me it’s not that it’s “better” it’s just not the cesspit that Reddit has become. It’s certainly better for avoiding mindless negativity.
Mindless negativity has arrived - at least in lemmy.world.
I have some tech-related subscriptions, so I check those out every now and then, but they have few new posts. So when I browse the Popular section, oy...... corporations bad, climate change bad, war bad, economy bad. (Not saying it's not true, I just want a place I can browse and escape all that for five minutes.)
And some users (even mods!) have an "all-or-nothing" attitude too, which is infuriating because they won't drive me away from the cause, but they may drive away others with less patience.
For example, I say "I support the blue color. Now, I wonder, if metallic blue with a purple hue is really a true blue? And how? Trying to learn. Just curious..." and then someone says "YOU JUST OUTED YOURSELF AS A BLUE HATER!!!!!!"
Unfortunately, I haven't observed that. There seem to be many people on Lemmy who go out of their way to be antagonistic to other Lemmy users. Which includes downvote brigading, as the OP said.
Sadly I have to agree. While the nice people on Lemmy are much nicer, there are some really extreme views here that are heavily detached from reality.
I've probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years. The highlight recently was me discussing how expert systems are used in LLM's, given that I'm a software engineer that works in AI at a big tech company for a living. Nope, I'm wrong, LLM's aren't real AI, downvotes... Pair this with me questioning customer data access rules in big tech, which resulted in someone arguing my view on something I literally helped build and telling me to "open source it to prove it".
LLM's aren't real AI
I think that's mostly a semantics issue. When people talk about AI here on Lemmy, they generally mean AGI. LLMs are not AGIs, as far as I understand it.
They're absolutely not. Where most people on Lemmy are wrong is in saying that most LLM's just parrot back trained text. The reality is that a LLM action plan will likely contain expert API's to provide valuable context. All a LLM is nowadays is an orchestrator platform, where it will pass ambiguities to an expert system that knows how to answer or give clarification.
We're decades away from "AGI", if at all. LLM's aren't even new, it's just that big tech has decided that the price of hallucinations and burning several rainforests a month's to power the fuckers is worth it.
The irony is that I've been antagonized for looking for other examples of AI that are not related to LLMs. As in "lol LLMs are AI!!!!" and I have to reply with "yeah, I know that, but what other types are being used out there?" "just shut up with your anti-LLM stuff!"
I’ve probably had more heavy downvotes or arguments on Lemmy in 9 months than I had on Reddit in over 15 years.
Same. I mean, I still love and prefer Lemmy, but I've had DM's of people saying that they were gonna follow me around on Lemmy "just to keep an eye on" me because I disagreed with what they said. lmao
Right? Way too often, I see some really interesting comments sitting at 0 or -1, and some still somewhat interesting and/ or arguably good-faith comments have something like -50 because they go against the current direction of the herd. I usually upvote at least the former, but for the latter, it's not going to matter much, unfortunately.
Furthermore, some mods get way too personally invested and take an obvious disliking to you so everything you contribute will be pushed to the bottom of the stack anyways.