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Is anybody else worried about the lack of diverse opinion here?
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this post was submitted on 14 Mar 2026
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I think there's plenty of diversity. However there is a tendency on certain instances to completely dogpile anyone who has the Wrong Opinion on certain issues, with extreme hyperbole.
Take the AI thread going on. People keep referring to environmental costs as if using an AI query is the equivalent of burning down a whole tree. You consume way more energy just charging your phone. Watching a video. Playing games. Yet using an AI is bad enough to get you called a fascist, an eugenicist and other fun things. The lack of perspective is staggering but certain section of Lemmy users have just decided that AI is evil and any nuance is wrongthink. Even just accepting the reality that AI isn't going to go away is seen as evil comparable to murder.
Other example is the db0 blocking feddit.org debacle.
I'm also seeing a lot of reasonable, even-handed takes on AI getting upvoted in that thread, tbh. The most downvoted comment is one saying that "AI is fascism".
It's only because being contrary is kind of the point of the thread. Anywhere else and these posts would be getting shredded.
Yeah it course corrected a little bit but it did not start out very well. The brainless, misrepresented link dump is the highest voted one. As people pointed out, link dumps like that are straight from alt right playbook. The one reply that called out the issues got removed by mods and it was heavily downvoted initially (actually the timing and amount of upvotes and downvotes in those two comments, and how it evened out makes me think someone was vote manipulating when the link dump was posted). One of the comments from the link dump user was calling the debunker an eugenicist too and that got way too many upvotes off the bat than makes sense to me.
Like I said, there's diversity of opinion but some users, instances have pretty terminally online, black and white opinions that lead to downvote burials. And for a lot of people, that does signal "this is what I should think/this is what I shouldn't think". If it's not the case for you personally, cool. But black and white thinking is so much easier and upvotes/downvotes play right into that.
I think some people pay waaay too much attention to instances. I never pay attention to it and these groupings never surface for me. It’s all just Lemmy for me.
My instance provides an option to hide instance names. It always looks so silly when people get into instance wars and they all look like they're on the same team.
I'd buy into the potential for eventual advanced AI being potentially a very serious, existential threat to humanity.
But I'm not especially worried about AI in the near term. I'm pretty sure that a substantial chunk of people upset about present-day AI systems are worried about economic shifts from AI putting their job at risk one way or another, which is something that I don't agree much with
technological advancement has always caused changes in what people do. People in today's society in, say, the US, do almost entirely different things than they did two hundred years ago, for example. That change is nearly always considered to be a positive in retrospect. There are very, very few people in 2026 who are going to seriously say "everyone should drop what they are doing and society should go back to farming small farms with horses and oxen the way we did around 1800".
However, if you look at, say, the Luddites, we've had a history of people being worried about that change as it occurred, so I don't much think that people will stop. It's just human nature to fret about that sort of thing, I think. I'd be inclined to just let people have their say and move on. It's not that I agree with the people who are yelling about it, but that I don't realistically think that there's going to be a world where you have technological development and don't have people worried about how changes from that technological development might affect their place.
I also think that people who are worried about that are also a lot more likely to be vocal than people who aren't worried about it. I mean, only stands to reason
if there's something that you are really, really worried about, you're probably going to talk about it. If there's something that you don't see as a particular concern, then you're probably less likely to talk about it.