Reddit is so hostile to women that I never felt comfortable posting anything. I was a lurker. It took me 3 years to make an account, just so I could sub to places and not forget they existed. But in all my years on Reddit, I never posted. I saw how women would get roasted and never felt like part of that community. I would report many comments that were hateful towards women just for the report to come back and say “sorry, nothing wrong here”.

I went back to look up something and it just seems like a cesspool of bots. The front page is nothing but stupid questions that I’ve seen asked more than I can count, memes, screenshots of texts and AITA with the most outrageous scenarios and answers. And guess what, I still see the same hostility towards women. It’s hard to feel welcome and participate with a culture like that.

Way back in the day, Reddit was a place people would argue something to death. If you disagreed with the hive mind, you were shunned. And don’t even think about making a spelling or grammar mistake, you’d get blasted for that too. And every so often, someone would post something compelling, and Reddit would collectively hold that opinion as truth.

I left facebook in 2016, and Reddit feels a lot like facebook was when I left. And now it’s time to move away from Reddit; at least for me.

You're not the first person I've heard who said that so there must be something there. That's not my experience however, I find that Reddit makes me angry these days, getting annoyed at all the low-effort, inconsiderate posting. Having a debate on Reddit is impossible I find because saying something that goes slightly against the hive-mind you'll you'll be passive-aggressively downvoted, which has a chilling effect on what people say. I like that Beehaw doesn't have downvotes, especially on local communities. On Beehaw/Lemmy someone might argue with you but that's at least better I think than the knee-jerk downvote-to-oblivion you get on Reddit.

It's true that a lot of people are more similar here than on Reddit. I'd argue that's not necessarily a bad thing. The one-size-fits-all social network for everybody approach I think doesn't work, it's more natural to choose a group you fit in to and feel comfortable with (which is how things were on old style forums and message boards). What ever happens to Lemmy/Beehaw in the future, the main thing I hope for is to have plenty of choice of smaller forums which is what's been lacking in the last decade or so.

I was on Reddit for a very long time and a few Lemmy instances when everyone moved. While it’s not perfect, Beehaw is by far the place where I can read comments that are original, less hateful, and less pedantic. I chose Behhaw because everything else is just exhausting to me