Hi. I recently had some issues with my lemmy client which made me accidentally post the exact same thing here twice. The posts were about privacy on my school issued computer. I could have made it more clear, but I wanted privacy from the companies that make their spyware not from the school that owns the computer. Anyway, as of now one post has more than 40 upvotes and less than 5 down. The other has 10 up and 5 down as well as significantly less helpful and more critical comments. My hypothesis is whether the early comments were helpful or critical determined what other people said. I am curios to see what everyone thinks of this.
I have had similar thoughts about early posts and upvotes and downvotes making people more unlikely to post even slightly differing opinions for fear of getting a negative number or something silly like that, but this seems like an issue with the platform in general and is only worse because we have a smaller community on Lemmy.
There is a huge herd mentality on here. You have to avoid certain topics, and I can’t tell you what they are without getting downvoted. :)
People love their bubbles.