Because I’m trying to avoid devoting mind space to things that only make me angry, I’d like to ask, is it worth looking them up? Or will they just make me lose slightly more faith in humanity?

Disregarding everything else, what’s a pod bro? Like vape pod? A fan of the dolphins? Ugly storage enthusiast?

This is potentially the grimmest perspective I’ve ever read. I don’t think you’re wrong, either.

You can’t discount the selfish and hateful as stupid as even the most vile people can be cunning. I’d agree that the median conservative would be less intelligent than the median liberal, but that discludes the folks looking to take from others their money, freedom, and time in order to enrich themselves monetarily or psychologically. Not everything can be Hanlon’s razor’d, sometimes people just enjoy sucking.

I’m not sure whether the issues plaguing Reddit really apply to lemmy, even with a single instance being disproportionately larger than the others, which makes “Reddit 2.0” a bit less derogatory to me. Reddit’s moderator tools were severely lacking for the required output (federation helps diffuse communities, and lemmy doesn’t encourage bots to swarm in order to increase apparent user numbers for investor satisfaction), every big anti-hate decision required a media spectacle to precede it (admins here aren’t free speech absolutists with authoritarian hard-ons), and staff retention at Reddit is an odd loop of promotion into managerial obsolescence which severely increases overhead (irrelevant to lemmy). Reddit 2.0 wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to me.