we're just building another platform full of very angry people flooding the platform with their negativity and extremist views, and shouting down anyone who doesn't agree with their angry world view.
if you compare the lemmy and reddit front pages, they increasingly look similar. just lots of pettiness, political anger, and dad-joke level memes. we're also starting to see a core group of power users on fedi who post their agendas and tend to flood out content posed by more casual users.
This is what people want. a year or two ago, lemmy was very different, but as it grows more popular it reflects more populist viewpoints and pushes more bait-content that is entirely about emotional reactions and bias confirmation.
You can't platform or technology away human beings natural propensities for ignorance and rage.
The reason the early internet had less of it was, well, the early internet was much harder to interact with and it was largely text-based, and it was mostly full of positive tech enthusiasts who thought they were going to solve all the world problems with with the internet. Now the internet is dominated by content that is largely pornographic in nature, desired to stimulate the lowest most base desires, and it's predominantly short-form video and image based, which even the dumbest people can understand and relate to, and overwhelmingly rewards negative feedback loops.