I’ve recently joined Lemmy and was reminded of this old fact I used to hear about all the time that lemmings will commit mass suicide by jumping off cliffs when they migrate (lemmings being the namesake of Lemmy, I think?).

Do lemmings actually do this? Because I think it would be funny if a social media software was named after an animal that’s literally known for mass hysteria / mob mentality.

      • key@lemmy.keychat.orgEnglish
        152·
        3 years ago

        Are we seriously going to have these shitty, typo-filled, keyword-driven, counter-productive bots here too?

        • AvaddonLFC ☄️ 🤘@lemmy.worldEnglish
          10·
          3 years ago

          Not yet, and it is not authorised in this community at its current stage, as it’s being tested. The API is unstable and the bot still needs improvement. But as we’d like you to sympathise, all moderators here are volunteers and they can’t keep an eye on every single comment here all the time. What we’re seeking is a minimally-enforcing automod that welcomes new users, deletes duplicate posts, notifies moderators for user reports, and doesn’t allow using specific slur words.

          We have to at least attempt for a fix when there aren’t nearly enough mod tools.

      • RealNooshie@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
        12·
        3 years ago

        When most of the replies to a suicide prevention bot are telling it to kill itself, I think something went wrong along the way…

  • Rhaedas@kbin.socialEnglish
    20·
    3 years ago

    Lemmy got its name inspiration from two places - the rock singer, and the game Lemmings.

    As mentioned, Disney set up the poor creatures and made up the whole thing, but I’ve commented before that if you treat the analogy as Disney being the evil corporate forcing the lemmings into a no win situation, the lemmings chose to leap into the unknown (the Fediverse) rather than put up with corporate crap anymore. So it’s not a suicidal thing, but more of a F U I won’t do what you tell me thing.

    • WildlyCanadian@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      3 years ago

      Think it makes for an even better analogy, corporations (and the rich) pushing the masses of a cliff (for profit)

      Reminds me of the people who blindly follow celebrities and corporations, blindly and unwittingly supporting the inevitable demise of our society, and eventually our planet.

  • Zirconium@lemmy.worldEnglish
    9·
    3 years ago

    Genocidal Organ Project Itoh. Don’t know how accurate it is

    “Yeah, apparently the lemming myth originates from a Disney documentary of all places. Crazy shit, huh? There’s this film that shows all these lemmings leaping off a cliff into a river, where they all drown. But apparently it was all staged. The lemmings had to be flown in from Canada and launched off the cliff using a turntable. The producers of the film even had to pay for the lemmings—they bought them from some Inuits, apparently.”

    I had to admit this wasn’t quite what I was expecting by way of a response to my confession about John Paul. But when I thought about it, it was the sort of response I should have expected from Williams.

    “So all that stuff about lemmings committing mass suicide as an evolutionary mechanism to regulate their numbers to keep their overall population at a sustainable level—”

    “Yeah, bullshit, all of it,” Williams said. “Apparently, that’s not how evolution really works. It ain’t all about survival of the species at all costs. It’s the individual that likes to live on, and so it adapts to its environment, and the characteristics that help it adapt become the dominant traits that are passed down to the next generation of the species. Evolution is about what the species can do

    • livus@kbin.socialEnglish
      1·
      3 years ago

      Yes that’s an accurate account according to everything I’ve read on this.

  • wurzelgummidge@lemmy.worldEnglish
    22·
    3 years ago

    No, they breed too fast and get peshed off the cliff by overcrowding.

    Someone told me that, I’ve no idea if it is true