About the votes, it might have been because of the opinion I quoted above.

Na, I don't think people on lemmy are that averse to criticisms of the UI, features, etc. And by "astroturfed" I don't mean "my thread was downvoted". The thread was flooded with hostile comments making personal attacks, etc., most of which completely ignored the substance of the blog post. Virtually the entire thread was filled with comments along the lines of "How dare you attack reddit, you are [insert random ad hominem]".

All the comments making personal attacks on me were greatly upvoted, and other reasonable and on-topic comments were downvoted. There was a delay before it occurred, and then all the comments were up/downvoted the same amount, and new ones met the same fate, so there was clearly a group of people who were notified about the thread at some point who then continually monitored it and voted on new comments.

I guess at the time the mods removed your blog post by mistake, because they didn’t expect personal blogs here.

I doubt that. But if that's the case, that's horrible moderation that they would allow all the personal, off-topic attacks against me and then "remove the post by mistake because they didn't expect personal blogs". They should have removed most of the comments in that thread and banned the users.

I've had a better experience with the reddit@lemmy.ml community so far. I've seen lots of criticisms of lemmy.ml, and even attempts to [dishonestly] attack the .ml developers. I wonder how much of that is from the same group/type of people who just want to cause problems and make people leave lemmy. I wonder if the reason I experienced it less on the lemmy.ml comm is because those users are banned there, and that's why they're spreading FUD about lemmy.ml.