I doubt that it can be any worse than tech companies with financial incentives doing it. Surrounding yourself with like minded people will surely cause some bubbles like that but since when is letting a targeted algorithm funneling us for ad revenue a better option? I don’t personally think it’s a big deal and guessing that people are just upset that their obsession with mass engagement is getting shook.
For all the great enforcement problems KOSPA has, at least it incorporated Filter Bubble Transparency…
No social media site controlled by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg is going to be a healthy experience. You will have much more varied content anywhere else.
Well that’s kind of baked-in to social media. If you’d otherwise talk to lots of different people in person, read much etc and now come to the internet and choose any of the mentioned platforms… That’d be bad. You’re now in a smaller filter bubble. If you’re already in some echo chamber and for example switch from mastodon to bluesky… that’s a minor change. The situation is a bit different if you change from a nazi platform to a regular one. It’s still not good. But better.
I don’t know how it could get any worse than now. Basically we’re all in echo chambers whichever platform you use. Including Lemmy.
Agreement with “consensus” of whatever bucket you’re placed into is rewarded, and disagreement is punished. Even if only by upvote/downvote. Switching platforms won’t change much.
If you stray from world, things are a bit better. World, however, hasn’t seen a ban or anti-free speech action they didn’t embrace fully. World is a cesspool of smug libs that refuse to engage with anyone they perceive to be on their left or right.
I think you’ve been in an echo chamber for too long.
yup. Lemmy.world!
I haven’t had any issues with .world. Ive had more issues with smaller instances banning people/topics. World seems like the most
blandor popular of the lemmy instances.Most of the issues I have with world are invisible because the comments are removed and the users are banned. As long as you stick with their narrative (that Trump bad and Biden/Kamala good) you won’t run afowl of them.
Cant you see everything via the modlist + API? I thought that was one of the benefits of Lemmy is that the modlist is open. I have seen people down-voted for specific comments but not banned.
Many have been banned. A leftist named linkerbaan (or to like that) was one for sure.
It’s like saying everyone who drinks water will die. It’s correct, but it’s not a problem.
Echo chambers exist everywhere.
Nearly all social media is full of
ecoecho chambers… I still post and follow stuff on several of the platforms. There is very little nuanced conversation… Seems like it is more and more just an up vote or downvote storm, or people claiming one thing or another without any supporting evidence.And that makes me genuinely sad. When I joined Lemmy, I was a little put off by the leftist bent here, but then I realized that I appreciated being challenged on my views, especially since people here are generally nice about it.
I wish I could find something like that for conservatives as well. Better yet, I wish there was a place like Reddit or Lemmy where all views were respected, provided claims are supported with evidence. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be compatible with the world we live in, and that makes me sad.
You can probably post on 7.62x54r.ru. Reddit had a decent number of anti-establishment leftists who would join up with conservatives on shared issues. I haven’t seen any spaces like that on Lemmy.
Yeah, and that’s something I missed about Reddit. I found a few good communities of centrists, open minded leftists, and open minded conservatives, so I could generally join a pretty good discussion. I still needed to watch what I said, because there were some things even open minded people wouldn’t consider given their political bias, but a lot of things were fair game.
For example, I could bring up Right to Repair to both groups, and I’d get different reasons for and against it from each group.
Here on Lemmy, I don’t get that diversity, either something is compatible with the group’s general leftist persuasion, or I get downvoted into oblivion. And that sucks, because I put in a lot of effort to be constructive and challenge the status quo. Fortunately, I usually know before making a statement which way it’ll go, and there are no downsides (aside from worse engagement) to getting down votes, so I know what to expect. It does make me sad though.
I’ll check out that community though. Not sure what to expect from a .ru domain though as an American…
Being a Reich Winger is incompatible with rational or thoughtful discussion.
Reich wing ideology boils down to subservience and deference to authority, not knowledge.
You seem to have a very specific definition in mind. There’s a lot more to the right wing than fascism.
Reich Wing ideology, the entire thing, relies on subservience and deference to authority. The difference in the various flavors of it are just how much and who.
OK, so you’re just going to spout partisan talking points instead of having a productive conversation.
Have a wonderful day.
Of course, discussing political ideology is “partisan”… Its exactly what we’re talking about.
And no, they’re not just talking points, it’s literally how we describe the various systems of political ideology… Reich Wingers look to construct a society around control and subservience. And, like I said, the question of “who” to obey, and how strictly people are to be controlled are what differentiates the various Reich Wing ideologies.
Reich Wingers look to construct a society around control and subservience.
This is a talking point, and you’re basically implying everyone on the right believes this, and that’s patently false.
Seems like there aren’t many centrist communities where you can have nuanced discussions.
I honestly don’t care about centrism, I care about diversity of ideas with citations for claims. If a left wing or right wing policy is the best for a given situation, I’d love to discuss it.
But failing that, I’ll take centrist over either political extreme any day of the week.
Hard to find nuance in anything the current government is doing
Eco chambers sound like a good thing.
Absolutely not. If for no other reason then you lose the ability to actually argue for your ideas if you’re in an echo chamber.
The person was referring to the eco typo in the original post.
Happy to see the word “nuance” being used… wish there was more of that too. This whole binary with-me / against-me mentality will bring us all crashing down.
Being around too many antagonistic people is stressful.
“The impact of election stress: Is political anxiety harming your health?: Psychological science shows that politics can harm our physical and mental health, but the positive aspects of political engagement can lead to greater well-being”
“In polarized communities, they found that bonding ties, or bonds between people who are similar (in this case, politically similar), were linked with better physical and mental health (International Political Science Review, Vol. 75, No. 3, 2022). Bridging ties—connections with dissimilar people—were associated with worse overall health for people who were politically isolated.”
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2024/10/managing-political-stress
There’s a big difference between analyzing your enemy and letting them shout at you constantly. I can research conservative evangelicals attitudes without having to let one set up a loudspeaker next to my house.
The conservative troll types are also the ones most likely to try and argue about echo chambers because their style of rage farming doesn’t work if everyone avoids them.
Far right radicalization will get worse if progressives leave X. Conservatives will stick around simply because they aren’t banned and then the white supremacists will be free to start pulling them without push back.
One thing to bear in mind is that, whenever someone accustomed to one platform explores another, they’ll tend to ascribe any differences between the communities to the other platform being an echo chamber of some kind.
I look at it this way: I don’t let in the crazy person on the street screaming racist garbage into my house, so I also don’t have to listen to or engage with that person on the internet, either. That doesn’t make my house an “echo chamber.”
For a long time I tried to treat “internet people” with some level of “respect” so to say. That is, I didn’t spend time blocking people and whatnot. But now? Screw em. I don’t have time to listen to nonsense, so if someone tries to come in to a conversation in bad faith, it’s very easy to block and move on.
Or on short-form social media like Bsky or Masto or whatever if someone posts a racist thing. Or a bigoted thing. Block and move on.
Those trolls live off of engagement so just don’t give it to them. And those same trolls are the ones complaining about “echo chambers.” “Waaa, no one wants to listen to my racist nonsense. It’s an echo chamber!” No, you are just a trash human, and no one is obligated to listen to you.
Those trolls live off of engagement
Not anymore. Back in the day trolling was a recreational activity done for fun. Deny the fun, cut off the troll’s food. Now it’s being done for political purposes, so cutting off the fun no longer functions since it no longer strikes at the primary motivation.
It decreases the spread. Cutting form the engagement means free people who aren’t already subscribed to that content will see it, since there’s fewer people arguing with it. Which means those who are susceptible to falling for it have less chance to even encounter it, meaning fewer fall into it.
Even if the incentive to create the trolls has changed, the counter to letting it spread hasn’t.
Depends on platform I suppose. Here, the level of activity is low enough that if you’re reading the comments, you’re usually reading all of them. In a major reddit sub that is seldom the case.
This was about bluesky/Twitter type social media. Things with reshare and follows to specific users, where someone you follow arguing with someone you don’t will expose you to the person you don’t follow.
Deplatforming works.
The result for the people who block them is still the same, though: they no longer see the troll garbage.
Natural end result of social media and user tracking search engines is echo chambers.
The echo chamber is a good thing. For some reason, everyone thinks I’m obligated to read their opinions that disagree diametrically with mine, constantly, non-stop, from hundreds of thousands of bots working for propaganda. I don’t.
The freedom of speech crowd isn’t real big on the other half of the equation. Freedom of association. No one is obligated to listen to anyone else’s bullshit. They’re free to be butthurt about it, I’m free to not give a shit.
You are both right and wrong there.
You need different opinions in your life, otherwise your echo chamber will tend to move to more extremist. Pretty soon you think those “others” are evil and so you are willing for anti-democracy coups by your side, or to fight wars to kill those infidels or other evil things. You need a steady input of other opinions to remind yourself that reasonable people can disagree and that is okay.
Also sometimes you are wrong. Few people have the guts to read a well reasoned opinion and admit they are wrong, but it is one you should be willing for.
Of course there is far more possible opinions than you have time to read. So eventually you have to say I don’t have time to deal with this subject and shut it out. So long as you avoid the problems of an echo chamber they are fine. Be aware of them though and make sure you are not falling into those traps anytime you shut something out.
I recognize and demand that everyone has an opinion, that everyone can speak their mind. And I have the right to have mine. And so, when all of Twitter is full of russian bots on the government payroll, there are hundreds of thousands of them, in all languages, I’m not kidding and not dramatizing. What i supposed to do about it? Read it all? Or retire to the echo chamber? I’m withdrawing, for now here, and if anything, from social media
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If by bots you mean computer programs or AI, they are not people and should be ignored/blocked. If you mean (as seems to be common) people with a different opinion, then you need to be more careful lest you get the faults of an echo chamber.
By bots, I mean people who are employed, go to work, and get paid just for writing comments, posts, and other texts, according to the orders from their superiors. You can call them a computer program, but what they are not is a person with a certain and different point of view. They have no point of view, they write what they are told to write, and yes, there are thousands of them, and they each lead a hundred fictional people. If you still didn’t know how the bot farm in Russia works, welcome to a new world
Those still aren’t bots. Bot farms are literally a bunch of servers running computer programs. That’s not the same thing as some online sweatshop pushing disinformation manually.
Echo chambers are on par with human nature: we fear the unknown and flock to like-minded people. It takes a degree of discomfort to read something you don’t agree with (explained rationally and with civility) and trying to argument in kind - it’s easier to down-vote and here we are…
Groups of any kind are echo chambers. That’s why they exist.
I’ve been on Bluesky very early on, and with the mass exodus of liberals from twitter, they are recreating their own toxic echo chambers on Bluesky now and it’s bleeding through into every post they disagree with.
