>I agree one can sometimes do this, but I don't think it's always possible. I strongly suspect you do not have the ability to, for example, turn all of the trolls and hijackers in a toxic reddit thread into reasonable conversationalists.
No, nobody has that power. The reality is that often some people are there to who appear to be on the wrong side. r/thedonald had that problem. On many cases there were organized raids to break rules.
>I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.
Moderation is needed and encouraged. We can look at Section 230 as an example.
Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
You can remove a number of things in good faith and not violate Section 230. Harassing is an example. You can also see the problem with Twitter. They are clearly in violation as they are removing content in bad faith outside their allowed categories. The problem is what's the punishment? The only punishment is that they lose Section 230 and therefore immediately shutdown. Death penalty.
The topic though is that at some point the community becomes an echo chamber. We know that for sure and they lose their community status. I highly doubt your argument is that all opposing viewpoint people are just trolls and hijackers. So it must go beyond.
>I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.
Well there was a recent testimonial called 'Social Dilemma' wherein they assert the upturn of social media was in of itself what created the echo chambers. I do believe that echo chambers existed before social media. Maybe they were at the Bar or sports events or whatever. However, that's tremendously limited. Not to mention OP is saying that as forums die in place of facebook groups and reddit. The problem worsens.
Admittedly I'm not sure how I can prove that the situation is far worse off than 10 years ago. However, so many others are arguing for this. Perhaps we can look at outside sources?
>I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all?
Well I'm not speaking of broad communities. The "scientific" community or the "academic" community still exists. Perhaps you are right, that there's not 'no communities' because of course there's still some church groups and various other groups that still act as a community. I think I may have been thinking of the context of covid lockdowns. I suppose I'm very wrong in the context of undeveloped countries who still operate properly.
In the western world even before covid. We lost our communities. People used to blame cars or video games or what have you. Lots of reasons. Very difficult to point to X as the reason community has died.
>For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.
HN is certainly an echo chamber. The only reason this conversation is happening is because my original post was squashed. You saw it early enough and replied. Absolutely nobody else has seen this conversation.
I do have a challenge for you. No doubt you believe HN isn't an echo chamber. The problem with echo chambers is the bias. So the test to see if you are in an echo chamber is to break the bias barrier.
The challenge, the next time you see an article on climate change. Post in there the opposing viewpoint. Be completely reasonable, provide links but only use links that are from a biased source that are pro-climate change. Wikipedia is a great source for that.
In RCP 8.5 emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century.[12] Since AR5 this has been thought to be very unlikely, but still possible as feedbacks are not well understood.[16] RCP8.5, generally taken as the basis for worst-case climate change scenarios, was based on what proved to be overestimation of projected coal outputs.
The graph there is pretending like a completely overrepresented unlikely to happen scenario. When in reality the governments of the world are taking action. We are actually tracking for RCP4.5
The wikipedia graph is clearly a misrepresentation. It's worse, the world has warmed up 6 celcius over the last 20,000 years. The warming has been fantastic for our species. An increase of 1.8c by 2100 is not going to be of any concern.
Anyway, I leave it up to you. You can make whatever argument but argue that climate change isn't the risk that it's being portrayed as and see if HN is an echo chamber for yourself. Afterall playing devils advocate is a healthy thing to do.
I would say the problem with echo chambers is that only one viewpoint is ever expressed at all. Everyone has biases; it's impossible to have a forum free from bias. But if people can express different viewpoints, each with their own different biases, at least people get to hear different viewpoints and different biases from their own.
There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time. By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers. I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.
> the next time you see an article on climate change. Post in there the opposing viewpoint
I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.
>I would say the problem with echo chambers is that only one viewpoint is ever expressed at all. Everyone has biases; it's impossible to have a forum free from bias. But if people can express different viewpoints, each with their own different biases, at least people get to hear different viewpoints and different biases from their own.
I agree.
>There is a stronger condition one could make, that to not be an echo chamber, discussions in the forum actually have to change some people's minds during the discussion, at least some of the time.
That's an interesting take on. I don't necessarily disagree, but perhaps there's a spectrum. Obviously echo chambers are typically considered to be political. However they clearly also exist along non-political lines. Dare touch the Transexual subject for example.
>By that criterion, it's true that I can think of very few online discussions I've ever seen that weren't echo chambers.
This is a newer thing. I certainly remember back in the day you could discuss issues even if they sometimes become flamewars that needed extinguishing. The ability to push out opposing viewpoints is rather new.
>I think that criterion is too strong because it's very hard for people to change their minds at short notice, so I normally don't expect to change people's minds during a particular conversation. If something I post plants a seed in someone's mind that only bears fruit much later, I would still count that as a win--but of course I'll probably never know if that happens, so there's no real way of gathering evidence on such an effect, if it exists.
I guess it also comes back down to 'community' vs echo chamber vs groups vs audience vs etc. Community is something a little more special than the others. Whereas echo chambers are a worse than others.
>I've run this experiment many times on HN. The results have been mixed. I've had some posts downvoted to oblivion and I've had some actual discussions. I will concede that I don't think any of those discussions have changed anyone's mind. However, I don't think things are any worse in that respect now than in the past; it's always been hard for we humans to change our minds.
When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN. Moreover, echo chambers have existed for a long time. I've been on forums where the moderators had public lynchings in order to vote on banning anyone who disagreed with their viewpoints. Mind you, my personal viewpoint was largely speaking in line with that hivemind so it wasn't a big deal. Until they came for me. In my case it was police brutality issue, I was on the wrong side.
There is a very interesting take on it. There's a friendship mecca system. As you get older your friends will want to have some grand meeting each year. At these meetings you almost always sacrifice someone to the altar of the fellowship. The now smaller group will be renewed to be better friends.
Perhaps that has some factor in it. That echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others. Perhaps echo chambers are mandatory to exist.
> The ability to push out opposing viewpoints is rather new.
I don't think that's true. I saw cases of it back in the 1990s.
It might be true that the online forums today have evolved in terms of their typical norms to make it more acceptable to do this. Which could be part of the Internet evolving in general to be less permissive and more controlled. That would be similar to the way previous communication technologies have evolved, although the evolution is no doubt faster with the Internet.
> When I say things are worse today than say 10 years ago. I'm not necessarily focusing on HN.
My comments weren't intended to be restricted to HN either; I just used it as one example.
> echo chambers are just trying to push other viewpoints out in order to strengthen their friendship with the others
If this is indeed a factor, I think it's part of human nature and certainly not something that just came into being with the Internet or social media. If anything, social media should make this problem, if it is a problem, more visible and therefore more amenable to some kind of counter action.
No, nobody has that power. The reality is that often some people are there to who appear to be on the wrong side. r/thedonald had that problem. On many cases there were organized raids to break rules.
>I am not saying people who reasonably argue for opposing viewpoints should be banned. I am saying that trolls and hijackers--people who don't reasonably argue for anything but simply shout down everyone else--should be banned. Doing that is necessary to make it possible for reasonable people arguing opposite sides of an issue to have an actual conversation.
Moderation is needed and encouraged. We can look at Section 230 as an example.
Any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.
You can remove a number of things in good faith and not violate Section 230. Harassing is an example. You can also see the problem with Twitter. They are clearly in violation as they are removing content in bad faith outside their allowed categories. The problem is what's the punishment? The only punishment is that they lose Section 230 and therefore immediately shutdown. Death penalty.
The topic though is that at some point the community becomes an echo chamber. We know that for sure and they lose their community status. I highly doubt your argument is that all opposing viewpoint people are just trolls and hijackers. So it must go beyond.
>I'm not sure I agree. The sickness might be more visible now, but I don't know that it's actually any worse, just more visible.
Well there was a recent testimonial called 'Social Dilemma' wherein they assert the upturn of social media was in of itself what created the echo chambers. I do believe that echo chambers existed before social media. Maybe they were at the Bar or sports events or whatever. However, that's tremendously limited. Not to mention OP is saying that as forums die in place of facebook groups and reddit. The problem worsens.
Admittedly I'm not sure how I can prove that the situation is far worse off than 10 years ago. However, so many others are arguing for this. Perhaps we can look at outside sources?
>I'm also not sure the sickness is quite as bad as you say. Are there really no communities at all?
Well I'm not speaking of broad communities. The "scientific" community or the "academic" community still exists. Perhaps you are right, that there's not 'no communities' because of course there's still some church groups and various other groups that still act as a community. I think I may have been thinking of the context of covid lockdowns. I suppose I'm very wrong in the context of undeveloped countries who still operate properly.
In the western world even before covid. We lost our communities. People used to blame cars or video games or what have you. Lots of reasons. Very difficult to point to X as the reason community has died.
>For example, is HN not a community? Is it just an echo chamber? I see opposing viewpoints argued reasonably here all the time; after all, that's what we're doing in this very conversation.
HN is certainly an echo chamber. The only reason this conversation is happening is because my original post was squashed. You saw it early enough and replied. Absolutely nobody else has seen this conversation.
I do have a challenge for you. No doubt you believe HN isn't an echo chamber. The problem with echo chambers is the bias. So the test to see if you are in an echo chamber is to break the bias barrier.
The challenge, the next time you see an article on climate change. Post in there the opposing viewpoint. Be completely reasonable, provide links but only use links that are from a biased source that are pro-climate change. Wikipedia is a great source for that.
For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record#/m...
Note the right side where they are showing the 2050 and 2100 predictions. Note the legend. It's RCP8.5 that they are showing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_Concentration_P...
In RCP 8.5 emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century.[12] Since AR5 this has been thought to be very unlikely, but still possible as feedbacks are not well understood.[16] RCP8.5, generally taken as the basis for worst-case climate change scenarios, was based on what proved to be overestimation of projected coal outputs.
The graph there is pretending like a completely overrepresented unlikely to happen scenario. When in reality the governments of the world are taking action. We are actually tracking for RCP4.5
The wikipedia graph is clearly a misrepresentation. It's worse, the world has warmed up 6 celcius over the last 20,000 years. The warming has been fantastic for our species. An increase of 1.8c by 2100 is not going to be of any concern.
Anyway, I leave it up to you. You can make whatever argument but argue that climate change isn't the risk that it's being portrayed as and see if HN is an echo chamber for yourself. Afterall playing devils advocate is a healthy thing to do.