One potential criticism of this sort of subscription business model is that it increases the echo-chamber effect, where people only subscribe to writers whose opinions they agree with. How do you answer that criticism?
One potential criticism of this sort of subscription business model is that it increases the echo-chamber effect, where people only subscribe to writers whose opinions they agree with. How do you answer that criticism?
We think that people should choose what they read. Stepping back and thinking about what you want to subscribe to -- instead of doing one more scroll -- helps.
I think the "war chamber" basically reinforces the echo chamber. You never see the reasonable people within the camps you hate, you only ever see the most ridiculous, most absurd shit the internet has to offer that inhabits that camp.
I noticed this a lot during the whole GamerGate thing. It's like those people had just been seeing endless streams of tweets and Tumblr posts from verbally abusive (or more often, satirical and sarcastic) feminists and strung them together to create a narrative about being "under siege." Never mind that what they were seeing was not at all a representative sample of the group they're talking about, it's their idea of what the group looks like and there's no way to recalibrate them once they dig in.
This can happen on social media even if almost everybody would prefer that it didn't. The way to fix it is to change the rules :)