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Comment by DaiPlusPlus | Hacker News Reader

Hopefully it will lead to what happened on reddit: the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc). While they’ll be in an echo-chamber (which isn’t a good thing at all), at least they won’t ruin other communities.

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Doesn’t that just lead to an echo chamber on the site they left also? When Trump supporters were banned from the political subreddits, they formed /r/The_Donald. And it’s an anti-Trump-criticism, anti-anything-left-leaning echo chamber. But that left /r/politics to become a left leaning echo chamber itself. Now, one can’t have a civil discussion about anything because /r/politics will ban anything saying Trump did anything remotely good, and /r/The_Donald will ban anything remotely critical of Trump.

This is a false equivalence - r/politics is not the left leaving equivalent of r/The_Donald. Trump supporters weren't broadly banned from political subreddits, just the ones that broke the rules did, like everyone else. r/politics is a left leaning echo chamber, yes, but you won't get banned for being pro Trump (just downvoted). On the other hand, you will get banned from r/The_Donald or r/conservative for being anti-Trump.

The problem there is that these sites have become echo-chambers, where they breed extremism. These kinds of ideologies (E.G. Nazism) need to be exposed to the light, like a bacteria, in order to be shamed and debunked.

This is a nice theory but are there any instances of Nazis being converted to normies because someone told them they were wrong on the internet?

Instead what seems to happen is that normies get pulled into Nazi content because the recommendation algorithms on these sites see heated discussions as engagement and try to feed it.

The only study I'm aware of on that is on Youtube's recommendation algorithm, which found the opposite is true - it tends to steer people away from radicalization.

How does that work out though in practice?

If I go to a bar and there's some guy screaming about his Nazi ideology and the owners don't kick him out, I'm going to just move on.

If some social media platform is full of trolls and hatred and such... people are just going to go away. It becomes a 'race to the bottom'.

> the worst go off to a competitor which then fails to gain mainstream attention (e.g. Voat, Gab, etc).

Or, HN :)

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