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Comment by will_pseudonym | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, and I also wish there was a way to filter out content from select people who I follow for their subject matter expertise, and I'm not interested in reading about their takes on politics. I don't mind that they're wanting to share those views, but I wish I could follow just their subject matter content. And by the same token, it would also encourage people to be able to post those non-subject matter tweets, if they knew that people wouldn't have to unfollow them if they preferred to avoid politics. Allowing people to choose to bifurcate what they follow a person for enhances the network, I think.

And I should say, it's not even necessarily about politics. I'm not a huge sports fan, and in the same way, I would like to be able to unfollow posts about sports, etc of friends on Facebook.

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Reddit is great for subject matter. Not perfect but actually gets better and better every year.

As long as you’re okay with politics leaking in. There isn’t a sub of any significant size that doesn’t become a reflection of the leftist echo chamber of the larger community.

Mods can surely delete comments that outright state anything political, but they don’t control the fact that the votes are controlled by the community and the votes favor things that fit in with a particular political world view.

All this to say, a vote-driven platform with an overwhelmingly one-sided user-base is not a great place to host a community.

And yet plenty of right wing echo chambers exist there too and have for a very long time. They continue to host communities on reddit which are all, one sided. What exactly are you doing here on HN? Injecting politics, how are you any different than the folks you're complaining about?

Talking objectively these days is a very political act.

> And yet plenty of right wing echo chambers exist there too and have for a very long time. They continue to host communities on reddit which are all, one sided.

You’re confused about what I’m saying. I didn’t refute that some group can gather in a special sub for right-wing topics while carefully banning thousands of wider users.

What I’m talking about is hosting a non-political community. The entire user-base of Reddit, on average, is leftist and those views leak into your community in the form of votes against/for particular topics.

> What exactly are you doing here on HN? Injecting politics, how are you any different than the folks you're complaining about?

Again, you’re confusing explicitly discussing politics with the effect of an echo chamber enforced by votes. Do you need me to explain the difference further?

This is not my experience with the specialized subreddits I follow (mostly reading, health, and tech related, all on the smaller side). However, I have noticed that people who like to label things as "left/right echo chambers" are extremely sensitive to what other people say and often read political intent where none is intended. Could this be what's happening to you?

> political intent where none is intended. Could this be what's happening to you?

Nope. You’ll notice I didn’t say anything about intent. It’s much broader with entire classes of ideas being oppressed and other bad ideas being accepted with refutations shunned.

It's more likely that you're sitting on the far end of a normal distribution, and what you see as an enforced echo chamber is just the vast majority of users sitting in the middle of that bell curve doing their thing.

In other words, if everyone is sitting to the left of you, maybe you're just sitting really far off to the right.

Nope, Reddit’s political bias is very well-known.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PoliticalDiscussion/comments/3e897a...

https://social.techjunkie.com/demographics-reddit/

It’s not that there is anything particular about Reddit that attracts leftists, it’s just dominated by a young demographic that generally skews far left of the wider population.

> other words, if everyone is sitting to the left of you, maybe you're just sitting really far off to the right.

It’s not “everyone”, it’s just a simple majority of the users on reddit, which demographically is sitting to the left of the wider population.

So (setting aside the fact that a two dimensional political spectrums is bullshit) yes, I’m sitting on the right side of the curve in Reddit’s user base. But so are most professionals, parents, etc (I.e. folks over 25). And you only have to be sitting slightly to the right of the median before the vote ratio steam rolls you’re world view.

> and what you see as an enforced echo chamber is just the vast majority of users sitting in the middle of that bell curve doing their thing

That’s literally a fucking echo chamber. A community that has a voting mechanism that reinforces the views of the majority and suppresses anything unpopular with that majority group.

A comment that reveals more about your leanings than anything to do with reddit.

Are you sure you're sufficiently equipped for a discussion about echo chambers and politics? Doesn't appear so. A moment of introspection might serve you well.

> A comment that reveals more about your leanings than anything to do with reddit.

It can’t be both. Either Reddit is biased and I don’t lean the same way or my comment said nothing about my leanings. Figure out what point you’re trying to make before throwing vague statements out.

> Are you sure you're sufficiently equipped for a discussion about echo chambers and politics? Doesn't appear so. A moment of introspection might serve you well.

Says the person who was incapable of actually engaging in a discussion about echo chambers and instead engaged in a personal attack.

Personal attack? Try again.

Have to agree. 280 characters is not that much better than 140, and what good ideas are compressed into that format. Sure you can link to a blog post, but then you might as well use rss.

Yep. I do follow Reddit via daily emails but rarely go there and comment or post.

I think something we don't want to hear is that maybe we dont need non-curated, non peer approved, non verified contents and comments in life.

If newspapers have not evolved before the internet into just readers sending their mails it's because of the ultra low quality of nobody's view on anything.

Social media made us believe they were helping us share opinions to get the conversation started more directly, but in fact they just wanted to sell us toothbrushes while we were addicted to the fast food equivalent of journalism. Then it influenced journalists as well who dont know anymore how to lower their quality to get us to read them, now. Again to sell toothbrushes so they can survive.

And yes this comment itself is obvious, low quality, self contradicting too

You could try keyword blocking, but this wouldn't extend specifically to individual users. User specific keyword blocking would be cool.

On Twitter go to:

Settings/Privacy & Safety/Muted/Muted words

You can put in all your political words like “Trump” “Biden” to remove from your feed

This has improved my Twitter 10x. IT people can be so annoying on Twitter, they basically all have the same political stance. I have a lot more respect for the people who just tell people to vote.

This isn't a solution to your exact problem, but I find that muting specific keywords helps

Twitter needs a way to subscribe/follow a dynamic list of mute keywords, as mind viruses trend, spread, mutate and fade.

Oh yea, I wish I could block the whining that happens here on hacker News, it really turns me off the platform. Many threads I open and the top comment is just some tangential moan about something barely related to the subject matter.

This comment is either skillfully ironic or blindingly unaware.

Woosh

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