I guess the "easy" solution to that is to have a small fraction of presented content to be randomly selected from outside the echo chamber. Either by presenting completely random content or randomly from contributors that have already been downvoted.

This is a very common reaction. I was just responding to this yesterday on Tildes: https://tildes.net/~tech/yrf/as_of_october_2021_what_is_in_y...

I hope you will forgive my quoting: """ You seem to be concerned that the mechanism of LinkLonk will lead to a filter bubble where people would group by opinions they agree with and they would simply be preaching to their own (often misinformed) choir. That is a concern, but I'm not sure it is an inevitability.

Now that you know how LinkLonk works, what type of content would you personally upvote:

1. Content that does a good job at persuading the reader to agree with the opinion you hold, even if that content gives little useful information to you, or even if the reasoning is a bit disingenuous.

2. Content that informs you even if it does not promote "we are right, they are wrong" narrative.

My hypothesis is that you would be more inclined to upvote content (2) on LinkLonk more, than you would in other social systems (Reddit/Facebook/Twitter).

In existing social systems, upvoting content (1) is logical because you are trying to promote your opinion to others. The upvotes are used as a tool to win opinion popularity contests. And you are less likely to post/upvote content (2) because it may be seen as non-conformance to the group. That results in the tribalism you mention.

On LinkLonk:

- The main effect of upvoting content is to get more content from people who also upvoted it. If you upvote content (1), then you would personally increase the amount of noise your "future-self" will see (since it has little new information). If you upvote (2) then your "future-self" will be better off.

- Your ability to influence what other people see is limited by how useful they found your past upvotes. You can easily lose that ability if you misuse it - they can just downvote any useless content you try to push. There is no such feedback mechanism in popularity based systems. Every upvote has the same weight. And so it can be misused.

I'm not saying that LinkLonk will avoid the echo-chamber/filter-bubble problem. I'm saying that LinkLonk has a different system of incentives that it is not fair to apply the behaviour seen in other systems to it. And what kind of system level behaviour LinkLonk will have is impossible to predict just using a thought experiment. That's because this behaviour is emergent. The only way is to run an actual experiment - which is what LinkLonk is. """