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Comment by tills13 | Hacker News Reader

The only issue with this is you create your own echo chamber. imo it's why conservatives feel so emboldened, recently -- they have surrounded themselves with people who agree with them making their "movement" seem larger than it actually is.

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That goes both ways. The hyper progressive echo chambers are just as problematic. Echo champers are problematic in general, it doesn't matter the political leanings.

Because echo chamber is distant from the rest of people. Distant-> withdrawn or numb ( both anger emotions )

I just aggressively unfollow anyone who talks about politics, either right or left. I also unfollow anyone whose average tweet rate is > 0.5/day. Works fine for me, but I understand that would just kill the whole experience for many people.

I can enjoy a tweet while at the same time disagreeing with it.

Same on HN. I often upvote comments, even though I disagree with them, whenever I feel they’re a meaningful contribution to the discourse.

Kudos. Many times if I want to bring up an unpopular opinion of mine it will get downvoted to oblivion, so I have to self-censor.

I see a pattern where they are downvoted initially, then later return. I suspect type of people that read HN periodically are different than those that are refreshing regularly.

> they have surrounded themselves with people who agree with them making their "movement" seem larger than it actually is.

At least in the U.S., I think that’s more attributable to their enormously disproportionate political power.

This is mostly an issue if you use Twitter for politics. If you use it to follow people in topics that you're interested in/hobbies, this isn't really relevant. You don't really need to worry about an echo chamber among baking pages, or DIY home guides, etc.

Honestly, life was so much more peaceful once I curated my social media apps to focus on my hobbies and remove "general news/current events" from my feed, which are largely garbage. I'll look up info about candidates when elections roll around, the rest of the year, I don't want to hear the worthless bullshit in that space.

I don't use Twitter for politics. It's a cesspool where the biggest assholes win.

It certainly has this reputation. But nearly 100% of the political content on my feed is respectful and thoughtful—much moreso than most political content I see here. And my follows are definitely not an echo chamber, I’d estimate that at least 1/3 of my political follows are far more conservative than I am.

I've noticed this as well. I think it has to do with people self-sorting to different parts of Twitter based on what kind of political discussion they want. The people who just want to be loudly scornful of $OUTGROUP go to the places where that happens all the time, avoiding the parts of Twitter they'd find boringly calm; and people who'd rather talk about things calmly stick to the places where that's the norm, avoiding the parts of Twitter they'd find to be content-free sound and fury. (And if you ever look at the replies to a tweet that crossed the streams, you get a glimpse of a strange other world.)

Yeah! The only people who should feel emboldened are the ones who have the courage to agree with me!

I was giving an example, I'm not sure what your point is here other than to just mock a point I didn't make.

I actively try to not create an echo chamber, but sure. I suppose it's something that people do.

This doesn't apply exclusively to conservatives. The echo chambering is definitely a bipartisan issue. This is obvious on almost any platform.

Edit: Submitted this on an out-of-date page, not realizing so many people would respond the same. Not being a copycat.

i think that goes for any of the movements today... where its the silent majority, who dont want to say anything in face of backlash of small few with big voices.

not just conservatives

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