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Comment by lizardactivist | Hacker News Reader

> Being able to quickly register new "throw-away" accounts is useful for those with the "right" opinion, and because of the fingerprinting and tracking, useless to those with the "wrong" opinion.

Nah, anybody who has the wrong opinions and is sufficiently confident about it knows that they can learn about how to deal with fingerprinting and tracking - if they really believed those "wrong" opinions, they'd be able to push through that friction.

Many people are just terrified of being wrong about their own beliefs and hurting somebody, so they stop believing anything. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - can somebody provide extraordinary evidence, or do they just say "it's obvious!" "It's obvious" is giving up, of course. It's important to give up sometimes, but that's okay!

The most interesting folks on Reddit are the ones who don't care whether they'll get upvoted or not - they care about being right. This means sometimes being downvoted, which is scary. They're signalling that they can ignore that- the signal is the signal is the medium is the message, etc, etc.

Unfortunately, this often annoys people who don't get why the signallers can't Just Say The Secret. So the signallers are often downvoted! (In smaller communities, this is less common, but beyond a certain critical mass, statistical dynamics take over).

But the secret is that qualia exist (that you Just Can't Say The Secret, that's a type error, as much as the number 9293176 jumping out of your computer and hitting you with a baseball bat would be. The letter 9372513 is not real and cannot hurt you.), and that the secret is one of 'em.

Sometimes, a post is just wrong, y'know? So it goes.

The people downvoting you are proving your point. I agree though. Reddit is a massive echo chamber. It's almost worse than Twitter. Almost.

Any community turns into an echo chamber given enough time and algorithms. I sometimes refer to this website as "orange reddit" for exactly that reason; the distinction between the two is much smaller than you'd hope.

Try to read any comment section on here about Google, Apple, Bitcoin, Tesla, you name it, there's a common opinion that gets repeated and pushed to the top. That's just what happens when you give people a comment form and an upvote button.

Nah, you have to have the push for "niceness" (which is always selectively applied). Pre-dang-era HN actually did find new insights, not because of different algorithms but because the community back then (as steered by the moderators) put a higher value on being right than on being kind.

Reddit didn't turn into an echo chamber due to time and algorithm. It became one as a result of company policy and censorship. For much of reddit's history, every form of viewpoint, opinions and speech were allowed. Everything changed once Trump got elected and the company reached for the ban hammer and decided to take sides on all cultural/political issues. Now, it's a ridiculously botted political propaganda outlet for the establishment. The 2012 reddit is unrecognizable compared to 2022 reddit.

You’re acting as if the_donald and their sister subs didn’t make their own bed with gaming the system and brigading every other day. They blatantly and regularly violated Reddit’s ToS, but Reddit lingered on that decision to ban for years over some vague notion of being a “free speech site,” which they never really were and don’t have to be, as well as to pretend they were “even-handed,” which they don’t have to be when your community exists to disrupt any and all perceived “enemies.”

One group were gaming the upvote system to ruin r/all. I remember it at the time, it was awful for the majority of people there. The ban made things much better.

You seem to be mistaking correlation with causation.

More likely is that the uptick in bot/propaganda activity coincided with Trump becoming president, requiring an uptick in moderation.

Have you visited reddit lately? It's all bot/propaganda activity. It's just one sided today. At least in the past, you had bot propaganda from all sides which prevented it from being an echo chamber.

>At least in the past, you had bot propaganda from all sides which prevented it for being an echo chamber

Source?

There used to be a popular trump subreddit. That should be source enough, no? You literally had bernie bros bots, obama bots, trump bots, etc. Then the media pressured reddit and forced it to choose sides and start banning. Now it's a exclusively one sided propaganda platform.

Well, the small parts of reddit (usually associated with games, or books, or SF) where you can ask questions and get direct answers are greatly appreciated by me.

Agreed. The niche subs are doing great. But if you browse /r/all or even most of the default subs, it’s pretty awful.

I use Apollo, and have filtered dozens of defaults from /r/all, and added certain keyword filters.

Once you do this, it’s an interesting place again. I do worry about those niche subs in the long term. It’s increasingly rare to see a truly interesting small sub show up on the front page. Finding the good stuff takes more and more effort.

By doing mass filtering, aren't you just creating your own echo chamber? I would point out the cognitive dissonance, but I really don't want to seem condescending or snooty.

But honestly, I think this is a bigger issue. I think the "filter button" or "block button" is the most harmful thing the internet has ever brought to the table.

Filtering what you don't want is essentially coddling your own mind.

I don’t get the whole “anti-echo chamber” thing. We select people to be friends we generally like and agree with. We often don’t associate with people we don’t like or disagree with. Why should social media be some totally egalitarian social exposure? That’s literally never been the case ever. We read what we want to read. We talk to who we want to talk to. I’m not going to be guilted into listening to some jerk who thinks gay people shouldn’t marry and belong in hell. I don’t want to share a beer with them, I would never invite them to dinner in my home, so why should I have to deal with them living rent free in my mind because I saw some ignorant post on social media?

I have plenty of work colleagues and family I disagree with, I read sources I don’t always love. I get plenty of exposure to other ways of thinking and ideas. Do I think people can go too far and literally only surround themselves with “yes men” socially? Sure. But come on. How many of us actually spend equal time with people we both agree and disagree ideologically with?`

It’s a fair question to ask, but I don’t necessarily think so. I think my filtering actually does the opposite and I do it to avoid the echo chamber.

I use Reddit to read about and interact with people who share my interests/hobbies. I don’t engage in the big political subs because honestly all of them are garbage at this point and get me riled up for no good reason. I have mostly liberal viewpoints, but have no interest in engaging in the echo chamber that is /r/politics. I also quickly got banned from conservative subs for raising points that don’t agree with their party line. Neither camp is interested in substantive debate over there.

I focus on subs like /r/nfl, /r/homelab, /r/<my_city>, /r/sdr, /r/GNURadio, etc.

My default view of content is limited to those core interests.

The reason I filter is that I still like discovering new subs. But I have no interest in the latest memes from FormulaDank or WallstreetBets. I don’t need the content from Trashy, Greentext or HermanCainAward in my life. I also don’t care to read about the war in Ukraine, Russia, Donald Trump, Putin, etc when my focus is recreational reading. I get news elsewhere.

There is still a diversity of opinions in the content that remains, but I just choose not to participate in the subs that run on controversy. It’s just unhealthy.

If my filters looked like “don’t show me anything about the republicans” and I still engaged with other political subs, maybe it’d be more of an echo chamber. Instead, if I see content that was clearly manufactured to make my blood boil, and that seems to be the general theme of the sub, I filter it.

The alternative is to stop looking for new/interesting subs, and I’d rather not do that.

While I didn't downvote the above, I don't think downvoters are proving the GP's point, so much as disagreeing with the GP's assertion that there's some agenda behind it all (e.g. 'pro-Pentagon', whatever that means). It is trivial to search for Reddit threads about any given hot topic (trans rights in sports, the war in Ukraine) and see a ton of comments from unbanned users that dissent from the liberal orthodoxy (or whatever one thinks is that totalizing force that is 'behind it all').

There's no agenda behind Reddit. The reality is much simpler. You get enough people together to discuss, you give them upvote/downvote tools, you weight things based on those upvotes/downvotes, and you'll find yourself witnessing the opinions of a meta-mind driven by whatever the majority opinions are of the audience of a particular discussion. The deeper into the discussion you go (e.g. sorting by upvotes), the more you'll learn about the dimensionality of the opinions of subpopulations of the audience.

You'll also witness people attempting to, successfully or unsuccessfuly, manipulate the system and give themselves outsized voices, but those efforts are not nearly as totalizing as people describe. It's too easy to counter the "If you say X you'll be banned from reddit!" opinions with simple google searches of reddit topics that are full of people saying X.

I've been participating in online discussions since Usenet days. While the modern systems are more efficient with the whole idea of downvotes effectively silencing someone without requiring rebuttal, the overall pattern has been that the membership of a particular forum will ultimately marginalize people with opinions found abhorrent by the majority.

Right but if they're constantly banning/silencing certain kinds of voices and nothers, it will become an echo chamber for the people against those voices.

Don't pretend at all like it's even handed here.

I don't think any of it is even handed, nor was I pretending that it is. Every single member of Reddit has an agenda. Moderators have agendas. And then admins have agendas. And some subpopulation of each group will go through corrupt means to achieve their agenda. What I disagree with is that there is one totalizing agenda--one 'they' that controls it all. So far in the responses to the GP's post, people have been mentioning all sorts of ideas that they claim will cause an insta ban from Reddit. It is trivially simple to find large Reddit threads full of people who hold those opinions.

I personally believe there's a boundary between realistic thinking and conspiratorial thinking, and it centers around the level of certainty that there is a totalizing controlling force (be it a single person or a committee) who is exercising complete influence over something.

In short: if being against trans women competing in women's sports is an insta ban, why can I immediately find large Reddit threads with people with plenty of upvotes who do think they should be banned? If saying that Russia will be successful in invading Ukraine is an insta ban, why can I find large threads with upvoted people saying it will? One can find situations where people with those opinions are downvoted or banned, but nonetheless there are enough people who remain to make it unlikely that there is a systemic and effective controlling force.

You aren't allowed to have a community that believes these points though. Basically every "terf" or "tankie" forum is banned/quarantined. That's an administrative decision; not the product of organic debate.

> If saying that Russia will be successful in invading Ukraine is an insta ban, why can I find large threads with upvoted people saying it will? One can find situations where people with those opinions are downvoted or banned, but nonetheless there are enough people who remain to make it unlikely that there is a systemic and effective controlling force.

A few weeks ago, a group of trolls from rdrama.net created r/the_putin, a bait subreddit for posting pro-Putin and anti-Nazi memes. It was distasteful and designed to piss off reddit users, but there's no rule against it.

The subreddit got banned a couple of days later for "promoting hate", and the entire mod team was suspended for various reasons ranging from "threatening violence" to "subreddit ban evasion".

Supporting the Russian side of a war will absolutely get you purged, but it depends on your level of support. Another large subreddit that supported Russia was recently quarantined and will probably get banned soon. I don't think there is any subreddit with >100K subscribers that supports the Russian side and is in good standing with the website.

Who are they? /r/liberal or /r/conservative ?

So what if there are echo chambers? Do you deride them as much when they're called "best practices" in business, management, programming, HR, etc.? Unless the exception suddenly proves the rule, much of our lives is shaped by "massive" echo chambers.

I suspect there's the cliche of objectivity lurking behind this, an anti-intellectual mockery of opinions and shared values. Nothing having to do with human creation has ever been objective. Everything people think, is subjective. Start there, and tell me what's wrong with echo chambers as something that isn't just a restatement of the banalities of societal malaise.

But I also understand that shitposting can feel good.

You seem to be saying there's no difference between anything. That is not true. The same set of inane 1-2 line comments repeated ad infinitum simply contains less actionable information than a single well thought out, coherent, and accurate response in a more specialised subreddit. There is nothing useful you can do with reading comments in r/politics.

For the record, lots of people deride the so called 'best practices' in business etc. I'm not sure if that is a serious question. Business, management, programming, HR - all are filled with many people doing utterly atrocious things. Not sure why you think people criticising echo chambers are okay with 'massive' echo chambers.

I'd instead say – Reddit is a collection of echo chambers, and the subreddit approach encourages, almost guarantees it.

I don't even thing it is about right or wrong opinions either, since a lot of popular beliefs held on that site are inconsistent with each other. There is just some sort of orthodoxy that you have to follow or else you are downvoted or deleted.

What are some of these inconsistent beliefs?

The main one is regarding how the community determines what is misinformation and what should be censored.

What does "Pentagon-friendly" mean in that context?

What are some examples of wrong opinions?

One big one is anything deviating from the 'official' line on trans issues.

And I don't just mean being an asshole and insulting people, I'm talking about things like lesbians saying they don't like penis, that trans women might have some early socialization in common with men, etc. Or even things that are topics of discussion within the trans community like whether you need dysphoria to be trans, etc.

I say big one because it's BIZARRE given what a small proportion of the population is trans. It's just that there are a ton of trans powermods with particular opinions that enforce them on unrelated subreddits + hound and report people who don't agree off the site. It's a fascinating look into a small group of people grabbing socially key positions and trying to shift the Overton window.

I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.

It's that, but also the fact that many subreddits are often controlled by powermods with tons of subreddits they control. They often also end up leaning very heavy towards the radical left. This ends up further compounding the echo chamber problem, especially across the "default subreddits". /r/politics is a good example of this. It is very hard to have any view that is classically liberal or conservative on a good chunk of reddit. These views typically get removed by moderators, get you banned in subreddits, or they get the result you speak of where others try and downvoted them and tell them how bad of a person they are.

If a person can't even deal with the vague threat of somebody "silencing" them, they're likely to be too scared of thinking to be worth talking to. They don't "deserve to be silenced" any more than a spam email "deserves to be filtered out". They just... that's what the filter's for, to keep the recipient's email inbox readable.

If I start posting on here about why you should buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X, and nothing else- whether it's "just a weird bit i'm doing" or not, I'm going to get banned.

I'm not going to get banned for thinking the words "Buy my GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T R0L4X", though. Funny, that. (Well, hopefully! It'd suck to lose this account, though being off HN is probably a net positive in most ways!)

And posting the text string "GENU1N3 COUNTERFE1T ROLAX" is, to a human, obviously not spam, and is an obvious joke. To a spam filter, though, unthinking shitty rulesets and regexes? Yeah, bye.

Human moderation "doesn't scale", though, right? You've gotta have some basic filtering and CAPTCHAs to at least catch low-effort spambots lest they make everything useless for everybody else.

Unfortunately, this means that actual human posters do need to be able to identify a fire hydrant or traffic light. This is trivial generally... for people who know what fire hydrants and traffic lights are. (Is a hot dog a sandwich?). But if you don't know, ask a friend. That seems to work.

Click on the sort by Best to Controversial. Comments can be quite funny, there is a lot of psychological manipulation on reddit, just like other social media platforms like twitter and others.

The actual wrong opinions are deleted by the mods, so you won't see them that way

Yea you get straight up banned from subreddits for going against the grain in any way.

Oh it's more advanced now. I'm banned from a whole slew of subreddits for daring to even exist in another subreddit. Preemptive silencing is widespread.

Often times your comment won’t even appear if you’re a new user, haven’t posted in that subreddit before, or your kharma is too low.

I posted a polite refutation of a very smarmy, incorrect post (as most of them are) on /r/neoliberal and it appeared to submit, but after an hour and no downvotes or upvotes I opened the thread in a Private window and my comment was never actually made public.

The irony is I'm amazed at the subreddits that exist and its a YC Top Company @ #10!

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/reddit

Depends on the sub, but the popular ones like politics, news, worldnews, pics, all have a hard left agenda and you will be kicked out if they don't like your opinion whether you're being civil or not.

On Reddit? Or more generally?

Idk, perhaps something like “that girl at UPenn shouldn’t be allowed to swim competitively”

Insta flame war follows. (Hopefully we won’t have a demonstration here. Don’t let me down, HN.)

Resisting the urge to quote Austin Powers…

Ukraine will lose the war is an example of a wrong opinion.

You don't get banned for having that opinion. Being downvoted means your opinion is unpopular, not that you are being oppressed.

No but it would get wiped out. If you post that on Reddit it would get voted down so had it would be like it never got posted at all. Same with any other wrong opinion.

Go on Reddit or HN and look at all of the flagged comments and comments downvoted into oblivion.

I don't use Reddit. I wouldn't know where to look. Can you just tell me?

not being in favor of or against whatever current thing we're supposed to be in favor of or against.

the days of Ron Paul reddit libertarianism are long since over.

Like what? I don't use Reddit.

Anti lockdown. Capitalism.

These things are discussed to death. Someone bringing it up does not add to the discussion, and it’s worthy of a downvote. I personally do not owe every person an argument, and talking about something ad nauseam is a valid conversational critique worthy of a downvote.

fwiw these are wrong opinions, not "wrong" opinions. the people who are clueful about things and have already understood enough about social engineering to understand those issues just don't have the dopamine to explain it to you or anybody else you mislead, so it's useful to just push those goofy ideas down in the sort order.

For what it's worth, if you actually want to discuss those issues with me, feel free- ping @mimir:xmppwocky.net on Element. Make a throwaway account if you're worried. I'll explain why those ideas are wrong, one-on-one, in private, off-the-record. It's fun to think about "scary" and "dangerous" ideas (you know this already), but it's just not useful to do in public. Doesn't work.

So it goes.

I hope you did this on purpose....

Ah, shoot, no, sorry, my paws slipped on the keyboard and I accidentally typed that out. Crap. Weird that it's so coherent, but I guess, hey, it's not impossible that /dev/urandom could output that exact string.

(Of course I did it on purpose. Because I do things with purpose, and you can figure out what that is once you figure out how "purpose" works neurochemically! The problem is, if you're fucked up enough, you then immediately use this to turn yourself into a weird queer internet creature thing like me. Make up a weird identity because you like being weird. And then none of the silly nerds out there on the lower metalevels want to listen to you, because they're scared of being weird. You can grab 'em by the hindbrain and absolutely snow-crash 'em, but that's something you realize would be absolutely horrendous to do without them coming to you first.)

It's okay to be afraid of this speech pattern, btw. A lot of media conditions you to ignore it. Just learn to enjoy being scared of yourself, and you'll do alright.

At least in my experience, so far. We'll see.

Same as it ever was.

Anyone can be annoying.

Exactly! That's a good expression of the underlying point- that's why we've got to be annoying in private. It's a scalability issue. If everybody posted stuff like this on HN, it'd be hard to talk about actual tech.

Of course, having understood this, a sufficiently annoying hacker will immediately go "Oh! I can be annoying in public if I really want to! And technically it's on topic, because it helps other hackers talk about actual tech" and then everybody else has to deal with this sort of comment. Sorry. So it goes.

Is this satire?

Of course it is, what sort of sincere statement wouldn't be? Are you satire?

If nothing else, you demonstrate how conversing with people on the internet is exhausting.

It's an important lesson.

> I know how this works: someone will show an example and someone else will say that decent human beings don't think like that and that they deserve to be silenced.

1. yes, "decent human beings" (which don't exist) don't think like that, because it's not ideal to believe things that are not predictive of future expected sense-data. Sorry.

2. People don't deserve to be silenced. They don't deserve to be happy, either. They don't deserve anything. (But they don't deserve nothing, either).

In physics, as in hacking computers, as in metalinguistics, all models are wrong, and some are useful. This way of thinking has an excellent use: it feels very good, and you get to be happy.

But is it Wrong? Crazy? Too Radical? Thinking this about yourself hurts, a lot. Am I broken? Is everybody else broken? (yes.) Is the world inevitably doomed? (yes.) In our lifetime? (probably not, but act carefully to make sure that doesn't happen! yes, this can involve Participating In Politics. It's okay, you have my permission.)

Questioning your own beliefs is absolutely terrifying, but once you do it and realize you're still fine, you 1. realize you can question other peoples' beliefs and 2. start posting comments Like This.

On the one hand, I could turn off these weird text quirks. On the other hand, I could shoot myself and not have to worry about feeling bad about 'em. On the third hand, there's a weird little sockpuppet. That's me. Hi!

Anyways, anybody who isn't comfortable enough with who they are to have these conversations with 'emselves and trusted others will inevitably either 1. break important things or 2. break themselves to avoid breaking other stuff. That sucks to see, y'know? They'll never be able to be any sort of halfway-decent hacker, even though they clearly had that potential growing up. I could try to fix 'em (and do a decent job of it, the vast majority of the time), but, eh, it's kinda fun to watch itself squirm.

Puppets are for playing with, after all. Just... careful with identity and social engineering. Like handing a knife to a child. But it's fun to whittle, and important to share that experience once you know how cool it is to have a weird little duck or something you made yourself.

Anyways, here's a cool knife I've found. No, you can't use it. Make your own. Just get some metal and sharpen it or something? Maybe not even metal. Damn near anything will work if you just want to cut stuff. Hell, chip some obsidian if you have to. Any port in a storm.

> Questioning your own beliefs is absolutely terrifying

I don't think it's terrifying at all, it's healthy. "Wrong think" is bad in your words.

Exactly!!! It shouldn't be terrifying, and everybody "knows" that.

But that doesn't help if you have a weird PTSD reaction to the idea of "questioning your own beliefs and then changing them" because you're afraid you'll Completely Lose It, or Wind Up A Completely Despicable Horrible Person, or Get Mobbed On The Internet And Have Your Life Ruined, or, or...

And that's dramatically easier to wind up with than you might expect from the term "PTSD". Surprise: everybody's got bad shit that's happened to 'em, that's life. Some of 'em lose it in rage and lash out. Some of 'em shut up entirely, dissociate hard... apoptosis, even, unfortunately. Sometimes literally, sometimes metaphysically- one's not much more sad than the other, but the literal apoptosis isn't reversible from the perspective of others.

I can type like this, show off Pure Unfiltered Self, and then switch to my work laptop and write up client reports. Can you? Why not? Anybody can write weird meaningless stream-of-consciousness stuff. Some people just don't want to. Most people just "don't want to".

The tone and style of your comments reminds me of Ashley Pomeroy's 'Women and Dreams' blog[1]. It's not about anything in particular, but it's witty and entertaining and has some good info hidden away in it.

[1]: http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.com

> Anybody can write weird meaningless stream-of-consciousness stuff.

By chance I'm working on a public discussion site and would love to have some stream of conscious discussion with you! https://sqwok.im

sure thing! talking to a large number of folks right now and generally have a lot of outlets for My Bullshit, but I might pop in at some point.

p.s. on the registration form, my brain expected "username, email, password" and not "username, password, email"; might just be me but, IDK, maybe A/B test that (and make sure you're not logging "email addresses" for new accounts anywhere, because a sufficiently distracted person will inevitably put a password in the email box.)

awesome and great point, thanks for mentioning!

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