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Comment by qzx_pierri | Hacker News Reader

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

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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 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.

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’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.”

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.

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.

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?`

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.

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

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.

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.

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