Perhaps it’s time to sideline the internet when evaluating collective reality

The structure of human society being hierarchical in nature (the 90-9-1 rule mentioned in the article) is a given. Lamenting it, implicitly or explicitly, is nonsensical. Society enacts a marketplace of ideas. Attaching those to persons is sort of a fallacy. Maybe due to the assumption, those with one good idea might have another one. Sometimes that's true though.

So, if some thinktank or company comes up with a good idea, or "hermenutical attractor" in your parlance, that's just fine? So long as nobody has an actually better idea, what's the problem?

The real problem is the lack of discussion space where ideas can be thoroughly compared.

(Just musing here) I've always wanted to try a simple ordering by time, but with each up/downvote adding an offset to the time. So you get 10 downvotes, you get pushed 10 minutes into the past on the timeline. I think that when people get sick of seeing something at the top of their feed they'll flip their upvotes to downvotes, and away it goes. Probably won't work - automated moderation systems don't generally. I'd still be curious to try it though.

> But then repeated news cycles about “toxic Bernie Bros” seemed to drain the movement’s momentum. Mainstream media outlets reported that Sanders’s base was made up of white male cyberbullies. Negative tweets had been amplified, and the words and behaviors of a few Sanders supporters all of a sudden were being portrayed as representative of an entire movement.

What I read is a description of how media portrayed Bernie Sander's supporters. Nowhere here does it say that white men are bad. In fact, it's calling out negative stereotyping used by mainstream media. Why do you think the author hates you?

No, there's nothing like that in the article. You imposed this strange interpretation on it. After all, Bernie himself is a white man, so why would someone who thinks white men are inherently evil support him, especially when some of the other candidates (e.g., Clinton) were women?

The "Bernie bros" meme was a cynical ploy to undermine the Sanders campaign by trying to show that only sexists would support him over his female opponents (Clinton or Warren).

The majority reads what these journalists write. If it seems reasonable, they'll accept it. When they're browbeaten, they'll also accept it, but with a grudge. But don't forget that there are different political, religous and cultural leanings in all media, so the majority is not uniform. Silent they are, though.

Yes, of course, that’s what it’s like for the other side. Those people are all bad. We on the correct side don’t have that problem. /s

But sometime in the last couple decades reporters stopped going outside and started reporting on whatever they saw on twitter, thus creating an irreality feedback loop

The media has been pretending the internet is real life (so they can write lazy articles) for so long that they've forgotten it's not.

No. Very much no. We're hiring a politician, not a counselor. His policies are the only thing that's relevant.

This narrative (not good for the General) is of course their preferred one. But I am not inclined to take them on their word when they chose to smear him with a “red herring” (your words) in the first place.

The 2016 election was when people started complaining about Populism, and both Trump and Sanders were populists in rhetoric, although very different in their substance. But the Dems would still have us believe that a non-populist, completely Establishment candidate (Clinton) was what the Dems needed for the General.

The more likely explanation is that the Dems would rather lose rather than run with a social democratic candidate.

Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes:

“Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception”

OTOH, if someone reads the article, your comment makes sense, given the section heading:

“A vocal minority sets the agenda”

Submitted post title, as it was for the first 100+ upvotes:

“Vocal minority sets online discourse, distorting real-life perception”

Back to your point, I've seen a change of mind on this forum regarding PHP in the last couple of years, but that could just be me.

What I do on subjects that have already been rehashed to death: I skim/skip the walls of black text and focus primarily on the black-gray checkered threads.

You can make the tiniest issue seem like a massive global concern without much effort, better yet enlist your friends and you can get the issue trending on other sites too because now lazy orgs have no problem using Reddit as a source. It’s of course not just Reddit, every platform has deep problems with people gaming their prevention systems, bot farms, trading accounts, and so on. That’s before you get into groups/corporations actively trying to push a very specific narrative in an organized effort.

It plays into the second thing I mentioned which was the distortion of numbers. The way we perceive stats online is very interesting, in that 2000 followers is a tiny insignificant thing, but 2000 upvotes is a major thread. This general distortion makes it very difficult imo for people to really grasp when something online is “real”.

So I get why some just opt out and view online life as just a funny thing irrelevant to reality. It’s kind of easier that way.

I've seen people in smaller city subreddits try and stand up to these folks, but they end up getting about a dozen downvotes on all their posts. They probably don't have the energy to keep putting up with all the contentiousness and they almost always give up trying to argue and the echo chamber is restored.

On big popular sites like reddit, especially on main sub posts, you can find any opinion you want in the comments. What this means is that if you are pushing an agenda, you don't need to be the originator of the comments/posts. You can use unknowing bystanders to carry your banner for you, giving the content much more legitimacy.

I don't think people understand how pervasive this is. Being able to control upvotes is far more powerful than being able to generate authentic looking accounts with strongly persuasive comments.