[lucretian]

i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens.

as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances.

this comment articulates it well:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...

"He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way.

But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."

[robwilliams]

I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections.

The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.

[lucretian]

neither am i comparing them. you're observing that the NYT comment section is free of trolls/spam but is otherwise a liberal echo chamber. that's another way of saying that it's lacking a counter-balance of intelligent conservative comments. i'm accepting that critique for the purpose of argumentation, and replying by asking you to look around and find anywhere on the web that has a majority critical mass of intelligent conservative commentary. once you realize that it pretty much doesn't exist, maybe that will lead to a different conclusion...

anyway, one of the few places i read that, for whatever reason, does carry an even mix of intelligent comments across the spectrum is interfluidity. for example:

http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/6400.html