[jawns]

Former magazine/newspaper editor here. (Disclosure: I briefly worked as a copy editor at a Rolling Stone sister publication, but never met Matt.)

One potential criticism of this sort of subscription business model is that it increases the echo-chamber effect, where people only subscribe to writers whose opinions they agree with. How do you answer that criticism?

[MattTaibbi]

I think the exact opposite is true. The problem with the “one click free” universe of tons of free content is that the reader naturally will search out - or be sought out, by algorithms - material he or she agrees with. That consumer takes less time to investigate alternative views and has less patience - something less mentally taxing is just a click away. When you pay, you’re making a commitment, and I think people both have higher expectations and are making a more reasoned, careful choice. We’ll see how it goes, but I think the subscription model is more likely to produce cool/experimental material than any model that tries to game Google/FB algorithms

[cjbest]

One thing I'd add to this: the algorithm actually selects for stuff you agree with or hate. So sometimes instead of an echo chamber you get a war chamber, which I'm not sure is better.

We think that people should choose what they read. Stepping back and thinking about what you want to subscribe to -- instead of doing one more scroll -- helps.

[naravara]

>So sometimes instead of an echo chamber you get a war chamber, which I'm not sure is better.

I think the "war chamber" basically reinforces the echo chamber. You never see the reasonable people within the camps you hate, you only ever see the most ridiculous, most absurd shit the internet has to offer that inhabits that camp.

I noticed this a lot during the whole GamerGate thing. It's like those people had just been seeing endless streams of tweets and Tumblr posts from verbally abusive (or more often, satirical and sarcastic) feminists and strung them together to create a narrative about being "under siege." Never mind that what they were seeing was not at all a representative sample of the group they're talking about, it's their idea of what the group looks like and there's no way to recalibrate them once they dig in.

[cjbest]

Exactly. This is an emergent consequence of 1) prioritizing "engagement" and 2) the mechanics of "retweet with comment"

This can happen on social media even if almost everybody would prefer that it didn't. The way to fix it is to change the rules :)