Echo chamber usually means it merely reflects back what you emit -- that's a possibility, but personally I like inciteful or thought-provoking comments more than I like comments that agree with me, and seeing more of them is also possible: this is one of the reasons I hate that pg (and thus HN) promotes downvoting for disagreement, and basically censors (with near invisibility) dissenting voices.
My favourite system has been Slashdot because you could promote your view of (moderated, and meta-moderated) content voted to be insightful, say, whilst reducing viewing pure joke posts, and such. You could also boost/nerf particular voices.
Reddit is too much "cutesy animal" content, I wish I could filter all of that, it just doesn't amuse me.
Exactly, and this highlights what I've never understood about echo chamber arguments. You might genuinely like things that you learn from, things that change you. You might like a subject matter that encompasses a huge variety of types of content- for instance if you follow astronomy, and see an article about a new discovery, it seems like more is going on than a pre-existing belief being echoed back at you.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as echo chambers, but there's so much else going in when you engage with sources you select that doesn't have anything to do with whether a pre-existing belief is being echoed back to you.
A lot of people do want echo chambers, and a lot of social media is designed to exploit this.
People tend to consider content that appeals to and reinforces their biases and desires to be more interesting, of higher quality and more trustworthy than content that doesn't.
Even self-described "free thinkers" tend not to want their beliefs challenged or to be moved from their comfort zone too much.
I’m not sure your latter statement is true. I’m a “free thinker” (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) and run in those circles. Most of us have jobs, so we only have the time to digest articles that take less than an hour to read except in rare instances.
I’m very open to other ideas and I actively manipulate the mechanisms on sites like Facebook to prevent being put in an echo chamber. But I am difficult to convince using emotional arguments and I also don’t have time to read a 900 page dissertation on my lunch break. Long form journalism is amazing though, but unfortunately rare and often now corrupted by bias.
Most people in my circle are in the same boat. We are all welcoming of total mental shifts if warranted by the data. We’re happy to entertain an idea long enough to get through a lengthy article even if we’re not sure of it. But if you start with trying to gut wrench you’ve lost us.
Unfortunately the majority of people respond more strongly to pithy memes and emotional appeals, so that’s most of what I see both from those who putatively agree with me and those who don’t. It takes extraordinary effort to find good arguments about anything being written/presented by anyone.
I only have personal experience (and, admittedly, my own biases) to go by, but I suspect you're an outlier, and I'm referring to the norm, both within and outside the mainstream. I think the ways most people approach social media are the same either way, people want to be entertained and they want to feel emotionally validated.
I don't know if a personal echo chamber is such a bad thing in a pseudo-anonymous internet community. Look at what happened to 4chan and voat, where a bunch a racists decided to take over those sites and it was relatively easy for them to do so. They destroyed whatever community was there before their takeover and now both of those sites are known as racist sites. Compare that to hubski, which has a built-in echo chamber mechanism (I think you when block someone, they can't respond to you), and it's much harder for the site to be taken over by an outside group. The community just blocks the outside group and the outside group just ends up talking to each other in their echo chamber.
Communities become echo chambers when a tiny minority of people who have too much time on their hands monopolize discussions. I'd even argue that this is the primary mechanism of echo chamber creation. Other mechanisms like the one OP mentioned aren't that significant a contributor in creating echo chambers.
I think the percentage of the population that desire genuine and thought-provoking discussions may be smaller than those who simply want validation and being part of a like-minded group.
We are going to live in echo chambers no matter what. I'd rather live in my own echo chamber than the one that Facebook or the DNC or RNC or Fox News or some Washington think tank has built for me.
By doing on your own research on issues you care about. If you have a strong opinion on something and you're only source of information is your own echo chanmber then you're just intellectually lazy.
If you don't want to put in the time then fine, but maybe you shouldn't hold a strong opinion one way or the other. Your own echo chamber is likely no better than any other.
I don't think that term means what you think it means.
I mean real research, e.g., quanifiable fact, scientific research. This is not your opinion, it's data, and data tells us things we didn't know before.
Now that's a perspective I haven't thought of before.
They could make it so that the more time you spend on Reddit, the less control you get over your feed. I know it's a complete non-starter for business reasons, but it's an interesting thing to think about.
Depending on how it's done. Hubski is pretty similar to Reddit, with a 'follow' mechanic to see content liked by certain people. It can easily be an echo chamber if you want that, but if you follow a good scattering of different people then it comes out much more varied than Reddit's hivemind outcomes.
There's nothing wrong with that, considering everybody else is strenuously trying to pull you into theirs. Upvote/downvote brigades abound as well as the institutionalization of power-users.
We already build our own echo chambers with personalized multi-reddits (which I use to great effect, since the defaults are trash-tier) as well as the main sub-reddit subscription list. I quite like this idea.
Groups that try to pull you into their echo chamber almost always have dubious or selfish intentions, ranging from blatant advertising to astroturfing. This puts power back into the hands of users.
My favourite system has been Slashdot because you could promote your view of (moderated, and meta-moderated) content voted to be insightful, say, whilst reducing viewing pure joke posts, and such. You could also boost/nerf particular voices.
Reddit is too much "cutesy animal" content, I wish I could filter all of that, it just doesn't amuse me.