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by gambler 1590 days ago
> Reddit and Twitter are an information source for what people are talking about.

It's a source of information for what Reddit and Twitter owners want you to see. Both websites are heavily manipulated in a myriad of ways. (The simplest one is via massive amounts of accounts banned for wrongthink.) This is blatantly obvious if instead of passively absorbing news you deep-dive into a specific issue and then look up the discussions and trends, especially on Reddit. Sometimes discussions for major events just aren't there, which is nigh impossible organically on a website with tens of millions of users.
2 comments
jrussbowman 1590 days ago
Manipulated or not, I do agree it's an echo chamber. I added Twitter in attempt of breaking the echo chamber aspect but wasn't as successful as I hoped. I do occasionally look for other sources to add but finding similar sites that can match the volume of those two is difficult. Which makes it more difficult to figure out how to weigh other sites results to those two.

This discussion did make me poke around some more. I may consider using the free tier of Bing's api just to pull in trending topics.

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dicefordeath 1590 days ago
What are some examples of this extreme and blatantly obvious manipulation? Certainly it happens but you're making it sound like we live in the Truman Show.
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gambler 1589 days ago
Here is a simple one.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ontario/comments/se7t5p/i_saw_the_t...

https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/secvqz/i_stood_...

A subreddit with 480K users manages to upvote the topic 1.3K times with 78% up ratio. A subreddit with 1.7 million users upvotes a similarly themed topic (expressing a different opinion) only to get it 555 points with 91% up ratio. Ten times the difference in engagement.

This is the norm. Reddit bans the fuck out of people with opinions that don't align with the hivemind. You can search HN for "reddit banned" and see a limitless supply of stories. At one point they deleted two thousand subreddits in one go.

I'm not going into certain topics magically not appearing anywhere on Reddit, because it would require a significantly more detailed examples, but it's a thing as well. It is the Truman Show for public opinion.

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