How much of an echo chamber is Reddit/the internet, really?
This post is mostly going to be incoherent rambling, but I hope this does make some sense and gains engagement from my other fellow Tildes users on here.
I, like many others, participated in the Reddit exodus to a degree after the API changes some years ago. I've been using tildes semi-regularly ever since, but I still frequent Reddit just as much as I used to (however, being much less active in terms of commenting/posting) simply due to the sheer size of the user base.
Of course, since January 20th 2025 (the beginning of Trumps second term), the world has definitely seemed to be in an increasingly state of turmoil ever since. De Minimis exception rules, non-stop changes on tariffs to different countries, the war in Iran, capturing the Venezuelan president (for better or for worse), trying to unite the Western hemisphere under the American flag, unveiling of the Epstein files, Isreal still attempting to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and countless other disputes that have been ongoing such as Russia v. Ukraine, China v. Taiwan, etc.
None of this is relatively good news, nor am I really a fan of any of these actions above, save for perhaps capturing Maduro.
Whenever I scroll through r/worldnews or r/news, it just seems that present day society is literally going on the brink of collapse. I'm just wondering, am I in the wrong to think that most people are living their lives the way they always have, and just hope for the best and they stay relatively unaffected?
I am someone who travels to the US semi-regularly, and if I were to take the word of the average redditor on there, I would safely assume that I am about to be shot on sight by ICE or be captured and waterboarded (slight exaggeration, I hope). And yet when I arrive, people are living their life the way they always have. Perhaps there is a tad more mistrust between citizens, and perhaps a bit more individuals feel more free to be openly racist (these are all assumptions, not stating them as fact), but everything is mostly just functioning the way it always has.
My question is, should I be more on the side that there is going to be significant political and economic reform in the world, or will things play out the way they always have for the 21st century, where everything gets, very slowly, shittier by the day, but things remain decent enough to quell the suggestion of a civil war?
Thanks for reading anyone, and appreciate any thoughts on the subject.
P.S I have no idea how to tag this, so thanks in advance to whoever does end up tagging this post.
The echo chamber aspect is, I think, directly correlated with the dead internet theory. Nearly everything is bot posts and psyops
Definitely can be true, ironically I almost want to say this comment is as well, seeing as you have no posting history other than on this one post lol
As an aside, I know cfabbro recently put up another Tildes invite thread on the r/tildes. I'm sure that's gotten us some new people lately...and bots!
What’s the stance on bots? Report and let Deimos figure it out?
Wait this is so funny haha its literally a brand new account from today. I hope its not a bot, that'd just be too spooky.
Wasn’t there a recent study that said a majority of posts/comments are now non-human? And we reached that faster than most people expected.
I'm not sure if that's a relevant statistic? For example, most email is spam, but spam filters are pretty good at dealing with it, so that doesn't really affect how people interact with email.
A more relevant question is, how many of the posts that you see are bots? And that's going to depend on where you look.
Yeah, by pure volume I'm sure most content on the internet is bots. But I imagine a large majority of it is stuff like endless chains of recursive comments on some facebook/twitter post that no human ever actually looks at.
The important metric to go by (which I'm not sure is even really measurable) is how many human impressions bot comments/posts are getting.
I recently saw posts from a subreddit called "FinanceUnfiltered" or something like it, which was a completely dead sub for years until a bunch of brand new accounts that were posting to Indian subs exclusively for 2 weeks in Hindi and then all of a sudden were posting to the finance sub with generic anti-trump memes (completely and utterly unrelated to finance) getting 30-40k upvotes in an otherwise completely dead sub.
All the comments were from other obvious bot/manipulated accounts except for the odd "what does this have to do with finance" from confused people.
Not even the most obvious cases of astroturfing/botting I've seen on reddit, but just the most recent.
Pretty highly a circlejerk, but I wouldn't even call it a Reddit problem, really. There's just a natural bias towards the negative. Part of it is that the negative is more provocative. Part of it is a natural social desire to avoid "punching down".
If you were with your mates, and one of them was unemployed, and complaining about the job market, but you knew that the job market was actually fantastic, you're not going to tell them "actually the job market is about as good as it's ever going to get, so if you can't get a job now oh boy just wait till it inevitably wanes".
There should be a razor that things will always go in the way you think most boring.
There's not going to be a civil war, or major reform, or anything particularly exciting.
Until there is.
I don't know the limits, and it certainly doesn't seem to actually be headed toward one now, but things may eventually trend toward the boring, but that's with huge spikes in the middle. Like, imagine telling this to someone in Ukraine, the Levant, Sudan, or Myanmar.
It’s a razor, in the end, it’s not always true. Occam’s razor can be wrong as well, like the guy who faked his own homocide with a balloon https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/07/16/florida-man-faked-his-murder-using-gun-and-weather-balloon/787566002/
But the point is to act as a counterbalance against the human bias for the exceptional. Even with the Ukraine war, I’m sure most people at the time thought it would either result in Russia conquering Ukraine and eyeing Poland, or Ukraine valiantly pushing Russia out. But instead, it’s been 5 years of quagmire. Europe is still buying Russian oil, just less of it.
When America started bombing Iran, did a revolution occur that overthrew the regime? Nope. Did the closure of the strait cause gas in US to skyrocket? Nope. Was this the final straw that caused people to revolt against Trump? Nope.
Since every group is founded on some kind of implicit understanding of reality, "Echo chambers" predate the internet. Reddit is perhaps one of the most vivid and abundant collections of echo chambers one can easily access today.
The sense of urgency in some groups is a consequence of their shared belief that they are in immediate danger. Whether that belief is justified may or may not be confirmed by subsequent events.
If your day-to-day experiences do not confirm those fears, it is important to understand that violent upheavals are not always predictable or gradual. So even if your impression of daily life contradicts these concerns, it is still possible that their fears are warranted.
This seems to be a problem. So you left and then immediately went back? What kind of message does that send?
As far as I'm concerned reddit is an utter cesspool and I wouldn't trust anything I read there.
I'm not sure; you tell me what kind of message does that send?
That goes for pretty much all social media, and reddit is still one of the lesser offenders.
You're not alone. There are still many redditors here. I did the exact same thing you did. Left during the APIpocalypse and then ended up going back to reddit "fulltime" like 4-5mos later.
Though I think they're saying that we're rewarding enshittification. We stood our ground to send a message to the admins, but by going back, we essentially ended up saying that it's OK for reddit inc to make the platform objectively worse.
But the reality is that there are still parts of reddit that do have use to me. Whether it be simple memes or actual good information. I'm sure the same is true for you. Tildes doesn't offer everything and isn't trying to (nor should tildes want to). It is what it is.
No. Most people want to be left the fuck alone. The "sky is falling" rhetoric is hyperbolic and tends to be, on its face, to try to drum up support, and perhaps more insidiously, to get people to tune out (intentionally or not).
If you just keep track of claims over the period of a year, let alone a year of something like either Trump admin, then number of outright wrong predictions you see stated with absolute confidence is tremendous.
The internet has made it easier for people to be wiki experts on something and try to extrapolate on things they don't understand or don't have first hand knowledge of, and it feeds into itself when a source is "this one dude on twitter".
If you did not have the internet/tv, you would almost certainly not notice a difference in quality of life in the US EXCEPT for cost of living. It's why those kinds of issues, which can't be ignored, are treated differently by politicians than social issues, which mostly can. As horrible as everything ICE has been doing is, the odds you've even witnessed it first hand let alone been affected by it directly are obscenely small, even if you're the kind of person who's life they're looking to ruin.
However literally every person in the country is paying more for gas and groceries.
So, are they likely to risk their lives, and the lives of their families, burning down the entire country over it? I don't think there's any evidence of that yet. It could happen. Things could get worse. Hell since the cold war we've always been one really bad day between world leaders away from nuclear war (and even then how much ability they have to kill us all is questionable when you consider what instances of almost nuclear launch we know about).
But will things get worse? Eh, who knows? And to what level? There's still places on this planet where atrocities occur on a daily basis. Roe v Wade being overturned signals a lot of bad things, but there's still options compared countries where the idea of an abortion will get you killed violently.
The entire framework of the US government is to hopefully weather bad actors and give the populace time to react. We're really fucking bad it, but we've got the chance.
And this is "US/West" centric. We've had a "good run" since around the industrial revolution, but just looking at raw numbers most of the world lives between Jakarta and New Dehli (off the top of my head...probably wrong cities to use for this). Tech moves, times change, it may very well be a Eastern dominated millennium and who knows if that's good or bad from a social/moral standpoint.
Either way, MAJOR movements are pretty rare, and often have severe buildup. Perhaps we'll see it, but it's pretty safe to bet on people wanting to just wake up, do their thing, and go home without feeling like shit. It takes a lot for them to suddenly decide violence and death is the better option, and often it has to be forced to their doorstep first.
Lets put the short part first. There are a lot of world events right now that are drastically shifting the global political landscape. There is a cost on the average person for all this change. Is it unbearable or guaranteed to increase? I do not think this is a sure thing.
I read an interesting summary of how media can be used to sway a population. I don't remember were I got it from, but it makes sense to me and I try to keep it in mind. If you want people to vote a certain way you need to channel their emotions, not their rational minds. Emotions are more easy to manipulate. When the person you don't want is in power you flood the media channels with negativity. Everything is terrible, there is no future, your world is crumbling. This puts people into a constant state of anxiety. Then when you can get the side you want into power you stop the negativity. You let the pressure off and finally allow people to breath again. People will be shaped by this. They don't want to live a life of constant oppressive negativity so they will try to get back to the state where the pressure is off.
I think it is safe to assume at this point that there are very few "redditors" on reddit. (at least percentage wise) As you have said, although you consume you don't interact much. I feel that it would be naive to assume that such a large stage with so many eyes on it would not attract people who want to shape the narrative.
I could try to give you my takes on what is happening, but I do not have first hand knowledge either. I just try to looks at facts, not the stories. Read the news. Mostly Listen to the part where they say "this is what happened", but completely tune out the part where they say "this is what that means". Are countries doing terrible things to each other? Absolutely. And if your country does something you disagree with I would encourage you to make your displeasure known to your government (provided this is reasonably safe).