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
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.
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
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.
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?
I'd be surprised if it had ever come up, but that seems a reasonable course of action if so.
I’ve noticed in the past year (and I’m guilty of this) shorter and less thoughtful answers creeping into tildes. I continually vote for conversational answers and topics though 🤷
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 wonder how much energy is wasted through processes like this. Like, is the amount of electricity used in a day for this kind of thing comparable to the amount needed to power a home, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country? My guess is it's somewhere between a city and a state worth of energy lost to the bots.
I wonder if it's overall worse than all of the awful junk mail I get in physical mail. I swear I get pounds and pounds of junk mail every week that is printed on high quality plasticy paper with fancy ink and everything. It must cause so much pollution for something literally no one wants.
This caused me to be curious about the Post Office's revenue for junk mail related to other things. The data in this article indicates that since 2000, the proportion of revenue from marketing mail has fallen from a quarter to a fifth, while it remained close to 50% of the volume of items.
This suggests that the PO could put a stop to it and probably be more profitable, but I bet the regulatory reform needed to make that happen would be difficult to achieve.
Honestly, I wonder what happens when the boomers and maybe genXers finally die off. Will mass market mailing continue to be effective?
It's so frustrating to see all the waste and pollution dedicated to something that is also less than useless. They're an annoyance at best, and predatory scams at worst. Why do they have to kill a tree on top of that?
What country do you live in? There's often some hidden way to opt out of all junk mail
US, I signed up for the do not mail registery, but I still get tons of mail for "member of household" or something similar. Plus tons of junk mail for the previous tenant even though they haven't lived here for 5 years.
I'm sure I get less than I would, but I still get way too much
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.
Down to 2% from 27%. I feel that's an important addition. Going cold turkey on oil is difficult in this day and age. Going down to near 0 levels over time is significant.
Right. Some kind of boring, but only compared to the shocks in between.
I'm of the personal opinion that it's a "yes but also no" kind of thing.
For people like you that are outside of the US, one of the things that tends to get lost in the conversation literally just how physically big the US actually is. It's entirely possible to live in the middle of nowhere and not have these things affect you very much beyond possibly the cost of gas and groceries. It's all stuff you simply don't see very often in your own personal life, even if you traveled 500 miles in any direction from your home. Seriously. So all of it can seem quite a bit alarmist if you're in that kind of situation: you don't know any trans people, probably very few gay people, don't interact much with the immigrant population, etc etc. You might grumble about the recent price of fuel or bananas but you also just sort of assume that it's all temporary and will be switched out with the next administration and just carry on going to your job and spending time with your family. Because, for a large chunk of the US, atomized as we are, that's the way it's been our entire lives. Stuff gets better, stuff gets worse, the cycle goes round and round but your own life is more or less the same on balance.
On the other hand, for people like me who live in a major metropolitan area, this stuff is all much more immediate. I know a lot of trans people, gay people, disabled people, minorities, or any combination of the above in my personal life for whom the policies of the current administration are disastrous. I know people that have been harassed by ICE or the police. I know people who can't get the critical health care that they need that they used to be able to get just 2 years ago, whether it's because they simply can no longer afford it, or it's been outlawed entirely. I live in one of the most ethnically diverse ZIP codes in the country, so when ICE shows up, we come out to protest not just because it's a principle but because families are being attacked, split up, and arrested right in front of you. So are the protesters.
For a lot of people in my immediate orbit, it's an actual crisis, not just something you see in a 2 minute package on the evening local news. For us, it's not just watching two sports teams spar it out from a distance, it's stuff that we deal with every day. It's on our doorstep.
The distance between the first group and the second is pretty vast, literally. People in the first group could easily be 1500 miles from anyone in the second group and never interact. As a result, the first group sees a bunch of echo chambers in the news and online, and I can't even judge them for that (though I admit I do, a little). The second group needs the awareness and solidarity and channels to organize. If that makes sense.
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.
Well there's levels to this, you know? The huge and most-trafficked subs, especially r/all, are going to be massive landfills of bot posts, beaten to death memes, circlejerks, and very rarely something actually new and relevant. However, niche subs are still some of the best sources of up-to-date news and communities that are actually knowledgeable or passionate about a particular thing while still having better regulation than, say, a discord server. In that sense you can definitely put yourself in an echo chamber or three, but at least it's ones of your choosing and hopefully on less serious things like hobbies rather than politics.
Where do you go to get something resembling an honest product review of some random thing you need to acquire? I hate reddit, but I'll be damned if I can figure out a better way to assemble some semblance of an honest impression of most products aside from reading several hundred reddit comments and trying to manually filter out any biases I can detect.
I'm not sure such a place exists anymore, and at this point I don't think reading 50 reddit threads on the subject is any better than cross-referencing reviews from multiple storefronts. I don't think either method will give you a very good answer.
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.
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.
I think it all comes down to the fact that 99% of one's life is not political. You go to work, you eat, you socialize, you take care of your home and your loved ones, and that's it for the vast majority, even for those with strong political opinions. It doesn't matter if you live in the USA or in North Korea. Is it a lot harder for North Koreans to have a good day and maneuver around political oppressors than in Finland? You bet it is. But that doesn't mean it's obvious if you visit.
On the internet, many people brandish their views like a sword, but unless you're a politician or an influencer, you don't do that at all in everyday life. You don't know if the cashier you just bought a snack from wants to bring back slavery, because even people like that are usually civilized and know how to behave to get through their day with a minimum amount of fuss. That doesn't mean there are no societal issues, not at all. But civilization means societies can still function when they are breaking apart.
A huge part of reddit's hive mind I think comes from its downvote function. If you have a genuine, respectful perspective that cuts against the grain, you'll get downvoted into oblivion. Nobody wants that to happen, so everything converges to the median opinion which itself becomes a more extreme version of itself with groupthink. With reddit becoming "mainstream" (adding in a lot of design elements to not make it "boring"), it also attracts a different crowd and aims to activate your lizard brain more, so to speak, than it used to.
Also, reddit's been psyop'd and guerrilla marketed to hell at this point and I have a hard time taking anything that reddit says as representing anything real.
Unpopular opinion: We're not immune to the "downvote problem" on tildes. Only that, instead of "downvoting someone to oblivion", it's "do not upvote this person at all, and instead massively upvote whoever is replying to them".
Occasionally you also see people abusing the "noise" tag to mark things they personally don't like, but that's a different story
Don't forget "mark the reply exemplary, regardless of the actual quality"!
But downvoted comments on Reddit are automatically hidden after a while, effectively eliminating them from the conversation. People only upvoting one side of the coversation doesn't do that.
True, that one requires abusing the noise tag. It's more like "getting ratioed" on twitter in that regard.
It's easy to identify anyone abusing the noise tag, so I assume it won't be a problem aside from a few one off cases.
Depends. I don't disagree per se, but over the last year or so, I've seen several "below the radar" cases of noise label abuse and misapplication.
I don't doubt that the reason behind many of those was somewhat benign (incorrect understanding of the "noise" tag) rather than malicious, but it's still something I used to notice often back when I was very heavily browsing this website.