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 🤷
Side effect of growth. The style of writing becomes more casual and simpler as the user base grows.
There’s a particular style I hate.
It’s most popular among techie/engineering heavy writers.
They’re usually on substacks or self-hosted blogs.
It’s just one or two sentences separated by line breaks. It’s like just stream of consciousness.
Just no organization or structure to the thoughts either. Just a jumble of half considered thoughts.
If there’s proofreading at all it’s just for typos.
Also replete with LLM speak.
It drives me up a fucking wall.
I am probably guilty of this sometimes.
Where there's a focus on the technical points and not the story in the text. The beats moving from one point to the next, disjointed and without good flow and structure.
I try my best to counter this by remembering that this is not the Orange Alien Site and most people here actually do put effort in their commentary instead of vapid one-offs. I go as far to assume that this place assumes good will of its users and, more often than not, I feel like I get way more higher quality answers than I ever will on the Orange Alien Site. I mean, some time ago, I asked for a really niche map thing and one person went out of their way to program something specifically for this issue I've been having. I cloned the source code in case of internet collapse, I'd still be able to do what I do. I ain't finding none of that good will on the Orange Alien Site. I feel like I'm disparately giving the site way too much credit by using proper nouns. It's just the orange alien site to me now.
Yeah. That works way better.
Just poking my head in -- but if you see a comment that seems like a joke or noise, it can help to label 'em as such. It hints the UI to load the messages collapsed, which can keep them from floating to the top and attracting as much attention at least.
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?
Speaking as a man dead smack in the middle of what they call Gen X .... I'm not going to tell you to go fuck yourself.
I really didn't. I said I wouldn't. I haven't.
A friend of mine, who is also Gen X, called us the "bridge generation". It's a great term. It means I have dialed a rotary phone and also used one to connect a 14.4 modem to the internet we had.
Oh, he said that on usenet. Do you know what that is?
Anyway you're talking about boomers and Gen X being the reason for mass mail. As if we ever wanted this crap.
What about younger generations building data centers to host videos of some idiot doing something stupid for views?
The content of those mass mailings is worthless. But nobody asked for it. Marketing people decided it was potentially a way to make money and they did it.
Same for tiktok and all the other crap. The content is equally worthless, but how much water/energy will they use to host the stupid videos?
Is it better or worse or just the same and not really anyone's fault?
Except for the ones doing it. The ones who don't care about the planet or our resources or anything aside from their short term profit.
Blame boomers if you like, blame Gen X. We'll never care.
Or blame the species and get things done. If you can. I doubt we’ll ever change.
Sorry, I was not trying to say boomers and genxers should be held responsible for it. Rampant unregulated capitalism is responsible.
I'm just saying I wonder if it will go away on its own if it stops working on later generations.
Bulk mailing? Sure, it will go away the moment it stops showing a return. I don't think younger generations will be less susceptible to bulk mailing though! You may think they will be but .... What's your sample? The stupid, impressionable and easily manipulated are normal better technology doesn't make them go away.
Now they can be reached through their phones and tablets and computers, true. They can still be reached by bulk mailings. They are going to open the mailbox eventually and look at the stuff in there if only to throw it away. A percentage of those mailings will work. They go away when the percent is no longer cost effective, not before. Who knows when that will be.
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?
The worst is during election season. The amount of mailers is ridiculous. Like who are these people who are simply voting on an issue or candidate based on a random piece of mail? Don't answer that; I know the depressing answer. Sigh.
I get that these also function as a reminder that an election is coming up or underway. But I don't need five mailers a day, one from each candidate, plus the YES and NO ones for ballot issues. For the whole month, and then some, preceding an election.
It's incredibly wasteful. I send it straight to recycling/trash.
I live in VA, and during the previous election where we were voting on mid-term redistricting (which passed, but the the state supreme court voided due to procedural issues. sigh), there were mailers that featured Obama on them.
On mailers for both the Yes and No campaigns mailers. Obama campaigned on Yes for redistricting.
These people just straight up lie and deceive these days. Regardless, given that it was all for nothing, incredible waste of money, time, and paper.
I mean, it's not the worst it could be. The paper could have been made from poison ivy. [1]
1 Credit for this idea goes to a comic (I can't recall which) where the box of a product is made from poison ivy as a chef's kiss on the otherwise terrible customer service.
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
I see this a lot. What proof is there? There's no way of knowing because the major platforms do not provide information publicly. I think it's true to some extent, but wouldn't be surprised if it's overstated.
I started reading French-language subreddits to improve my french not long ago, and recently came across the exact same comment in two different posts; it was unique enough to stick in my memory.
I knew bots are ubiquitous, but I was honestly surprised to see it in a non-English language, in smaller regional/niche subs. I guess I was naive and thought it was moreso a problem in the bigger, main subs. It's really extra-soured me from reddit.
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.
There really is a difference in people when we start with one reality and then grow to see the untruth of the lies we are told later. This is kind of like kids growing up, they start out innocent, then have very harsh black and white morality about things they have experienced or been told about by others, then as people age I see the nuance comes as they and the people around them live their life and experience all the exceptions to the hard and fast rules.
People really under estimate the power in controlling the narrative and spigot of information into people not getting direct counter examples to their narrative. It is why you see so much effort go into quiet people that become loud exceptions to the narrative of those in power. I think deep down people are all good in one way or another, however, there seems many paths to turn us all into violent animals that just keeps getting activated over and over through the generations. We can't turn off that switch and we can't stop people who desire power from throwing that switch either.
I actually may be one of the few people who do understand this, because I live in one of the few countries that are physically bigger than the US lol.
I do understand that there is a relatively remote population of American citizens that live in their towns/villages with not a care in the world (exaggerating to prove a point), but don't the vast majority of Americans live on the East or West coast?
Ah, lol. Well you may well understand then.
While that is very broadly true, there is enough space spread out between them and many major metropolitan areas (Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas/Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, etc) that there's still a very large number of people even accounting for the lower population density once you add them all together. It's still fewer people depending on how much you stretch the definition of "coast", but still a force to be reckoned with, doubly so once you factor in gerrymandering, as our last election just showed.
But in terms of the "first group vs. the second group", it's more about distance from each other and urban vs. rural, rather than being on a coast or not--even in a coastal state like California or Oregon or Washington or Florida, you can be several hundreds of miles from any major city. For one example: Crescent City, CA is directly on the Pacific Ocean but is a 7-hour drive in any direction to get to the nearest major population center such as Portland, OR or San Francisco. And all of that space between SF and Portland is full of the "first group" from my comment and tend to skew conservative. A very large physical chunk of the geography of California is populated by people who don't typically encounter people from the second group, the kind of people who are trying to raise the alarm to the first group but it falls on deaf ears because they're like, "what? Yeah gas is pretty high right now but I haven't seen any of this stuff you're talking about except for you people constantly yelling about it on television and the Internet".
I know all of this is oversimplifying reality a bit but that's my basic take on it.
Even in coastal states, there are extremely rural areas. I grew up in a small town in one of the smallest coastal states in the country, but with pretty easy access to major cities, and about an hour or so from the ocean. There were kids in my neighborhood who never left the county we were in before going to college, and who had never been to a beach.
I was fortunate that my parents prioritized travel over other things and so I was able to go to a lot of different states, in addition to a trip to Europe as a kid – but that is not at all the norm for a blue collar family in rural America.
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.
Wait, was there a different reason gas has been so expensive these last few months?
No there wasn't a different reason and oil prices did skyrocket to 160 a barrel.
It was the emptying of oil reserves everywhere that stemmed the tide, as well as a slew of sanctions relief on Russian oil. It also helps that most Hormuzi oil goes to SEA so while global oil decline still caused upward price pressure, much less if the oil was intended to go to other countries not China.
Don't be mistaken by Western price stability. A lot of countries in SEA were rationing oil by implementing rules that limited petrol use, like fuel rations, workdays based on last name, etcetera.
Right. Some kind of boring, but only compared to the shocks in between.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thanks; and you're essentially right for my case as well. There's niche communities (be it for my city, or PC sales, etc.) that are just not replicated else where, and that's primarily what I check Reddit for at this point.
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.
It's really coming down to having to know the reviewer. Youtube is turning to my go to for things, I can't know all creators but if I have some experience with a product style I can see if their opinion's on things I know match mine, then factor in if they are being paid to boost a product, and can go from there. I was looking for office chairs and I found a site that does refurbished resales, but they had tier lists for every office chair, and I have sat in a bunch that I know, so looking how they ranked stuff I knew and then agreed, let me trust their reviews on other things, and sure enough I was happy with what I ended up getting.
If I don't know the product I'll watch some of their content just have to assume they show off enough of the thing I can make a guess based on looking with my own eyes at it, and then trying out a few different reviews. Generally the bigger creators that just do reviews as a thing with a large sub count tend to be ok enough they can be reasonably impartial, so cross referencing a few and usually I end up somewhere i'm alright.
Generally even if i have been shilled too I end up in a better place than back in the day before all of this content where I'd have to walk in, let the sales person talk to me about features and randomly pick a thing.
Marketing agencies disguise themselves as Redditors to make lowkey posts about the products they sell, to encourage users in those "Would I like XYZ?" posts to buy the products. It's highly sophisticated, and most of the time sounds relatable enough to not come across like an ad, but that's definitely what it is.
So in essence, you can't even trust that you're getting an honest product review of something by Reddit commenters anymore. I'm sure it was easier back then, but these days, it's really hard to tell when one of those "redditors" is just a marketing agency in a mask.
Yes, hence the caveat that you have to read "several hundred" reddit comments to get a vague impression of an honest opinion. If you have any leads on where I can go to get commentary on a wide range of goods and services with a lower ratio of astroturfing, I'd love to hear it.
I definitely do not have any advice on that front, but if you’re an app developer, I can see this being a massive game changer.
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.
Over the years the only highly upvoted comments I have are always very sharp 'redditorisms' that make a strong point. They might be reddit points that are made that I do genially believe enough in to make a post with them.
Personally I grew up with a hugely negative and judgmental POV on everything around me, so part of my growing up was to not trust my initial interpretation of well, anything, so I often try to immediately argue against my first thoughts in my head to help find a way to a truth faster. If I ever post in this style with, "well I see XYZ can be true, but some times in these cases like this not, it's a really hard call to make because you need more details before you can really find out..." it's always sitting at score 1. But if you are "These people have been fucking over everyone since the 90s, first when they released X and forgot to include Y, then in the 2000's , X all over again, 2010, same thing, and now here we are in 2026 and look, X, once more, don't fall for it people!" 50+ upvotes or more.
I honestly think the whole culture around redditors is really just 'people', people respond to confident and easy to understand truths, most don't like nuance, most they don't like not being told who is good and who is bad. Movies with clear bad guys do better to general audiences. Endings are controversial bad if they don't tell us who is right or wrong. Reality tv makes sure extreme idiots with bad views have a loud voice so you have an obvious villain rather than true nuance.
I won't say I'm not immune, I like thinks simple too, unfortunately the world isn't simple, and a lot of people don't want to hear that it's not, and because of that we arrive at our social media problems of today.
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.
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.
I found this very true when my friend group came online. This was just before myspace took off, but I was running a blog style website for my friends IRL where they could log in and post stuff. We mostly used it for planning to hanging out in person as we had been for a few years without incident. However soon people started posting articles and opinions, and oh boy, fights started happening. We never talked about politics or any of these topics, and turns out the gelled group that would all joke, hug each other, goof around, call each other great friends, had some strong difference of opinions that came out as soon as we started writing to one another.
In the end everyone moved on to myspace then facebook and I took my website down, but it really was incredibly fascinating to see the effects of social media in real time from its birth in an established friend group.
In theory, I would strongly agree with you. Personally, I'm not a fan of political discourse in person or on-line because most of the time, it's a waste of time and most people don't have the humility or grace to admit they're wrong or that their mind has been changed, so what was the point of stirring everyone's emotions and potentially losing a relationship out of it?
On the other hand, I think politics are almost engrained in everything you do. From the food you purchase, to the family you interact with, to where you want to travel, to the medicine you consume etc. And most likely, you want to interact with people who have a large degree of overlap with your own political world views as well. I know for sure I have lessened communications with family members based on their own beliefs (such as an immediate family member believing vaccines are a scam).
Now, I'm not saying that these things will change your day to day life, I'm just saying that a lot of choices people tend to make are political to some extent, as minor as they are.
It's funny because I recently had a discussion in another Tildes thread because I said "You can't spend money without making a political statement" and now I seem to contradict myself.
But not really. I agree with you. Many of the things we do have some political aspect to them. But we don't do them for political reasons. If I laugh when my boss makes racist jokes, I might feel like throwing up but laugh anyway because he always supported me when nobody else would, and because I have a kid and I need that job.
So yeah, whether I laugh or speak up, my reaction is always political. But my reasons are probably apolitical because 0% of my life is about reorganizing society. It's about paying bills, getting food on the table and, every once in a while, if I have some money and energy left over, I will probably spend it on something that makes me happy so I don't fall apart.
Reddit, Facebook, Instagram and most social media sites are an echo chamber, because that's how they make money. They make money off how much outrage people are experiencing. They make money off of their users being racist, starting fights in the comments section, and drawing people in to defend their positions or sling mud over and over and over again. They make money every single time that someone engages with the smut, overblown and outright hostile comments section.
Once I realized this, things started falling into place a bit. Of course the top rated comment on an Instagram post of black people enjoying themselves is racist. Despite the fact that it's from a profile with 0 followers, 0 posts and like 3 "friends", Instagram purposely tells me, and others, that this comment is important, boosts it to the top with like 30 likes total, and encourages everyone to dogpile in on how the person is a piece of shit. Zuckerberg is making money the entire time doing this.
Zuckerberg loves more than anything when bad thing in the world happens, because they know users will check-in, start arguing with each other, and every argument, every refresh... it's all another opportunity for these companies to make large dollar bills off of us.
With that being said, if I relied on the internet alone, specifically Reddit, and not my real life experiences, I would think that every plane that ever takes off every single day has an 80% chance of crashing, I would think that most people in the world HATE pugs, and I would think everyone is on the verge of divorce basically forever. I would think that there is no gray area in the world, and that everything is strictly good, or strictly bad. I would think everyone knows what a "Sweet summer child is", or that every man who takes their child to a playground is an assumed predator by the public at large. I would think my pets were days away from being dead with how many people post about their dead pets every day.
Look no further than how Jon Fetterman was viewed, vs how he is viewed now. I recall everyone on Reddit forcing this guy into my feed talking about how "great" he was, and posting pics of "his first day in office", and how great it was that he wore basketball shorts to meetings. Now, Jon Fetterman, according to Reddit, is the most turncoat Democrat that's ever lived. Despite the fact that he's practically the same guy with the same policies... It's just Reddit is fucking stupid. Here's a good video that helped me come to this conclusion https://youtu.be/28M_zkoAGQM?si=4R9UuKKf4zOxSxUk .
Anyways, all things considered, relying on Reddit or the internet rather than your own experiences is a quick way to fall into a rabbit hole. I know, I've been there myself and honestly, I have not gotten my own vision back from having it warped by Redditors opinions, thoughts and aggressions throughout the years. I'm still untangling my actual views with the ones Redditors insist you have, and it's a work in progress but I'm getting better. I'm actually able to enjoy life and people when I intentionally refuse to accept anything Redditors have to say, and at this point, I just assume they're all bots unless proven otherwise. And good luck with proving that anymore.
Overall, I feel you, but yes, Reddit is an echo chamber. Rely on your experiences in life to dictate how you perceive things.
I feel every topic gets extreme in places like Reddit. “Oh, so you like open source? So you must compile your weird Linux distro and only use FOSS ever or you'll be a fraud.” Something like this. Which isn't a healthy way to enjoy a hobby, study something or catch up with the news.
I mostly abandoned these places and I feel better for it.