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(my karma will likely not survive this) the title should probably read "Mastadon makes the Internet feel like an safe echo chamber again." I get that it's nice

(my karma will likely not survive this) the title should probably read "Mastadon makes the Internet feel like an safe echo chamber again." I get that it's nice to escape the things you don't like to see or read, but the article drops hints throughout to let us know that's what the author is actually discussing. I get it, but the internet has never been devoid of things you don't want to see, and walling one's self off is no better an idea than only socializing with people who view the world exactly the same as yourself.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago
I think people need safe echo chambers, even if their views are controversial; if you don't have a closer group of people to share your views with (and/or who share your viewpoints), you'll end up either just not participating at all (because someone will have problems with what you're saying), being a controversial person (and getting a lot of shit and/or even your account removed), or a boring or personality-less person with no personal views. I mean all of those work, but neither of those feel like "just be yourself". It's probably in line with the thing about id, ego, and super-ego; you need spaces to align your id / ego, not just via the super-ego. if I'm using those phrases correctly. Probably not.
- baq 9y ago
  i think the problem is people aren't wired correctly for this option, which wasn't available in a high-bandwidth edition even 20 years ago, to be safe for societies in the long run. the dopamine-driven positive feedback loop that happens in such echo chambers cause a runaway reaction of radicalizing the opinion of the whole bubble to the point where it's a religious issue when confronted about it. you almost admit it yourself and correctly diagnose that HN is also like that. no idea about that psychology stuff. i heard those words before :)
  - epicide 9y ago
    Echo chambers obviously happen even on sites with larger userbases (follower groups on Twitter, particular subreddits, etc.). I don't know if having walls built into the system helps or hurts. Or does nothing at all. Ultimately, I don't think it matters since people are going to organize into some form of group no matter what.
- enkiv2 9y ago
  Yeah. Picking a community is about deciding which echo chamber feels like home. Like, on HN, if I talk about certain things I get downvoted to hell. So I talk about them elsewhere. Every community has its own biases, and people have different personas they apply to each community. The fediverse is not a community. It's an ecosystem of loosely-interlinked communities, in about three or four layers: you've got the whole fediverse, the people on your instance, the people you follow, and the people you interact with. (On most instance software you also have topics, though not on Mastodon. There are hashtags too but they aren't used all that much and rarely does a community form around one, though they're useful for discovery.) You've got more potential points of segmentation than on Twitter, and more levels of potential control over what you see. (Add the possibility of having an account on several different instances and keeping to local rules and topics for those instances, and you have even greater control over how you present yourself and how your discussion goes.)
- Roodgorf 9y ago
  I think it's okay to have some amount of an echo chamber, they happen more or less naturally just because of who you select to be in your personal sphere of influence, but I think I disagree with the way you describe it. I don't think people need to exist in an echo chamber so they can "be themselves" without social consequence, I think that's actually the biggest problem with echo chambers and why people argue that they should be avoided. Rather, what we need is a higher standard of discourse outside of those echo chambers. It is possible to respectfully disagree with someone without shouting them down/trolling/removing them from the conversation, and from the other side, without reaching a point of disruption that someone might consider that a good resolution. The failure happens at both sides of the conversation, and interacting outside of echo chambers seems to me the only way to gain experience in interacting civilly.
- jerf 9y ago
  I think even calling it an "echo chamber" is a bit harsh. I have a home in the real world. When I am in it, I do not particularly want a nudist hippie drum circle in it. I do not want a Republican senator organizing his campaign in it. I don't need ten philosophy professors to come in and start debating the finer points of logical positivism. I don't want some guy to be there ranting and raving about how the lizard people are poisoning us all with chemtrails to prevent us from realizing how the world is going to end next Tuesday. There's nothing necessarily wrong with any of those things (though the last guy there might be mentally ill, but that's another complicated issue). But I don't want them in my space, all the time, without invitation (and even then, a solid exit plan). This is not because I need my home to be an "echo chamber". It is because I need it to be a home. There's nothing wrong with having a "home" on the Internet either. It's just a lot harder to have one when you don't have width, height, and depth helping you delineate a space in the 3D universe, vs. the Internet, which easily degenerates into a zero-dimensional space where no distinctions can exist. Having a home doesn't prevent HN or Twitter from existing; nobody can stay in their homes all the time in either space. But the Internet is definitely getting less and less inviting for lacking the ability to have a "home" in it. Thanksgiving just went by with HN denizens complaining a bit in some of the comment threads about how they are going to have to spend time with people they don't really want to, and the other holidays are coming up fast for a repeat performance. The homeless-Internet makes every day the day you have to spend like that, makes every minute the minute you have to spend like that. I fully believe people of a free society have some sort of obligation to engage with viewpoints they find uncomfortable (even if really nailing down what that means would be a challenge), but that doesn't mean everyone needs to be doing it all the time, without rest. I wouldn't expect that to produce understanding; I'd expect it to produce conflict and bitterness, not even necessarily because of the views themselves, but just from the sheer tiredness of never being able to rest anywhere for even a moment.
- kingmanaz 9y ago
  An echo chamber would appear to be a derisive term for instances of freedom of association. That being said, it would be nice if "links" to alternate viewpoints could be kept in close proximity to said chambers. What should bother more people are echo chambers pretending to be open forums. Look no farther than Wikipedia for an ostensibly open community which is in fact an echo chamber allowing no alternate viewpoints; any remark less than fawning for the state of Israel or Judaism is flushed straight down the memory hole and scrubbed off the "Talk" page by an army of Hasbara trolls.
enkiv2 9y ago
Ultimately, it's a matter of control. On twitter, you're still stuck in a bubble -- only, one created by ranking based on projected interaction. (Functionally, this means an angry bubble: you see only things Twitter thinks will drag you into a flamewar.) On the fediverse, you set your own filters and pick your own followers, see things in unadulterated reverse-chronological order, and nobody's pushing promoted posts on you. (Ultimately, this comes down to having a non-profit-oriented, non-centralized system, favoring multiple independent identities. And, it's a throwback to the pre-eternal-september era of usenet, where you went online to have reasonable discussions and added people who annoyed you to your killfile.)
- nathcd 9y ago
  > unadulterated reverse-chronological order This is a wonderful phrase. It's hilarious and strange what we've come to value in a feed. What else might we now be taking for granted that ad companies are going to fuck up?
  - chc 9y ago
    There's nothing about reverse chronological order that makes it innately better for listing things, or better or worse for advertisers. Even for a feed, there are good arguments for and against different orderings depending on both the data and who you are. As one obvious example, most people prefer forum software with threaded views of discussions to strictly chronological listings of messages. Probably most relevant in Twitter's case is that if your feed contains more stuff than you can get to quickly, any curation is probably more useful than simply missing the things that came first or the things that came last. This is why, for example, people who receive a large volume of email often like prioritization or rule-based organization features in their email clients. Like I said, this might not be your situation and a reverse chronological feed might be better for you, but it's not like it's inherently superior. Like so many design choices, it's a trade-off. And of course you can show ads with a feed no matter what order the feed is in.
    - nathcd 9y ago
      Yeah, you're right. Like @enkiv2 said, it's really about control. If the user controls ordering and filtering, any old order is fine. I think the reason plain old reverse-chronological seems notable is because most people who use feeds are using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and/or Snapchat, where the user isn't in control. Even if these services offered sorting options (most don't, I think), the default is an optimization for time-on-site. Which is to say, when most people's experience of feeds is being manipulated by them, boring old reverse chronological sticks out.
eeZah7Ux 9y ago
On the contrary, the "bubble", by definition, requires people to be unaware of it - to believe that a biased conversation space is unbiased. OTOH if you join the Jazz Appreciation Society you are fully aware that participants have music preferences. There's no bubble or echo chamber in that. EDIT: and here comes the usual bunch of downvotes. Speaking of echo chamber.
- epicide 9y ago
  You can recognize that you're biased and still be biased.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
I don't think this is really about differences of opinion, but rather the social aesthetics of the kind of space you're building. A laid-back little pub is a different kind of space than Central Park, which is a different kind of space than your living room. If some jerk barged into that bar and started shouting offensive slogans or trying to start a fight, I'd fully expect them to be kicked out (perhaps literally). Even considering less blatantly offensive conduct, I don't think every place on the internet needs to be open to every drive-by "devil's advocate" or concern troll who thinks they're being so goddamn clever by clumsily trying to bait the regulars into making a bad argument.
- scoggs 9y ago
  You make a great point with your bar / park comparison. When I was younger I yearned for the wildest, loudest, most packed bars and places to party and drink but now that I'm older I prefer a quieter pub with enough seats for everyone I'm hanging out with to relax, have some drinks, and take a load off. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to want a more laid back approach to social media or any sort of community / activity on the web (or anywhere in life for that matter). I think I'm able to make this comparison because at times Reddit and Facebook and especially Twitter feel like the bars did when I was 18-22 and there were so many underage kids going wild, having a blast, but not really caring about much beyond that -- and there is definitely a time and place for that on the internet for me as well, too!
- kstrauser 9y ago
  As an instance admin, I see my server as pretty much exactly my living room: https://blog.freeradical.zone/welcome-to-my-living-room/ https://blog.freeradical.zone/welcome-to-my-living-room/ I'll tolerate (and welcome!) differences of opinion, but if someone starts harassing my other guests or driving them off, I'll cheerfully kick them out.
moron4hire 9y ago
I think there is a big difference between self-curating the sort of people you want to interact with, and being subjected to algorithmic feed shaping and advertising that surreptitiously pushes only the voices that it thinks you'd be happy hearing. Or, as it turns out more often, the voices it thinks you'd be most unhappy to hear. Negative emotions are more sticky than positive emotions, and Facebook, et. al., optimize for engagement, not user happiness.
- epicide 9y ago
  I think this is a great point. As I put in a different comment, people are naturally going to organize into groups no matter what. You also can't realistically expose yourself to everything (nor would you want to). So there has to be something that decides what you're going to see. At the end of the day, as faulty as they are, I'd rather have individuals deciding for themselves what they want to see rather than profit-oriented groups that thrive on the misery of their users.
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    The auto suggestion of even more extreme feeds/views tends to polarize
Slackwise 9y ago
Oh yeah, we need a purely unfiltered web to prevent echo chambers forming! Let's see what that turns out like—oh that's right, 4chan. (Do we really need more 4chans?) It looks like even with an unfiltered world, echo chambers still evolve. It's the nature of communities.
- krapp 9y ago
  4chan isn't unfiltered. People left it in droves for sites like 8chan because they found the moderation of 4chan too restrictive. 8chan also isn't unfiltered. Neither is Voat, which is where everyone who found Reddit too stifling wound up. No site on the open web is truly unfiltered, because that would allow for illegal content, and the men with guns in vans are a real thing. Too many people mistake the freedom to be intolerant, rude or uncivil with free speech. >Do we really need more 4chans? Yes, if by "4chans" you mean anonymous platforms. That doesn't necessarily mean we need more of the toxicity at the bottom of the cesspool that imageboard culture is known for, but I do think we need more sites which push back against the hostile patterns of social media, which include "real name" policies and moderation or filtering that tries to shape communities from the top down. The truth here is that one person's echo chamber is another person's culture, and that "unfiltered" is just another kind of echo chamber.
  - glenstein 9y ago
    I think this academic search for an example of purely unfiltered community is getting in the way of the practical point that communities, however filtered they are, are clearly more or less filtered relative to one another, and that yields observable effects. 4chan is clearly less filtered than reddit, and we can see how differences in the degree of filtering creates a race to the bottom. 4chan is too restrictive for some people who want to race to an even deeper bottom, and on and on. >That doesn't necessarily mean we need more of the toxicity at the bottom of the cesspool that imageboard culture is known for But the whole point is that the less filtered the community, the more a toxic lowest common denominator develops, which is not preferable to the things decried as "echo chambers" in more filtered communities.
- whywhywhywhy 9y ago
Vinnl 9y ago
There's a middle ground, and it's one we have to seek for ourselves. As someone who leans left, I enjoy reading the opinions of those leaning right (or Americans leaning left, which is still quite right for me as a European). This does give me a rather diverse worldview. That said, there's also a lot of people I really don't care to hear about, because my time and attention is limited and the odds that they're going to be an enrichment of my world view is really low. (Oh, and also: the only reason for me to downvote would be due to the remark about receiving downvotes. Next time, you might want to consider whether that remark adds to the conversation.)
- izacus 9y ago
  I think the key point here is choice: e.g. if you want to go listen to people rail about the government, you stop by the local pub. If you want to talk about cooking you join another group / activity. Networks like Twitter and Facebook don't really facilitate this behaviour - you're being sprayed by endless stream of opinions which aren't grouped or filtered in a way that would be meaningful to you.
sp332 9y ago
But Facebook actively tries to insulate you from most of your friends, except when it's trying to start a fight to juice its "engagement" numbers. It actively creates filter bubbles. So I would say it's an improvement. https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336 https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336
lucideer 9y ago
There's a huge conflation in people's views on this topic between "safe"* and "echo chamber". A safe space should be a place with moderation guidelines around the type of discussion being had, rather than the type of views being discussed. We can have social media platforms free from overt abuse without restricting the views being aired. I can have a conversation with someone where they espouse views that offend me without being personally offended by the discussion. If they start shouting insults in my face, then that's different: that's not an environment I want to be in. - * This is purely anecdotal, but I think this conflation probably arises from discourse in modern identity politics, and the term "safe spaces". The intent of this term is often fine, imo, but for a subset of people it's extended not only to mean a space that is free from abuse, but rather a space that is free from people who don't understand your politics in great detail, to avoid being offended by "innocent ignorance" (e.g. using incorrect terminology).
- interfixus 9y ago
  > We can have social media platforms free from overt abuse without restricting the views being aired In theory, yes. In reality, even in these hallowed and supposedly rational halls of HN, certain views are immediately hammered with downvotes and flagging and ominous warnings from moderators, no matter how urbane the tone, and often irregardless whether said views have a decent empirical underpinning.
  - lucideer 9y ago
    HN has a very good, solid, commendable moderation policy. It's also an echo chamber. These are separate topics though: I (mostly* ) don't believe one feeds the other, I strongly believe the reasons for the echo chamber here are unrelated. HN is not just a tech discussion forum, it's one administered and hosted by an influential, Silicon Valley VC company. This means, with zero input from moderators, the views expressed will naturally tend toward a worldview that endorses the activities of such a firm, and the tendencies of local SV culture. * I say mostly as there was just one case here on HN in the not too distant past around political topics that were explicitly banned, which is the first and only example of moderation based on topic rather than based on behaviour I've seen here. That aside, my points above stand.
glenstein 9y ago
What I've never understood about the echo chamber argument is the notion that it's merely an unstimulating exchange of views echoed back and forth that entails loss of social richness or complexity. The ways communities differ from each other depend on so many particularized variables, as different from each other as fingerprints. They can be stagnant, or they can be special, precisely because of their convergence on certain ideas & values. But that depends on the details, so the blanket charge of sameness feels intellectually lazy. And let's not forget that we're talking about addressing a specific set of problems: the whack-a-mole problem with bots & trolls, the problem of social cooling, the constant brand building, the bad faith arguing. Not wanting those very specific things still leaves wide open possibilities for how interaction can work within a community. If the desire to solves those problems look to you like a desire for an echo chamber, it might say a lot about the things you associate with normalcy.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  Not to mention foreign entities trying to recruit or manipulate your views and information. Someone only letting in their interests is different and probably better than being a free-for-all target for motivated actors.
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Walling one's self off from ads and spam though?
jpfed 9y ago
>(my karma will likely not survive this) the title should probably read "Mastadon makes the Internet feel like an safe echo chamber again." This is a very well represented viewpoint on HackerNews. Your karma has nothing to fear.
guelo 9y ago
When I try to read opposing viewpoints I don't go looking for it on social media filled with bad faith trolls, shouting matches and dumb comebacks.
ColinWright 9y ago
You seem to be saying that Mastodon is bad because it's not Twitter. The whole point of Mastodon, and the article, is that it's not Twitter. Most of the instances are smaller, and most of them have people within a single conceptual community. That's the point. It's not an echo chamber, it's a place where people can share information. It's not a place to rant about your political opinions (unless, you know, it is) it's a place to discuss things of common interest. But all means, if you're worried about being in an echo chamber, go to Twitter and expose yourself to other opinions that you will disagree with, see no evidence for, and have no means of changing. But if you want to interact with people in a way that enriches you, your knowledge, and your appreciation of community, Twitter is not the place, and Mastodon might be.
tscs37 9y ago
I think your concerns are valid but on the other hand; Twitter is already an echo chamber. People make it to even worse echo chambers. On Mastodon you have a choice. You can be on an instance that does echochamber and safespace the discussion or you pick one that doesn't. Or make your own.
KirinDave 9y ago
This is a classic example of someone projecting their values, politics, and fear onto a technology and article with only minimal reading. That's not how Mastodon works at all, and anyone who's been there can say there is plenty of dissent and argument there. The principle difference of Mastodon to Twitter and Facebook is that it's not a fully connected network. Instead of trying to paper over this, Mastodon highlights this feature. You have a "local" timeline and a "global" timeline. The global timelines are assembled dynamically based on what people on the instance follow. This allows instances to collectively shape their experience, and they tend to have extremely different feels. For example, I was part of a private instance focused around hardware and crypto hackers, and I have a primary account on the original .social instnace. The .social instance has high exposure and plenty of obnoxious redditor-types bellowing their politics and wondering why they aren't getting applause, mixed among a wide array of more interesting people. I'm just as likely to get into a halting and awkward conversation with a Japanese artist as I am to end up talking about javascript critics with Brendan Eich as I am to see someone with a kekistan flag talking about their ignorance and how net neutrality is good. The other private instance was totally different. The entire experience was great. You could make intelligent conversation about tech and expect intelligent responses. The network gradually connected to other people in the fediverse and even the global feed started to get very good. People began to use that instance as a bridge for good follows in the distributed software, hardware, and digital art scene. As that connectivity grew, so did the value of the instance. I'm very sad that the owner was unable to maintain it for a few months and the whole thing fell apart. If your primary goal is to yell at people until they are browbeaten down? Yeah, that's a bad environment for that. But it's also a win, because this neighborhood may kick you out but I'm sure there is another one that will have you, no questions asked. If you're like most people looking for specific subjects for engagement and some control of the overall quality? It's amazing. Unprecedented, even! It takes time and effort for these instances to grow, but unlike many social networks there is actually a legitimate (i.e., not shitposting and moderation evading) reasons to have more than one account, or prefer one server over another. While instance connectivity across the total network is very powerful, I think there is a lot to be said for requiring a great deal more inertia to have a hastily penned 200-500c comment flashed in front of millions of people. And in many ways it's the same principle as Hacker News was founded on: it's a cul de sac in the internet, a smaller place where rules are more enforcable and governance is slightly less arbitrary. Unlike Hacker News, it actually has controlled ways to knit together. Imagine if my viewing habits started to affect the top feed. Finally, as an aside, please stop with this "echo chamber" rhetoric. It's counter-productive. There is nothing wrong or shameful about community selection. No one is obligated to engage with anyone else. We here at Hacker News are beneficiaries of this. As problematic and lacking in tradecraft as this forum often is, its still a much more reliable place to gain technical insight than many subreddits. Similarly, Stack Overflow is a "tech echochamber" but what echos is the community consensus on how to build things. That's a good echo, better than the noise you'd get on Yahoo! answers. The only people who have a vested interest in disrupting these dynamics are people for whom consensus, truth and trust are objectionable concepts.
yogthos 9y ago
The whole point of Mastodon is that it's open source and decentralized. Anybody can run an instance any way they like. There are no global rules that apply to everybody. There are already many instances with wildly different rules and demographics. The barrier to running your own instance is pretty low nowadays as hosting is becoming very cheap, and Docker removed a lot of the hassle associated with setting up an instance.
acranox 9y ago
the problem is that some communities have devolved into: person a: "my opinion is that green is a nice color." person b: "i hope you die a painful death." I'm happy to hear differing opinions. But watching people threaten and harass each other is something that quickly turns me away from online communities.
AFNobody 9y ago
> (my karma will likely not survive this) the title should probably read "Mastadon makes the Internet feel like an safe echo chamber again." As someone who is banned from Twitter but not on Mastadon. Eh, I don't think your comment is fair to the OP.
dejawu 9y ago
I think it's still a bit different. On Twitter, you still sort of fear retribution from the people within your bubble, since it's encouraged to "roast" and win arguments by getting more likes. I get the impression Mastodon is more forgiving, which makes me want to try it out.

Cthulhu_ 9y ago

I think people need safe echo chambers, even if their views are controversial; if you don't have a closer group of people to share your views with (and/or who share your viewpoints), you'll end up either just not participating at all (because someone will have problems with what you're saying), being a controversial person (and getting a lot of shit and/or even your account removed), or a boring or personality-less person with no personal views. I mean all of those work, but neither of those feel like "just be yourself". It's probably in line with the thing about id, ego, and super-ego; you need spaces to align your id / ego, not just via the super-ego. if I'm using those phrases correctly. Probably not.

baq 9y ago
i think the problem is people aren't wired correctly for this option, which wasn't available in a high-bandwidth edition even 20 years ago, to be safe for societies in the long run. the dopamine-driven positive feedback loop that happens in such echo chambers cause a runaway reaction of radicalizing the opinion of the whole bubble to the point where it's a religious issue when confronted about it. you almost admit it yourself and correctly diagnose that HN is also like that. no idea about that psychology stuff. i heard those words before :)
- epicide 9y ago
  Echo chambers obviously happen even on sites with larger userbases (follower groups on Twitter, particular subreddits, etc.). I don't know if having walls built into the system helps or hurts. Or does nothing at all. Ultimately, I don't think it matters since people are going to organize into some form of group no matter what.
enkiv2 9y ago
Yeah. Picking a community is about deciding which echo chamber feels like home. Like, on HN, if I talk about certain things I get downvoted to hell. So I talk about them elsewhere. Every community has its own biases, and people have different personas they apply to each community. The fediverse is not a community. It's an ecosystem of loosely-interlinked communities, in about three or four layers: you've got the whole fediverse, the people on your instance, the people you follow, and the people you interact with. (On most instance software you also have topics, though not on Mastodon. There are hashtags too but they aren't used all that much and rarely does a community form around one, though they're useful for discovery.) You've got more potential points of segmentation than on Twitter, and more levels of potential control over what you see. (Add the possibility of having an account on several different instances and keeping to local rules and topics for those instances, and you have even greater control over how you present yourself and how your discussion goes.)
Roodgorf 9y ago
I think it's okay to have some amount of an echo chamber, they happen more or less naturally just because of who you select to be in your personal sphere of influence, but I think I disagree with the way you describe it. I don't think people need to exist in an echo chamber so they can "be themselves" without social consequence, I think that's actually the biggest problem with echo chambers and why people argue that they should be avoided. Rather, what we need is a higher standard of discourse outside of those echo chambers. It is possible to respectfully disagree with someone without shouting them down/trolling/removing them from the conversation, and from the other side, without reaching a point of disruption that someone might consider that a good resolution. The failure happens at both sides of the conversation, and interacting outside of echo chambers seems to me the only way to gain experience in interacting civilly.
jerf 9y ago
I think even calling it an "echo chamber" is a bit harsh. I have a home in the real world. When I am in it, I do not particularly want a nudist hippie drum circle in it. I do not want a Republican senator organizing his campaign in it. I don't need ten philosophy professors to come in and start debating the finer points of logical positivism. I don't want some guy to be there ranting and raving about how the lizard people are poisoning us all with chemtrails to prevent us from realizing how the world is going to end next Tuesday. There's nothing necessarily wrong with any of those things (though the last guy there might be mentally ill, but that's another complicated issue). But I don't want them in my space, all the time, without invitation (and even then, a solid exit plan). This is not because I need my home to be an "echo chamber". It is because I need it to be a home. There's nothing wrong with having a "home" on the Internet either. It's just a lot harder to have one when you don't have width, height, and depth helping you delineate a space in the 3D universe, vs. the Internet, which easily degenerates into a zero-dimensional space where no distinctions can exist. Having a home doesn't prevent HN or Twitter from existing; nobody can stay in their homes all the time in either space. But the Internet is definitely getting less and less inviting for lacking the ability to have a "home" in it. Thanksgiving just went by with HN denizens complaining a bit in some of the comment threads about how they are going to have to spend time with people they don't really want to, and the other holidays are coming up fast for a repeat performance. The homeless-Internet makes every day the day you have to spend like that, makes every minute the minute you have to spend like that. I fully believe people of a free society have some sort of obligation to engage with viewpoints they find uncomfortable (even if really nailing down what that means would be a challenge), but that doesn't mean everyone needs to be doing it all the time, without rest. I wouldn't expect that to produce understanding; I'd expect it to produce conflict and bitterness, not even necessarily because of the views themselves, but just from the sheer tiredness of never being able to rest anywhere for even a moment.
kingmanaz 9y ago
An echo chamber would appear to be a derisive term for instances of freedom of association. That being said, it would be nice if "links" to alternate viewpoints could be kept in close proximity to said chambers. What should bother more people are echo chambers pretending to be open forums. Look no farther than Wikipedia for an ostensibly open community which is in fact an echo chamber allowing no alternate viewpoints; any remark less than fawning for the state of Israel or Judaism is flushed straight down the memory hole and scrubbed off the "Talk" page by an army of Hasbara trolls.

enkiv2 9y ago

Ultimately, it's a matter of control. On twitter, you're still stuck in a bubble -- only, one created by ranking based on projected interaction. (Functionally, this means an angry bubble: you see only things Twitter thinks will drag you into a flamewar.) On the fediverse, you set your own filters and pick your own followers, see things in unadulterated reverse-chronological order, and nobody's pushing promoted posts on you. (Ultimately, this comes down to having a non-profit-oriented, non-centralized system, favoring multiple independent identities. And, it's a throwback to the pre-eternal-september era of usenet, where you went online to have reasonable discussions and added people who annoyed you to your killfile.)

nathcd 9y ago
> unadulterated reverse-chronological order This is a wonderful phrase. It's hilarious and strange what we've come to value in a feed. What else might we now be taking for granted that ad companies are going to fuck up?
- chc 9y ago
  There's nothing about reverse chronological order that makes it innately better for listing things, or better or worse for advertisers. Even for a feed, there are good arguments for and against different orderings depending on both the data and who you are. As one obvious example, most people prefer forum software with threaded views of discussions to strictly chronological listings of messages. Probably most relevant in Twitter's case is that if your feed contains more stuff than you can get to quickly, any curation is probably more useful than simply missing the things that came first or the things that came last. This is why, for example, people who receive a large volume of email often like prioritization or rule-based organization features in their email clients. Like I said, this might not be your situation and a reverse chronological feed might be better for you, but it's not like it's inherently superior. Like so many design choices, it's a trade-off. And of course you can show ads with a feed no matter what order the feed is in.
  - nathcd 9y ago
    Yeah, you're right. Like @enkiv2 said, it's really about control. If the user controls ordering and filtering, any old order is fine. I think the reason plain old reverse-chronological seems notable is because most people who use feeds are using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit and/or Snapchat, where the user isn't in control. Even if these services offered sorting options (most don't, I think), the default is an optimization for time-on-site. Which is to say, when most people's experience of feeds is being manipulated by them, boring old reverse chronological sticks out.

eeZah7Ux 9y ago

On the contrary, the "bubble", by definition, requires people to be unaware of it - to believe that a biased conversation space is unbiased. OTOH if you join the Jazz Appreciation Society you are fully aware that participants have music preferences. There's no bubble or echo chamber in that. EDIT: and here comes the usual bunch of downvotes. Speaking of echo chamber.

epicide 9y ago
You can recognize that you're biased and still be biased.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

I don't think this is really about differences of opinion, but rather the social aesthetics of the kind of space you're building. A laid-back little pub is a different kind of space than Central Park, which is a different kind of space than your living room. If some jerk barged into that bar and started shouting offensive slogans or trying to start a fight, I'd fully expect them to be kicked out (perhaps literally). Even considering less blatantly offensive conduct, I don't think every place on the internet needs to be open to every drive-by "devil's advocate" or concern troll who thinks they're being so goddamn clever by clumsily trying to bait the regulars into making a bad argument.

scoggs 9y ago
You make a great point with your bar / park comparison. When I was younger I yearned for the wildest, loudest, most packed bars and places to party and drink but now that I'm older I prefer a quieter pub with enough seats for everyone I'm hanging out with to relax, have some drinks, and take a load off. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world to want a more laid back approach to social media or any sort of community / activity on the web (or anywhere in life for that matter). I think I'm able to make this comparison because at times Reddit and Facebook and especially Twitter feel like the bars did when I was 18-22 and there were so many underage kids going wild, having a blast, but not really caring about much beyond that -- and there is definitely a time and place for that on the internet for me as well, too!
kstrauser 9y ago
As an instance admin, I see my server as pretty much exactly my living room: https://blog.freeradical.zone/welcome-to-my-living-room/ https://blog.freeradical.zone/welcome-to-my-living-room/ I'll tolerate (and welcome!) differences of opinion, but if someone starts harassing my other guests or driving them off, I'll cheerfully kick them out.

moron4hire 9y ago

I think there is a big difference between self-curating the sort of people you want to interact with, and being subjected to algorithmic feed shaping and advertising that surreptitiously pushes only the voices that it thinks you'd be happy hearing. Or, as it turns out more often, the voices it thinks you'd be most unhappy to hear. Negative emotions are more sticky than positive emotions, and Facebook, et. al., optimize for engagement, not user happiness.

epicide 9y ago
I think this is a great point. As I put in a different comment, people are naturally going to organize into groups no matter what. You also can't realistically expose yourself to everything (nor would you want to). So there has to be something that decides what you're going to see. At the end of the day, as faulty as they are, I'd rather have individuals deciding for themselves what they want to see rather than profit-oriented groups that thrive on the misery of their users.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  The auto suggestion of even more extreme feeds/views tends to polarize

Slackwise 9y ago

Oh yeah, we need a purely unfiltered web to prevent echo chambers forming! Let's see what that turns out like—oh that's right, 4chan. (Do we really need more 4chans?) It looks like even with an unfiltered world, echo chambers still evolve. It's the nature of communities.

krapp 9y ago
4chan isn't unfiltered. People left it in droves for sites like 8chan because they found the moderation of 4chan too restrictive. 8chan also isn't unfiltered. Neither is Voat, which is where everyone who found Reddit too stifling wound up. No site on the open web is truly unfiltered, because that would allow for illegal content, and the men with guns in vans are a real thing. Too many people mistake the freedom to be intolerant, rude or uncivil with free speech. >Do we really need more 4chans? Yes, if by "4chans" you mean anonymous platforms. That doesn't necessarily mean we need more of the toxicity at the bottom of the cesspool that imageboard culture is known for, but I do think we need more sites which push back against the hostile patterns of social media, which include "real name" policies and moderation or filtering that tries to shape communities from the top down. The truth here is that one person's echo chamber is another person's culture, and that "unfiltered" is just another kind of echo chamber.
- glenstein 9y ago
  I think this academic search for an example of purely unfiltered community is getting in the way of the practical point that communities, however filtered they are, are clearly more or less filtered relative to one another, and that yields observable effects. 4chan is clearly less filtered than reddit, and we can see how differences in the degree of filtering creates a race to the bottom. 4chan is too restrictive for some people who want to race to an even deeper bottom, and on and on. >That doesn't necessarily mean we need more of the toxicity at the bottom of the cesspool that imageboard culture is known for But the whole point is that the less filtered the community, the more a toxic lowest common denominator develops, which is not preferable to the things decried as "echo chambers" in more filtered communities.
whywhywhywhy 9y ago

Vinnl 9y ago

There's a middle ground, and it's one we have to seek for ourselves. As someone who leans left, I enjoy reading the opinions of those leaning right (or Americans leaning left, which is still quite right for me as a European). This does give me a rather diverse worldview. That said, there's also a lot of people I really don't care to hear about, because my time and attention is limited and the odds that they're going to be an enrichment of my world view is really low. (Oh, and also: the only reason for me to downvote would be due to the remark about receiving downvotes. Next time, you might want to consider whether that remark adds to the conversation.)

izacus 9y ago
I think the key point here is choice: e.g. if you want to go listen to people rail about the government, you stop by the local pub. If you want to talk about cooking you join another group / activity. Networks like Twitter and Facebook don't really facilitate this behaviour - you're being sprayed by endless stream of opinions which aren't grouped or filtered in a way that would be meaningful to you.

sp332 9y ago

But Facebook actively tries to insulate you from most of your friends, except when it's trying to start a fight to juice its "engagement" numbers. It actively creates filter bubbles. So I would say it's an improvement. https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336 https://twitter.com/Hellchick/status/942863353403150336

lucideer 9y ago

There's a huge conflation in people's views on this topic between "safe"* and "echo chamber". A safe space should be a place with moderation guidelines around the type of discussion being had, rather than the type of views being discussed. We can have social media platforms free from overt abuse without restricting the views being aired. I can have a conversation with someone where they espouse views that offend me without being personally offended by the discussion. If they start shouting insults in my face, then that's different: that's not an environment I want to be in. - * This is purely anecdotal, but I think this conflation probably arises from discourse in modern identity politics, and the term "safe spaces". The intent of this term is often fine, imo, but for a subset of people it's extended not only to mean a space that is free from abuse, but rather a space that is free from people who don't understand your politics in great detail, to avoid being offended by "innocent ignorance" (e.g. using incorrect terminology).

interfixus 9y ago
> We can have social media platforms free from overt abuse without restricting the views being aired In theory, yes. In reality, even in these hallowed and supposedly rational halls of HN, certain views are immediately hammered with downvotes and flagging and ominous warnings from moderators, no matter how urbane the tone, and often irregardless whether said views have a decent empirical underpinning.
- lucideer 9y ago
  HN has a very good, solid, commendable moderation policy. It's also an echo chamber. These are separate topics though: I (mostly* ) don't believe one feeds the other, I strongly believe the reasons for the echo chamber here are unrelated. HN is not just a tech discussion forum, it's one administered and hosted by an influential, Silicon Valley VC company. This means, with zero input from moderators, the views expressed will naturally tend toward a worldview that endorses the activities of such a firm, and the tendencies of local SV culture. * I say mostly as there was just one case here on HN in the not too distant past around political topics that were explicitly banned, which is the first and only example of moderation based on topic rather than based on behaviour I've seen here. That aside, my points above stand.

glenstein 9y ago

What I've never understood about the echo chamber argument is the notion that it's merely an unstimulating exchange of views echoed back and forth that entails loss of social richness or complexity. The ways communities differ from each other depend on so many particularized variables, as different from each other as fingerprints. They can be stagnant, or they can be special, precisely because of their convergence on certain ideas & values. But that depends on the details, so the blanket charge of sameness feels intellectually lazy. And let's not forget that we're talking about addressing a specific set of problems: the whack-a-mole problem with bots & trolls, the problem of social cooling, the constant brand building, the bad faith arguing. Not wanting those very specific things still leaves wide open possibilities for how interaction can work within a community. If the desire to solves those problems look to you like a desire for an echo chamber, it might say a lot about the things you associate with normalcy.

SubiculumCode 9y ago
Not to mention foreign entities trying to recruit or manipulate your views and information. Someone only letting in their interests is different and probably better than being a free-for-all target for motivated actors.

JKCalhoun 9y ago

Walling one's self off from ads and spam though?

jpfed 9y ago

>(my karma will likely not survive this) the title should probably read "Mastadon makes the Internet feel like an safe echo chamber again." This is a very well represented viewpoint on HackerNews. Your karma has nothing to fear.

guelo 9y ago

When I try to read opposing viewpoints I don't go looking for it on social media filled with bad faith trolls, shouting matches and dumb comebacks.

ColinWright 9y ago

You seem to be saying that Mastodon is bad because it's not Twitter. The whole point of Mastodon, and the article, is that it's not Twitter. Most of the instances are smaller, and most of them have people within a single conceptual community. That's the point. It's not an echo chamber, it's a place where people can share information. It's not a place to rant about your political opinions (unless, you know, it is) it's a place to discuss things of common interest. But all means, if you're worried about being in an echo chamber, go to Twitter and expose yourself to other opinions that you will disagree with, see no evidence for, and have no means of changing. But if you want to interact with people in a way that enriches you, your knowledge, and your appreciation of community, Twitter is not the place, and Mastodon might be.

tscs37 9y ago

I think your concerns are valid but on the other hand; Twitter is already an echo chamber. People make it to even worse echo chambers. On Mastodon you have a choice. You can be on an instance that does echochamber and safespace the discussion or you pick one that doesn't. Or make your own.

KirinDave 9y ago

This is a classic example of someone projecting their values, politics, and fear onto a technology and article with only minimal reading. That's not how Mastodon works at all, and anyone who's been there can say there is plenty of dissent and argument there. The principle difference of Mastodon to Twitter and Facebook is that it's not a fully connected network. Instead of trying to paper over this, Mastodon highlights this feature. You have a "local" timeline and a "global" timeline. The global timelines are assembled dynamically based on what people on the instance follow. This allows instances to collectively shape their experience, and they tend to have extremely different feels. For example, I was part of a private instance focused around hardware and crypto hackers, and I have a primary account on the original .social instnace. The .social instance has high exposure and plenty of obnoxious redditor-types bellowing their politics and wondering why they aren't getting applause, mixed among a wide array of more interesting people. I'm just as likely to get into a halting and awkward conversation with a Japanese artist as I am to end up talking about javascript critics with Brendan Eich as I am to see someone with a kekistan flag talking about their ignorance and how net neutrality is good. The other private instance was totally different. The entire experience was great. You could make intelligent conversation about tech and expect intelligent responses. The network gradually connected to other people in the fediverse and even the global feed started to get very good. People began to use that instance as a bridge for good follows in the distributed software, hardware, and digital art scene. As that connectivity grew, so did the value of the instance. I'm very sad that the owner was unable to maintain it for a few months and the whole thing fell apart. If your primary goal is to yell at people until they are browbeaten down? Yeah, that's a bad environment for that. But it's also a win, because this neighborhood may kick you out but I'm sure there is another one that will have you, no questions asked. If you're like most people looking for specific subjects for engagement and some control of the overall quality? It's amazing. Unprecedented, even! It takes time and effort for these instances to grow, but unlike many social networks there is actually a legitimate (i.e., not shitposting and moderation evading) reasons to have more than one account, or prefer one server over another. While instance connectivity across the total network is very powerful, I think there is a lot to be said for requiring a great deal more inertia to have a hastily penned 200-500c comment flashed in front of millions of people. And in many ways it's the same principle as Hacker News was founded on: it's a cul de sac in the internet, a smaller place where rules are more enforcable and governance is slightly less arbitrary. Unlike Hacker News, it actually has controlled ways to knit together. Imagine if my viewing habits started to affect the top feed. Finally, as an aside, please stop with this "echo chamber" rhetoric. It's counter-productive. There is nothing wrong or shameful about community selection. No one is obligated to engage with anyone else. We here at Hacker News are beneficiaries of this. As problematic and lacking in tradecraft as this forum often is, its still a much more reliable place to gain technical insight than many subreddits. Similarly, Stack Overflow is a "tech echochamber" but what echos is the community consensus on how to build things. That's a good echo, better than the noise you'd get on Yahoo! answers. The only people who have a vested interest in disrupting these dynamics are people for whom consensus, truth and trust are objectionable concepts.

yogthos 9y ago

The whole point of Mastodon is that it's open source and decentralized. Anybody can run an instance any way they like. There are no global rules that apply to everybody. There are already many instances with wildly different rules and demographics. The barrier to running your own instance is pretty low nowadays as hosting is becoming very cheap, and Docker removed a lot of the hassle associated with setting up an instance.

acranox 9y ago

the problem is that some communities have devolved into: person a: "my opinion is that green is a nice color." person b: "i hope you die a painful death." I'm happy to hear differing opinions. But watching people threaten and harass each other is something that quickly turns me away from online communities.

AFNobody 9y ago

> (my karma will likely not survive this) the title should probably read "Mastadon makes the Internet feel like an safe echo chamber again." As someone who is banned from Twitter but not on Mastadon. Eh, I don't think your comment is fair to the OP.

dejawu 9y ago

I think it's still a bit different. On Twitter, you still sort of fear retribution from the people within your bubble, since it's encouraged to "roast" and win arguments by getting more likes. I get the impression Mastodon is more forgiving, which makes me want to try it out.