3 ms·

I don't want to sidetrack y'all's discussion but any user base curated social media platform is going to be an echo chamber, HN included. It's not a unique feat

by chomp 7y ago

I don't want to sidetrack y'all's discussion but any user base curated social media platform is going to be an echo chamber, HN included. It's not a unique feature of just Reddit.

newen 7y ago
Don't think so. 4chan encourages contrarian opinions because posters care about replies, not upvotes or likes. Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people, i.e. the discussion itself. While, agreed that voting style sites like HN and Reddit encourages echo chambers by having a points system and making highly voted comments more visible. There might be some middle ground between these.
- burger_moon 7y ago
  > Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people Just because there's no points, doesn't mean people don't get satisfaction from people replying to them, or having your thread stay at the top with lots of discussion. Replying to threads bumps them to the top right? So having a thread high on the page is a similar signal as point rankings right?
  - whymauri 7y ago
    Yeah, but the difference here is that exposure can also come from negative and contrarian attention. So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. From a meta perspective, I guess trolling-for-the-sake-of-trolling can be part of the 'echo chamber.' However, at a surface level it remains antipodal to the idea of 'following a narrative.'
    - Fleetingreef 7y ago
      >So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. In my experience this varies wildly, both from board-to-board and between imageboard sites in general. One aspect is moderation. The MO of 4chan moderation is to enforce US Law and a bare minimum of conduct in such a manner that it is not noticeable to most posters. If you use a browser extension which allows you to monitor deleted posts/threads, such as 4chanX, and have it monitor a thread where a poster is intentionally trying to incite controversy in a manner which is not conducive to the topic or board theme, they will generally get silently deleted. On their end, they may get warned, banned, or no notification at all, but the deletion is primarily effective because it deprives them of their exposure (also, ban evasion is trivial, while keeping one's flamebait up is not). Another aspect is the culture of each board, which varies wildly on 4chan. For example, posting political and social flamebait on one of the slower, niche boards will just as likely result in people silently reporting the bait and not replying, or only reply to call out the post as flamebait (which is less ideal, but generally ends the conversation chain). If the content is deleted in a consistent and timely manner, the posters can establish norms, and can more effectively handle borderline flamebait without devolving into a flamewar. Meanwhile, on faster boards, the larger number of trolls and people willing to take the bait, along with the ephemerality from faster pace of thread birth and death, results both in moderation being unable to keep up, and a need for more moderation, usually in the form of "janitors" (board specific moderators with limited powers). The more janitors, the more erratic the enforcement of rules tends to be, especially for Global Rules 3 and 6. So there tends to be greater animosity between moderation and posters on faster boards. The extreme examples would be /b/, /r9k/, and /pol/, the latter two informally serving as an outlet for (a)social and political posts which have proven to be irresistible to discuss while simultaneously being rancorous enough to derail almost any thread. So to sum it up, trolling is more effective on the fastest and most vitriolic boards, and less effective on the rest. IMHO, the best "proper" ways to increase your exposure is to either post original content (with mixed success on a good day), actively engage others in conversation that is at least tangentially related, and if on a more image-oriented board, provide on-topic content to bump the thread.
  - newen 7y ago
    Yes, that would be part of the "getting replies from people" section... There is no points system. So people don't get gamified into obsessive behavior. And people don't feel a compunction to behave in an echo chamber way in order to get points and be visible either.
- lame88 7y ago
  4chan has some good elements to it, but it is absolutely a political echo chamber and breeding ground for... everything a decent person should be against. And not just the politics board. You can find anti-semitism and the like all over the site.
  - newen 7y ago
    Agreed, but this is because of lax moderation and because there was a campaign by the racists to take over the entire site and it drove many people out. You could have good discussions on the smaller boards there before 2015-ish. I'm trying to say how 4chan style discussion boards differ from HN/reddit style sites. The latter forces you to post in a way that garners votes. There is always a voice in your head when posting to vote-based forums that asks you if what you're posting fits the hivemind thinking or if it is good enough that the hivemind will like it. You can post without worrying about things like this in 4chan-style boards. There is no voting, so you can have a genuine discussion with a group of people without being monitored, judged, and interfered with by non-participants.
lame88 7y ago
Yep, I find HN better than most places, but specifically there is an ideology here with a lack of skepticism toward technology and its effects, and people are quick to rush to the defense of big tech corporations. I cant tell you how many articles about one of these companies i’ve come across where the top voted comment trivializes, generalizes away, or outright dismisses the article when the company is portrayed in a negative light. Even in the antitrust Google article thats on the front page still you have a Google employee arguing against the article in favor of Google, and explicitly denying that he has a conflict of interest. Which he absolutely does, by definition.

by chomp 7y ago

I don't want to sidetrack y'all's discussion but any user base curated social media platform is going to be an echo chamber, HN included. It's not a unique feature of just Reddit.

newen 7y ago

Don't think so. 4chan encourages contrarian opinions because posters care about replies, not upvotes or likes. Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people, i.e. the discussion itself. While, agreed that voting style sites like HN and Reddit encourages echo chambers by having a points system and making highly voted comments more visible. There might be some middle ground between these.

burger_moon 7y ago
> Pretty much the only reason you post on 4chan is to reply to people and get replies from people Just because there's no points, doesn't mean people don't get satisfaction from people replying to them, or having your thread stay at the top with lots of discussion. Replying to threads bumps them to the top right? So having a thread high on the page is a similar signal as point rankings right?
- whymauri 7y ago
  Yeah, but the difference here is that exposure can also come from negative and contrarian attention. So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. From a meta perspective, I guess trolling-for-the-sake-of-trolling can be part of the 'echo chamber.' However, at a surface level it remains antipodal to the idea of 'following a narrative.'
  - Fleetingreef 7y ago
    >So the dominant strategy for staying at the top of a board is sometimes to be as controversial as possible. Basically, trolling. In my experience this varies wildly, both from board-to-board and between imageboard sites in general. One aspect is moderation. The MO of 4chan moderation is to enforce US Law and a bare minimum of conduct in such a manner that it is not noticeable to most posters. If you use a browser extension which allows you to monitor deleted posts/threads, such as 4chanX, and have it monitor a thread where a poster is intentionally trying to incite controversy in a manner which is not conducive to the topic or board theme, they will generally get silently deleted. On their end, they may get warned, banned, or no notification at all, but the deletion is primarily effective because it deprives them of their exposure (also, ban evasion is trivial, while keeping one's flamebait up is not). Another aspect is the culture of each board, which varies wildly on 4chan. For example, posting political and social flamebait on one of the slower, niche boards will just as likely result in people silently reporting the bait and not replying, or only reply to call out the post as flamebait (which is less ideal, but generally ends the conversation chain). If the content is deleted in a consistent and timely manner, the posters can establish norms, and can more effectively handle borderline flamebait without devolving into a flamewar. Meanwhile, on faster boards, the larger number of trolls and people willing to take the bait, along with the ephemerality from faster pace of thread birth and death, results both in moderation being unable to keep up, and a need for more moderation, usually in the form of "janitors" (board specific moderators with limited powers). The more janitors, the more erratic the enforcement of rules tends to be, especially for Global Rules 3 and 6. So there tends to be greater animosity between moderation and posters on faster boards. The extreme examples would be /b/, /r9k/, and /pol/, the latter two informally serving as an outlet for (a)social and political posts which have proven to be irresistible to discuss while simultaneously being rancorous enough to derail almost any thread. So to sum it up, trolling is more effective on the fastest and most vitriolic boards, and less effective on the rest. IMHO, the best "proper" ways to increase your exposure is to either post original content (with mixed success on a good day), actively engage others in conversation that is at least tangentially related, and if on a more image-oriented board, provide on-topic content to bump the thread.
- newen 7y ago
  Yes, that would be part of the "getting replies from people" section... There is no points system. So people don't get gamified into obsessive behavior. And people don't feel a compunction to behave in an echo chamber way in order to get points and be visible either.
lame88 7y ago
4chan has some good elements to it, but it is absolutely a political echo chamber and breeding ground for... everything a decent person should be against. And not just the politics board. You can find anti-semitism and the like all over the site.
- newen 7y ago
  Agreed, but this is because of lax moderation and because there was a campaign by the racists to take over the entire site and it drove many people out. You could have good discussions on the smaller boards there before 2015-ish. I'm trying to say how 4chan style discussion boards differ from HN/reddit style sites. The latter forces you to post in a way that garners votes. There is always a voice in your head when posting to vote-based forums that asks you if what you're posting fits the hivemind thinking or if it is good enough that the hivemind will like it. You can post without worrying about things like this in 4chan-style boards. There is no voting, so you can have a genuine discussion with a group of people without being monitored, judged, and interfered with by non-participants.

lame88 7y ago

Yep, I find HN better than most places, but specifically there is an ideology here with a lack of skepticism toward technology and its effects, and people are quick to rush to the defense of big tech corporations. I cant tell you how many articles about one of these companies i’ve come across where the top voted comment trivializes, generalizes away, or outright dismisses the article when the company is portrayed in a negative light. Even in the antitrust Google article thats on the front page still you have a Google employee arguing against the article in favor of Google, and explicitly denying that he has a conflict of interest. Which he absolutely does, by definition.