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It becoming somewhat of an echo chamber might be an unfortunate natural phenomenon: if there’s even a slight lean to one political view, people with contrasting

It becoming somewhat of an echo chamber might be an unfortunate natural phenomenon: if there’s even a slight lean to one political view, people with contrasting views will shy away from the abuse, leaving only people with the same view, which will make the problem worse and worse. Similar to how the rich get richer, big stars in the galaxy get bigger, etc. Definitely the upvoting/downvoting system and various corrupt mods make it worse.

tryptophan 6y ago
Its not just political views, it's everything. For example, try posting about Intel in pc building subs. Or try advocating for anything other than passive index investing in /investing. Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming. Any idea outside a sub's main approved-idea-space is rewarded with hate and downvotes.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Czarcasm 6y ago
  I have been on Reddit for 5+ years now, and agree that it seems to have gotten worse over this period. Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? I think the main issue is that Reddit has become more mainstream. My theory is that when a new website like reddit is created, the early adopters are typically more open-minded people by their very nature. Later as the platform is recognized as successful, the mainstream population joins. These mainstream users, less likely on average to accept new ideas than the initial early-adopter user base, then begins to drag the discussion into group-think. My most pronounced experience with this phenomenon was with r/wallstreetbets. In the early days, it was actually a very interesting and unique community with rapidly evolving conversations. With the mass influx of new users in 2018 and 2019, the comment sections slowly shifted into parroting of the subs common phrases and group think. Now in 2020, you can almost predict the comment sections before you open it up. Perhaps due to its lack of promotion and UI, HN has been more resistant to this shift, but is not immune. My personal solution to this problem is to keep jumping to new platforms if an old one becomes too bias. When my favorite subreddits start hitting r/all, I begin looking for new ones that follow the same topics.
  - magicsmoke 6y ago
    When you think about it, it's like the phenomenon where cool places to travel get publicized in glossy magazines and turn into crowded tourist traps.
    - jasonv 6y ago
      I deleted my reddit account and read it read-only-accountless now. Having zero inclination to post there keeps my reading habit super lightweight. I don’t even bookmark subreddits. Just dip and dive out. I just can’t handle more than that amount of exposure to what it’s become.
      - csiegert 6y ago
        For even lighter reading, try https://popular.pics https://popular.pics – a picture/video viewer for Reddit I’m working on. I find it excellent for browsing image-heavy subreddits.
  - quantummkv 6y ago
    > Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? It's a classic case of a variant of the WWW-Eternal-September virus that had been plaguing the interwebs since the dawn of forums. There is no solution other than quarantine and moving to unaffected places.
    - marcus_holmes 6y ago
      It's been plaguing non-interweb groups since always. The dynamic goes something like: - A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing. - the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it. - if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun - if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry. - Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community. Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
- Moodles 6y ago
  Church.
- collyw 6y ago
  To be fair you will get a bit of pushback against PHP on here as well, no?
  - ptero 6y ago
    It's not the fact of the pushback that it is important, but how it is expressed. One of the great HN advantages is community's focus on substantive comments and a strong dislike of any personal attacks. HN: "php sucks because of those technical reasons". Reddit: "php sucks, period, and you are a moron".
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  I think there is also another aspect that is not talked about when discussing downvotes and eco-chamber: the shills. Companies/lobbyists/govs have realised a few years back that reddit was big enough/influential enough to shape some aspect of public opinion, it is now quite obviously that they are paying PR companies to defend their lobbies/brand/products on reddit. The other day I commented on a european sub-reddit, where they were discussing the move away from coal power plants as an energy source. I pointed out that the move away from coal was great but that we should remain sceptical of the "green" "clean" energy marketing around bio-mass power plants and also natural-gas power plants. Immediately the comment became controversial with wildly varying scores of up and downvotes. All the comments that followed where quite adversarial and flippant, mixed with bland marketing statements filled with buzzwords about how bio-mass is sustainable and 'renewable'. I doubt this situation would have occurred 6/7 years ago. In this case it was so obvious that I couldn't care less but probably for some users they would be intimidated to continue to comment on the topic after this. It's not just Energy lobby, you could say the same thing about Pesticides, Pharma, <insert major lobby group>. Also on the shills, I used to go to reddit as a source of legitimate product reviews and recommendations, now it's obviously that every marketing person uses the platform to name drop their product and do stealth marketing companies. As so many others before it, reddit has become a victim of its own popularity.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  > Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming. To be fair, advocating for new PHP projects here on HN is met with ... scrutiny to put it lightly, too... same for going against the "groupthink" when it comes to libertarian capitalism, gig economy or the latest JS framework.
- cameronfraser 6y ago
  This also makes it hard to find new information. The movie and moviesuggestion subreddits for example always recommend from the same small subset of movies. There used to be people who would post really interesting galleries of "Movies you may have missed in 20xx" and they were almost always movies I had missed that flew way under the radar but were great. Ir's like that with every subreddit though, they have this corpus of knowledge they refer to and won't consider anything outside of it, everyone is just parroting someone else.
- chrstphrhrt 6y ago
  Same thing happens on HN. Comments that go against the kooolaid-driven white saviour ethos of certain VC-backed ideas are often downvoted. Still not as bad as popular Reddit subs though. There is so much dystopian doublespeak in startup marketing, and people continue to believe it, because not doing so threatens their careers. Of course there are also many startups out there that actually do improve lives, but I wouldn't say it's the majority.
rajlego 6y ago
Recently, I learned that there's a name for that kind of happening: preferential attachment processes. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment
skocznymroczny 6y ago
That's why on certain subreddits you just sort threads and replies by controversial. This will give you the opposite point of view. Or not so opposite, because sorting by controversial on /r/politics will often give you pro-Biden threads rather than pro-Trump threads, because the mainstream hivemind is overwhelmingly pro-Bernie.
etrabroline 6y ago
>if there’s even a slight lean to one [...] view While group-think is real, the views that are allowed to be expressed on Reddit were not selected because a majority of users held them and pushed out those who disagreed. They were selected by the corporate owners of the site to promote their ideological beliefs, and to appease the very similar ideological beliefs of the major corporations who buy ads there. Contrary opinions were driven off the site simply by repeatedly deleting the subreddits and users who expressed them. Down-voting or any other organic user interaction had nothing to do with it. Placing corporate representatives as moderators is just a way of preventing the organic accrual of power to those with popular opinions that challenge the ideologies of the site owners.
- djannzjkzxn 6y ago
  Reddit contains massive left and right wing communities, and on both sides there widely-held that are antithetical to the corporate establishment, so this narrative doesn’t seem true at all.
  - collyw 6y ago
    There seems to be a lot more left than right. Something that ought to be neutral such as r/barcelona has a heavy left wing slant to it. The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved. And they have now turned into the corona gestapo, posing pictures of people not social distancing enough for their standards all in the name of "saving lives".
    - bildung 6y ago
      Perhaps this isn't a conspiracy but actual mainstream political thought in Barcelona? The city has a very rich leftist history, being one of the centers of Spanish anarchism during the civil war, for example. > The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes? > corona gestapo Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?

tryptophan 6y ago

Its not just political views, it's everything. For example, try posting about Intel in pc building subs. Or try advocating for anything other than passive index investing in /investing. Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming. Any idea outside a sub's main approved-idea-space is rewarded with hate and downvotes.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Czarcasm 6y ago
I have been on Reddit for 5+ years now, and agree that it seems to have gotten worse over this period. Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? I think the main issue is that Reddit has become more mainstream. My theory is that when a new website like reddit is created, the early adopters are typically more open-minded people by their very nature. Later as the platform is recognized as successful, the mainstream population joins. These mainstream users, less likely on average to accept new ideas than the initial early-adopter user base, then begins to drag the discussion into group-think. My most pronounced experience with this phenomenon was with r/wallstreetbets. In the early days, it was actually a very interesting and unique community with rapidly evolving conversations. With the mass influx of new users in 2018 and 2019, the comment sections slowly shifted into parroting of the subs common phrases and group think. Now in 2020, you can almost predict the comment sections before you open it up. Perhaps due to its lack of promotion and UI, HN has been more resistant to this shift, but is not immune. My personal solution to this problem is to keep jumping to new platforms if an old one becomes too bias. When my favorite subreddits start hitting r/all, I begin looking for new ones that follow the same topics.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  When you think about it, it's like the phenomenon where cool places to travel get publicized in glossy magazines and turn into crowded tourist traps.
  - jasonv 6y ago
    I deleted my reddit account and read it read-only-accountless now. Having zero inclination to post there keeps my reading habit super lightweight. I don’t even bookmark subreddits. Just dip and dive out. I just can’t handle more than that amount of exposure to what it’s become.
    - csiegert 6y ago
      For even lighter reading, try https://popular.pics https://popular.pics – a picture/video viewer for Reddit I’m working on. I find it excellent for browsing image-heavy subreddits.
- quantummkv 6y ago
  > Do you think that the removal of the downvote capability solves this problem? What solutions are available? It's a classic case of a variant of the WWW-Eternal-September virus that had been plaguing the interwebs since the dawn of forums. There is no solution other than quarantine and moving to unaffected places.
  - marcus_holmes 6y ago
    It's been plaguing non-interweb groups since always. The dynamic goes something like: - A thing becomes possible. Some people enjoy the thing, get together and form a community doing the thing. - the community quickly stratifies into "creators" - the people who actually do the thing and do it well, "community builders" - the people who don't actually do the thing very well, but are good at building the community around it, and "fans" - people who can't really do the thing, but enjoy the community and hang around in it. - if the creator:fan ratio stays within reasonable limits, the community will continue to be enjoyable and fun - if the community attracts more fans, though, the community is destroyed. Either the urge to monetise overwhelms and fans become customers, creators become rockstars and the community becomes an industry. - Or it drowns in its own bile. Fans don't actually contribute to the community, they just soak up every else's contribution. If there are too many fans, they drain the energy and ability of the community to self-sustain. Community builders "burn out" and creators become reclusive, staying away from the community. Anything that gets too popular gets either turned into an industry, or destroyed by its own popularity.
Moodles 6y ago
Church.
collyw 6y ago
To be fair you will get a bit of pushback against PHP on here as well, no?
- ptero 6y ago
  It's not the fact of the pushback that it is important, but how it is expressed. One of the great HN advantages is community's focus on substantive comments and a strong dislike of any personal attacks. HN: "php sucks because of those technical reasons". Reddit: "php sucks, period, and you are a moron".
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
I think there is also another aspect that is not talked about when discussing downvotes and eco-chamber: the shills. Companies/lobbyists/govs have realised a few years back that reddit was big enough/influential enough to shape some aspect of public opinion, it is now quite obviously that they are paying PR companies to defend their lobbies/brand/products on reddit. The other day I commented on a european sub-reddit, where they were discussing the move away from coal power plants as an energy source. I pointed out that the move away from coal was great but that we should remain sceptical of the "green" "clean" energy marketing around bio-mass power plants and also natural-gas power plants. Immediately the comment became controversial with wildly varying scores of up and downvotes. All the comments that followed where quite adversarial and flippant, mixed with bland marketing statements filled with buzzwords about how bio-mass is sustainable and 'renewable'. I doubt this situation would have occurred 6/7 years ago. In this case it was so obvious that I couldn't care less but probably for some users they would be intimidated to continue to comment on the topic after this. It's not just Energy lobby, you could say the same thing about Pesticides, Pharma, <insert major lobby group>. Also on the shills, I used to go to reddit as a source of legitimate product reviews and recommendations, now it's obviously that every marketing person uses the platform to name drop their product and do stealth marketing companies. As so many others before it, reddit has become a victim of its own popularity.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Or say you like PHP for making websites in /programming. To be fair, advocating for new PHP projects here on HN is met with ... scrutiny to put it lightly, too... same for going against the "groupthink" when it comes to libertarian capitalism, gig economy or the latest JS framework.
cameronfraser 6y ago
This also makes it hard to find new information. The movie and moviesuggestion subreddits for example always recommend from the same small subset of movies. There used to be people who would post really interesting galleries of "Movies you may have missed in 20xx" and they were almost always movies I had missed that flew way under the radar but were great. Ir's like that with every subreddit though, they have this corpus of knowledge they refer to and won't consider anything outside of it, everyone is just parroting someone else.
chrstphrhrt 6y ago
Same thing happens on HN. Comments that go against the kooolaid-driven white saviour ethos of certain VC-backed ideas are often downvoted. Still not as bad as popular Reddit subs though. There is so much dystopian doublespeak in startup marketing, and people continue to believe it, because not doing so threatens their careers. Of course there are also many startups out there that actually do improve lives, but I wouldn't say it's the majority.

rajlego 6y ago

Recently, I learned that there's a name for that kind of happening: preferential attachment processes. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preferential_attachment

skocznymroczny 6y ago

That's why on certain subreddits you just sort threads and replies by controversial. This will give you the opposite point of view. Or not so opposite, because sorting by controversial on /r/politics will often give you pro-Biden threads rather than pro-Trump threads, because the mainstream hivemind is overwhelmingly pro-Bernie.

etrabroline 6y ago

>if there’s even a slight lean to one [...] view While group-think is real, the views that are allowed to be expressed on Reddit were not selected because a majority of users held them and pushed out those who disagreed. They were selected by the corporate owners of the site to promote their ideological beliefs, and to appease the very similar ideological beliefs of the major corporations who buy ads there. Contrary opinions were driven off the site simply by repeatedly deleting the subreddits and users who expressed them. Down-voting or any other organic user interaction had nothing to do with it. Placing corporate representatives as moderators is just a way of preventing the organic accrual of power to those with popular opinions that challenge the ideologies of the site owners.

djannzjkzxn 6y ago
Reddit contains massive left and right wing communities, and on both sides there widely-held that are antithetical to the corporate establishment, so this narrative doesn’t seem true at all.
- collyw 6y ago
  There seems to be a lot more left than right. Something that ought to be neutral such as r/barcelona has a heavy left wing slant to it. The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved. And they have now turned into the corona gestapo, posing pictures of people not social distancing enough for their standards all in the name of "saving lives".
  - bildung 6y ago
    Perhaps this isn't a conspiracy but actual mainstream political thought in Barcelona? The city has a very rich leftist history, being one of the centers of Spanish anarchism during the civil war, for example. > The delete posts about crime in case anyone notices any demographic patterns involved Probably because, just as in every other country, demography is the confounding variable and poverty/inequality the actual predictor of blue collar crimes? > corona gestapo Because, after Belgium, Spain has the highest per capita Covid death rate in the world?