Heavy moderation by participants push out opposing view points until all that's left are echo chambers.
The downside of this trend is the vast majority of people don't tend to realize they are in an echo chamber and take what they are interneting as gospel because people tend to trust the wisdom of the masses.. they just don't realize the masses are carefully culled.
IMHO problem is worse on Reddit, but likely affects more people via Facebook.
https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/
>> “People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.)
> Recently, I had my head torn off by a book: Bryan Burrough’s Days of Rage, about the 1970s underground. It’s the most important book I’ve read in a year. So I did a series of running tweetstorms about it, and Clark asked me if he could collect them for posterity. I’ve edited them slightly for editorial coherence.
> Days of Rage is important, because this stuff is forgotten and it shouldn’t be. The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about.
I (used to) have friends on FB who will unfriend anyone epxressing an opinion that they don't agree with (or "find offensive"). They end up in an echo chamber where they never hear an opinion they don't already agree with, and then get surprised when elections don't turn out the way they wanted. Weirdly, I'm still friends with some of them irl, and we can have civil discussions about the same topics in person, just not online.
Unpopular opinions on HN get downvoted to invisibility, but the author is still able to post other unpopular opinions. They'll probably also get downvoted, but sometimes they get supported.
Do they? In my experience (admittedly limited, a couple of years) things get a lot of downvotes almost always for how they say it, not what they say. Can anyone give counterexamples? A well-expressed comment worth reading but downvoted to invisibility?
Also, I've had climate-skeptic comments upvoted and culture-war comments downvoted in contradiction to the dominant narrative here, so it does seem to be post-by-post rather than site-wide chambering.
That doesn't seem better to me. :( You are right that sometimes counter-hive-mind comments get upvoted, though, if written just the right way. I hope this happens more often in the future.
If it's shut down, something else will quickly fill its place.
“They consumed much less news, and were thus less aware of events but also less polarised in their views about them than those still on the network. Leaving Facebook boosted self-reported happiness and reduced feelings of depression and anxiety.”
^^ this is why I’d like to see it broken up or shut down. There’s so much vitriol in everyone’s faces every day, it greatly contributes to the general unreasonableness of politics today.