Heavy moderation is why people don’t hate each other even more. When I started using Twitter I followed loads of people who disagreed with me politically who I thought were intelligent. Lots of them are, and thoughtful but it just made it really obvious that there’s still plenty of support for people and views I consider odious. Non-filtered news consumption leads to a more accurate picture of reality in which huge portions of the population hate each other and there’s an excellent chance of widespread violence at the level of the US in the 1960’s again.

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.

For anyone else curious, just found an article on this: http://time.com/4501670/bombings-of-america-burrough/

We shouldn't be the pot calling the kettle black. This place is an echo chamber on a variety of topics to the same extent or worse than I've ever seen on FB or Reddit.

I think the difference is that only individual posts get downvoted here.

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.

>Unpopular opinions on HN get downvoted to invisibility

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?

I have no idea if there's a perceived difference in how I'm saying things, but I definitely notice that the unpopular opinions I hold get downvoted to invisibility.

Do you have some examples of that? Links? I should do an Ask about it I guess.. Examples seem hard to come by.

check my comment history and see the numerous downvoted comments ;)

Agreed there is a difference. Not so much agreed that it meaningfully suppresses the echo chamber effect. The ultimate result is the same. That which sufficiently differs with the views of the majority of the people on this site tends to be seen less, or not at all depending on the extent of the disagreement. Except for us heretics with showdead enabled.

agreed. But the majority here define the "acceptable" opinions, not the individual.

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.

> But the majority here define the "acceptable" opinions, not the individual.

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.