My feeling is that the world at large underestimates the impact of social media and Hacker news overestimates it. Not sure how to rate the infulential-ness of different media, but Fox News was HUGELY influential to the voters that decided the last presidential election: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/4/18249847/fox-news-effect-swing-...

I think "worldview media" is a more appropriate term for the phenomenon.

What form it takes isn't as important as the fact that it supplies enough content / entertainment / methods of consumption that one can subscribe to it and have 100% of their bandwidth filled, to the exclusion of competing narratives.

Talk radio was an imperfect expression of this, because radio isn't portable in the same way that app-based social media + mobile devices / Fox News are.

But it's entirely possible to prevent someone from ever being exposed to a contrary narrative, simply by filling all their available time.

Media, generally, catalyzes and facilitates social change, often in bad ways.

That's the central premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (1980) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/printing-press-as-an-ag...

I've compiled a related bibliography that gets at other aspects, including social and online media.

https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...

Is there a breakdown by subreddit? I'm curious how popular the adult reddits are.