So if most people want to be sheep they can and will, but it isn't an inherent property of the medium.
Sites like 4Chan end up with a uniform tone because trolling, immaturity, and vulgarity will cause anyone with higher standards to quickly self-select away from the site. The content trends toward a sort of stability around content that repels people who don’t want to see it. Bad behavior is essentially rewarded by reinforcing the echo chamber.
Similar patterns occur on alternative sites created to escape moderation on popular platforms: Voat was created to escape perceived unfair moderation on Reddit, but quickly became an echo chamber of all the terrible content that Reddit wouldn’t tolerate. A similar story is playing out with the new TheMotte website that left Reddit, which is systematically collecting all of the people with terrible, racist opinions who weren’t welcome on the Reddit equivalent.
Self-/unmoderated ideals always reminds me of this:
> The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
* https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/01/neutral-vs-conservativ...
That's a very interesting observation.