this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2024
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Showerthoughts
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But those echo chambers are a normal result of human interaction, from the friends you choose, to the events and bars/clubs you frequent, to the magazines and papers/websites you read.
Echo chambers will naturally occur as long as people can choose who to follow or read or otherwise consume or connect with.
The only system to prevent this would be to always force every flavor of everything to anybody, removing every way to filter or freedom to choose who to follow and what to hear/consume. And that sounds very dystopian and fascist to my ears.
Idk about fascist but it certainly makes vulnerable groups open to harassment.
That too, yes!
I agree wholeheartedly
Fascist? Are you fucking kidding me? You're literally just describing newspapers, broadcast news, town criers, and literally all life pre-internet.
Filter bubbles occur because we have the ability to selectively choose to only hear news we like which is a new phenomena that is a result of the internet, because it is fundamentally a messaging system, not a broadcast system like virtually every news system throughout history.
You are just falling into the American trap that personal freedom is the ultimate good and should trump everything else, even if the systemic effects of it are bad.
Reddit / Lemmy are fundamentally not a good place to read the news and get informed because of the filter bubble effect. They're a good place to go have an in-depth discussion about an article, but if you actually want to be informed then you should use an RSS reader or something else that gives you a chronological feed, not one based on what's popular amongst people you already agree with.
I fear you misunderstood me. Fascist would be if choice would be forbidden, when everyone would have to always hear every side of every topic.
Even with newspapers and the like are filter bubbles possible. I am free to buy only the newspaper who writes the stories in the way I want to read them. There are left wing newspapers and right wing newspapers and stuff in between. And even with newspapers and broadcasts you are still free to only consume what you want to consume and block, by not buying or active ignoring, what you not want to see or hear. Things like cracker-barrel philosophy or Stammtischparolen where a thing long before the Internet.
Echo chambers are a normal part of being human, it exists in small (only between friends),huge (tribes/nations/cults/religions) and anything in between more or less as long as humans are able to communicate.
Are you arguing that the filter bubble effect is the same for a newspaper and for a social media site?
Yes, the filter bubble effect is still possible to some extent with a traditional chronological news feed, but it's quite frankly absurd on it's face to claim that that is the same severity of filter bubble, when a site like Reddit / Lemmy operates by taking those chronological news feeds and filtering them further.
The Guardian might be a relatively true neutral newspaper (meaning it appears to lean left by mainstream standards), and yet articles it publishes that back up any remotely right wing / economically conservative points do not get posted here.
Echo chambers naturally arose in the past because information could not travel freely, that does not mean they are a good thing or something that we should be recreating and reinforcing on the internet now that it can.
I never said that they are a good thing, I say they are a natural occurrence, something that only can prevented by a very dystopian system.
Because people will always filter what they want to hear and consume, and with that create filter bubbles. If you went to church (regardless of the specific religion) you enter a filter bubble. If you talk with people on a rave you are in a completely different filter bubbles then in a country music bar. Filter bubbles are all around us and yes the Internet is, by its nature, a magnifying glass for this effect. But it inherent to the human nature not inherent to the Internet. So to prevent filter bubbles you would have to radically change the human nature.
We're not talking about every possible aspect of life. We're talking about the choice we make in how we consume news. One way leads to more of a filter bubble, one way leads to less of one. Everything else you're saying is just besides the point justification for why you wanna choose the one that leads to more of a filter bubble.
And I use my filter bubble power just now and here I think. Have a nice rest of your life