Ask Lemmy
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The internet only allows people to form more niche echo chambers. It does as much or more to challenge them though. All of us grew up in echo chambers of one or another. They predate the internet by millennia.
Politics has also been a 2 party thing for Americas entire history. The names change but it's always two. Modern magats are no different than the rural rubes taken advantage of by wealthy southerners in the civil war.
The reason wealthy powerful politicians don't address base problems. Is because that's often them. We replaced one wealthy ruling elite for a slightly less narrow group of wealthy powerful elite. Thinking it would resolve all our problems in the long term. But the problem was never the number of wealthy ruling elites. The problem was the wealthy ruling Elite.
Disagree. YouTube recommends me a lot of videos about science, Linux, nerd stuff, certain kinds of politics... It's an entirely different feed for my wife with her interests matched. Also my 65 yo relatives read completely different news articles than the ones I read. Same with Instagram, TokTok and Telegram groups they're a member of. It's not a slightly more niche thing, it's a completely different perspective on the world and what's important.
10 years ago we all used to watch the same 8 'o clock news... It has completely changed.
And it's on an entire different level than 15 years ago when the choice was like 5 different newspapers with a slightly different political focus. You're right that echo chambers, tribalism and groups have always existed. But the internet did quite something and brought it to a whole next level. Mass media is close to dead and it's the recommendation algorithm of the tech companies who shape the perspectives of most of the people. Tailored to their filter bubble.
And with the 2 party system and the politicians not addressing the problems... I agree. I think that's one of the major problems. And the USA has pioneered being an echo chamber for the "western world". I'd agree that it happened way earlier and is more pronounced than in other parts of the world. And these aren't healthy or sustainable dynamics.
I would propose that the echo chamber has just diversified, changed, become maybe more atomized. But it hasn't really gone away. The other guy is right, the nightly news was a huge echo chamber. America was totally hyped for the Iraq war in a post 9/11 world, if you pulled that shit nowadays, you'd probably see a pretty diversified set of opinions due to the death of the monoculture. Whether or not that's good or bad, or is dissolving the social fabric and sense of a shared culture, is a different kind of conversation that I'd also have, but the echo chambers themselves, they've been around.
Hmm. I can relate more to that. I myself think these are two different (somwehat related) problems. However, with very different consequences...
One large echo chamber (or a handful) isn't good.
But replacing that with many indivudial echo chambers isn't good either.
Having a large one will do those mass dynamics. And it won't lead you towards truth or progress.
Individual echo chambers have the effect that people now can't find a factual basis to base their conversation on. People won't be able to handle dissent anymore or talk to other groups / generations. I suppose in the US you have two large groups who can't agree on anything anymore, dragging everyone down in the process. I think these issues are closely related. And from my perspective it looks like the situation hasn't been that bad before.
I think it's two seperate topics. Neither one is a good replacement for the other.
In the end the internet has the capability to connect people. To make lots of diverse information available to everyone. But it can also be used to spread misinformation and feed narrow perspectives to people. I think the internet is a great tool to get us towards enlightenment. The echo chambers and recommendations are two steps back, however.
Yeah, it's just pretty tough to get people wormed out of those short term benefit incentive structures, and it's also pretty hard to sort through an excessive overabundance of content. Like half the reason tiktok is so popular is because it doesn't require that you really do much to interact with the app, it just serves you automatically as long as you scroll and watch content. It's like a three button operation, basically. It's pretty hard to get consumers to not act outside of their own immediate instincts when that's what they've been programmed to do.
I also don't have the answer to that problem. I get that nobody can put in the effort to verify all information they get. Not even curate what they want to see and what to skip. And I get that you sometimes want convenience. But I think sometimes it comes at a high price. I'm really not okay that most of the platforms most of us use on a daily basis are owned and designed by a few large companies. That they exploit short time incentives as you said (and human psychology.) I don't think that's healthy or sustainable for the people or society. And it feels to me like we've been there. Before the Age of Enlightenment when other people guided us and our access to information. Difference is, back then the monarch forced people. Now it's not a monarch and they have more elaborate means and people follow willingly.
That's also why I'm here and not on Reddit or Facebook or TikTok. I'm aware that I can't escape being subject to my own small world and echo chambers. But at least this way I'm choosing them myself and not being fed that by Meta or Google. And I suppose it's a bit less confined because the Fediverse was designed with other goals in mind.
I mean I dunno, in some ways I think the fediverse might be worse, right? If I'm on reddit, then I have to intentionally go to r/the Donald or whatever, and manually block the shit from appearing on my page, if that were to happen (it probably won't unless I seek it out, but yeah). With the drivers, after choosing your instance, you just don't see, say, posts from hexbear or whatever. NSFW posts, whatever, whatever they decided to defederate with. So it kinda just seems like a continuation of the atomization, a continuation of the fracturing of the information landscape, the continuation of the death of the monoculture.
At the same time, Reddit also sucks. You really don't need a complicated system to create these perverse incentive structures, anyone who's used reddit could probably already tell you the relatively obvious set of disadvantages that are incurred by the platform, that lend themselves towards echo chambers. Downvoted posts don't float to the top, which means they aren't seen, certain users are given priority based on the historical consistency of their ability to get upvotes, and overall the platform is going to consistently cater towards the lowest combo dominator. Lemmy hasn't really solved any of those problems with the inherent structure, there, of like a "pure" democratic system online. It's only really solved, like, selecting for only privacy councious Linux tech bro libs on this instance, and then selecting for revolutionary cosplay commies on the other couple. And then Germans, also, somehow.
Even with that simple of a structure, it doesn't work. I could spell out similar problems with the way 4chan is structured, and that site is basically just like, first come first serve, as simple as it gets. To solve these problems, you have to introduce more complicated mechanisms, but to introduce more complicated regulatory mechanisms, you introduce probably more obfuscation and probably more centralization of power.
As far as I can tell, without majorly changing the economic structure of our society, and the set of behaviors and incentives that are created as a result of that structure, nothing on the Internet is really going to change. The user behavior is shaped by the environment, usually not the other way around, so much. I dunno, I'm kind of a boomer when it comes to this stuff specifically. It's nice to be able to not pay 50 bucks to get a manual for my car, though, so that's not nothing.
Hehe. You're right. Lemmy certainly isn't the pinnacle of communication platforms. I kind of have my hopes up for a worthy successor... The Piefed people seem to have some good ideas.
Ultimately there isn't a technical solution to everything. Could be very well the case that platforms, individual behaviour and society needs to change. In order to achieve change.
I like this threaded structure of conversation. And Lemmy is okay. It's not perfect but I occasionally enjoy spending some of my time here. I hope it's going to improve and the community might do, too. I'm not aware of any better alternative.
I don't think the Fediverse is "worse" than something else... It's a good idea and approach. But it's more complicated than just that.
And I'd also like more democracy on the internet. And the place being built for the people, not any advertisers or other stakeholders... Technically that should be possible. The Fediverse isn't there (yet) but I think it has some potential to go that direction. At least technologically.