I’m happy to go back to IRC and curated forums (and I guess usenet if I must). I still belong to some smaller forum sites. As long as a way to find those sites exists, it’s fine.
Bye. Just leave it to the bots. The way forward is decentralised systems run by people who care about civilised discourse. Like Lemmy and Mastodon. Fuck the toxic dinosaur social media empires.
To be honest, I was hoping for a little more engagement with the fact that the polarization (or, dare I say, radicalization) under discussion seems inherent to online spaces of any sort, and decentralized spaces aren’t immune to it.
I agree that “run by people who care” is important, but I’m not sure it’s the answer in and of itself.
I’m also don’t think that a certain degree of polarization is inherently a bad thing. But I think it deserves more examination that a simple dismissal as something other platforms have to reckon with.
There are absolutely echo chambers and polarization on Lemmy. It’s definitely less noticeable than Reddit or Facebook, but its still there. They can definitely be good things too, but when the conversation is driven by one or a few people and everyone else constantly agrees or goes along with the status quo it becomes a problem.
For profit models seem to prioritize engagement over moderation, as long as people are commenting and driving engagement, even if it’s largely negative, toxic, or even completely false, it’s okay.
On Lemmy, at least for the most part, Toxic behaviour isn’t tolerated and most communities are pretty good at discouraging false narratives. I don’t think I’ve ever felt attacked here, or really elsewhere on Lemmy, for providing my views in a comment section like I did on Reddit, even if they were contrary to the prevailing opinions. When attacks and negativity are not tolerated actual discussion is much easier.
Yeah, that’s similar to my own thinking. To take the coffeehouse example from the article, if my local coffeehouse were to become a wretched hive of scum and villainy, I would probably stop going there.
And it’s not the fault of much-hated algorithms, non-chronological feeds, or our human proclivity for seeking out negativity. Rather, the dynamics that give rise to all those negative outcomes are structurally embedded in the very architecture of social media.
I wonder who architected social media to have all of these negative aspects embedded 🤔
There’s some real interesting stuff in here.
It doesn’t take much to destabilize or stabilize the system, Törnberg found. Even if the threshold for disagreement was quite low, the disagreements became amplified to the point where each random interaction was increasingly likely to exceed those thresholds. More and more users were pushed to relocate until what was once a community with a solid diversity of opinion rapidly became polarized and/or overly homogenous.
Conversely, if just 10 percent of users in a given social media community largely agree with your stances, you will be more tolerant toward diverse opinions that contradict your own. “There’s a certain chance that some users will end up in communities where it’s very homogenous and 99 percent of users are disagreeing with them,” said Törnberg. “That will cause them to leave, and you get this feedback effect just because of the structure of interaction. But if you have a filter bubble effect, where everyone is shown 10 percent of their own type, that creates a possibility for you to find the people who you agree with within the community. And that stabilizes the entire dynamics so it doesn’t tip over to one side or the other and become extreme or overly homogenous.”
Törnberg found some confirmation of those dynamics when he analyzed an actual online echo chamber: the subreddit r/MensRights. He found that members of the subreddit were more likely to leave if their posts diverged too far, linguistically, from the community’s center of gravity.
“Who are the users leaving the community?” said Törnberg. “The users that are more ideologically distant are more likely to leave. So it captures the same mechanism of feedback dynamics, where the community becomes more homogenous and more extreme because users leave—[and they leave] because they feel it’s becoming too homogenous and extreme. Eventually it tips over to one direction. And of course, as the community becomes more extreme, there’s this boiling the frog effect where the users who stay are influenced by the community and become more extreme.”
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