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Big Tech Wants You Trapped. The Open Web Sets You Free (www.joanwestenberg.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 83 points 2 years ago (35 children)

I hope more active users move to the fediverse. That way we will have a lot of variety in content and can also potentially prevent communities from becoming echo chambers. I suppose moderation will also have to be taken up a notch for these changes to actually have a positive effect.

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  • [–] 25 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    prevent communities from becoming echo chambers

    I suspect this will still become a problem since we can subscribe to whichever communities we like and vice versa.

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  • [–] 20 points 2 years ago

    It is a feature, not a problem.

    I have, like, this whole rich life offline. My curated list of instances and communities (plus my user block list) is just my entertainment and a small portion of my day.

    You may not believe this but I have numerous thoughts, activities and interactions that never leave a trace online. I have no obligation to drink from the firehose that is being pumped from the septic tank of the human psyche.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    @Flagstaff @gunpachi I'm not sure echo chambers are inherently a bad thing. My real life is a carefully crafted echo chamber of people I like to spend time with (which conveniently includes my family). The problem comes when we get *all* our information from that echo chamber.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    I agree with what you are saying. What I really meant is that every community should have some amount of people who think differently and see things from a different perspective. This can help widen the variety of posts, comments and even sources used for citations.

    For instance, here on lemmy I've noticed a tendency for people to see things from a political viewpoint and don't hesitate to start a flame war in the comments. Maybe the average user will feel more welcome to express their opinions if they see that the existing users are open minded. Thankfully most communities I'm a part of are very nice, more so than their reddit counterparts.

    P.S: forgive me if there are any logical inconsistencies in my comment. I might be a little intoxicated.

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    Echo chambers are not bad when the echo is due to the majority opinions being in favor of basic human rights and equality. Giving voice to those that spew hate is not conducive to going anywhere except a circle.

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  • [+] -9 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    And you will be the one deciding what constitutes hate, whose voice to cut off?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    The community tends to vote with the little arrows.

    And thankfully, hate is pretty easy to identify. Take any group of people, if you don’t like one in particular, the whole group, that’s hate. I don’t like trans people. I don’t like black people. See? It’s easy.

    There is acceptable hate, and that’s based on human morality. I hade racists. I hate pedos.

    If everyone lived with that simple philosophy in mind, love thy fellow humans, not hate (except you, pedos) then the world would be a better place.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    Also, more active users means more niche communities. I just realized there’s a Severance community that is medium active. One less thing I need Reddit for.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Niche communities are awesome ! Sadly reddit is still the king in this aspect.

    Maybe in a few years lemmy will reach that level or even surpass it... One can dream.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    It is interesting that forums had less people but felt very active and didn't need the millions of people that places like modern day social media do.

    And I think big part of it is the presentation of material with threads that get bumped up when people comment and can keep going on for years.

    In reddit type social media a thread is considered dead after like a day or less, so needing a new one even if it is the same topic to start up conversation again. Even more the case for one off comment type social media like mastodon.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    Another thing is google results. When I want a recommendation for anything I will add “Reddit” to my query. This is because I know it will return great recommendations and conversations that help me decide. Hopefully I will eventually be able to just use Lemmy for this.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    In case you didn't know, You can get lemmy posts by adding the following to a search query -

    site:lemmy.world

    You can replace with the lemmy instance url of your choosing (or any url for that matter).

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    I used to spend tons of time on forums 20 or so years ago. Social media killed many of those off, but there’s no reason that something else can’t do the same thing - be it Lemmy communities or something else.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 years ago

    I hear echo chamber brought up a lot but never really have seen examples of a place that doesn't have an echo chamber.

    I think that's just the natural result of people forming communities as opposed seeking out battle grounds for adversaries.

    Only thing that can be done is offering people the tools to freely form as many communities as they want with the main barrier being who feels compelled to join the new echo chamber community.

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  • [+] -8 points 2 years ago (12 children)

    Why moderation? The old internet didn't have moderation. Why does everyone feel the need for moderation?

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago

    The old internet was hidden behind dial-up modems and TCP-IP stacks and weird telnet and usenet protocols. This complexity worked as a filter and the people using it were mostly academics, students, techies and other nerds (me amongst them). The moment uncle Bob could poke his way through social media on his phone from the shitter, the whole thing cascaded into Eternal September and "the old internet" was lost forever.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago* (7 children)

    Trolls, bots, and scammers make them necessary at a minimum, and then the subliminal messaging from the cronies of politicians, etc. make them welcome. Bots are easier to make than ever before so you can't compare the past with the present that easily. kbin.social died last year because of relentless spam bots posting garbage/malware links 100x/sec.

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  • [+] -9 points 2 years ago* (6 children)

    Computer bots always act a certain predictable way. You can filter out most bots easily based on time-based filters or other algorithms. The rest should not be moderated, except for illegal things like selling weapons, drugs, or hiring a hitman.

    Moderation is a skippery slope. Everyone wants to moderate something different. Rights want to moderates Lefts, Lefts want to moderate Rights. Moderators have the power to decide which side they are on. If we had clear laws that forbid most moderation, there would not be any discussion about it anymore. Just allow everything and deal with it.

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  • [+] 10 points 2 years ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And the extremism follow.

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  • [–] -1 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    That's fine by me. I'm capable of ignoring that. Call me anything you want. Insult my family, my life, my person, my culture; I literally don't care. I'm either going to ignore you or respond accordingly. Let the extremist come in. Everyone that can't handle it is a weak wimp that isn't worthy of the free internet.

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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago

    I don't know what old internet you used, but the IRC channels and forums I used to run around on definitely had moderation. This was about '97. Maybe you're talking about the late 80s when barely anybody knew the Internet even existed and it was just academics and ubernerds?

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