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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • 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.

    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.




  • 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.




  • Hell, NK joining the war is an escalation by both NK and Russia. Does this justify NATO adding Ukraine just for them to immediately invoke article 5? I don’t think so.

    Here’s the thing, if Ukraine just invaded Kursk, unprompted, and Russia used North Korean troops to push them back into Ukraine, it would be problematic because of the sanctions against North Korea, but it would not be an escalation, it would merely be Russia’s allies helping it to defend itself.

    The reality though, because Russia is in Ukraine, is that those troops, even if they’re only deployed to Kursk, are done so to free up more Russian troops to invade Ukraine. Which makes it a massive escalation of the invasion of Ukraine no matter what.

    NATO troops (or planes if we were to impose a no fly zone), would, however, still be purely defensive. Hell, ask Ukraine to give up Kursk for direct Nato support and they would in a second.









  • I don’t think there’s any less karma farming on here. People still look at their up and downvotes, and I don’t think there was a legitimate industry for selling high karma accounts on Reddit. Not one that would make a difference at scale anyways.

    The problem with Mastodon and Twitter is structural, it’s based around following people, not topics. It is inherently problematic because a) personalities and status get elevated over the logic of the argument, b) following people instead of topics inherently feeds people’s egos in a problematic way, and c) a given person can use their followers problematically (brigading, etc). On Reddit / Lemmy by following decentralized topics it eliminates or reduces most of these effects, though the mods controlling each subreddit can exercise some of the same influence.


  • Reddit’s early days were also far more left leaning then they eventually became.

    When you have a small niche of nerds who enjoy discussing topics and ideas, then far right wing points will get downvoted to hell because they are, quite frankly, dumb, divorced from logic and the real world, and don’t stand up to actual critical scrutiny.

    Reddit got more right leaning as it grew and expanded into the general population and more dummies started upvoting dumb posts, then got more right leaning when right wing political orgs took notice and started trying to influence it, and now seems even more right leaning because they’ve changed their algorithms to prioritize controversial comments and posts that get people angry because it boosts engagement.