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veen  ·  3610 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How does an (online) community avoid the 'Echo Chamber' effect?

No, that's far too simplified, I think. By that logic, either everything would have been an echo chamber ages ago or it is a process so slow that thousands of years of human development didn't progress it fast enough. If it's inherent to civilization and growing ever-faster over long periods of time, either the effect has happened, isn't strong enough, or it isn't inherent to civilization. I think it's the latter.

An echo chamber effect happens when the community has a way of propagating opinions in a distinct direction and there is no significant counterforce. E.g: the opinion Potatoes are delicious is propagated in /r/potato because of people upvoting them, and there is no good counteraction because the people disagreeing with that statement probably aren't in /r/potato. So to answer the question of how to prevent an echo chamber is -I think- simply to do the opposite of what I just described: make sure opinions don't all have a similar direction, (e.g. all good or all bad) and make sure proper discussion is possible through counterarguments.