I don't think hubski is an echo chamber, but I've seen it happen a few times on a lot of other sites. A community adopts a certain 'vibe' and then carries that out to extremes, which effectively shuts down discourse, because actors in agreement feedback into each other, while different opinions get squelched or destroyed. And eventually the ONLY content that exists serves to continue the echo.
How can this be prevented? Does anyone have any relevant experiences?
From Hubski's Primer Page: Some people disagree with this, but so far it's been working.Another misconception is that following users creates an "echo chamber." In fact, we feel that communities centered around topics are much more likely to become echo chambers, as people of like minds gather in the same place. It's very rare that an atheist subscribes to a Catholic board or vise versa. By following users that are looking to post, share, and engage with thoughtful content, the diversity of content and perspectives tends to be greater.
kind of the million dollar question, isn't it? I don't think there's an easy answer. I think the fact that eventually all communities homogenize and die gives most community planners ample reason to study the issue. That said, I think if you look at the differences between a geographic community and an internet community, the biggest difference is friction. If your community is "Sedona" you had to move there. You had to sign up for electricity, phone, television, internet, garbage service. You found the restaurants, you found your favorite parks, you found the speedtraps. If your community is "Reddit"....
If your community is Sedona, your neighbors might annoy you but you shop at the same grocery store, you stop at the same stop signs, you vote in the same elections, the same rain falls on you all. Loudmouths are bitched about around the dinner table, not the commons. Everyone just wants to get along and enjoy the community. You're all invested in it, economically, socially, emotionally. If your community is Reddit... This is part of what the points systems endemic to internet communities attempt to curb. They are "investment." However, they're not the same "investment" as "I can't move because I really like the Thai food down the street." What you need is something "sticky" to cause people to do things they don't want to do in places they don't want to leave. You need things to be difficult to set up and difficult to break down (ever tried to leave Facebook?) You need a social structure that causes people who don't agree and won't agree to somehow have to agree in order to participate in the commons. The problem most internet communities face is their emphasis on fluidity, on ease, on transactional utility. Most real communities emphasize those things that cannot leave their community (parks, shops, restaurants, scenery). You're "stuck there" and have to deal with people's bullshit. Of course, it's generally something other than "people's bullshit" that attracted you in the first place. With online communities, it's all about the bullshit. And since it's so easy to come and go, the only people left after a while are the bullshitters. The trick, then, is to add some sort of inherent value that emphasizes transactional friction - aka politeness, opposing viewpoints, etc. And I have no idea how to accomplish that.
As I see it, part of the problem with most aggregator communities is that they lack context. It's easy to be a dick because you don't have to see the person your being a dick to ever again. This is why the emphasis on following users exists on Hubski. Through repeated interactions a context begins to form between users. eventually, in some cases this context can be governed by mutual respect and even friendship. You have skin in the game because while you have an anonymous username you have context and an equity of good will built in to that name. I don't want to start-over in another community and not because of fake internet points but because I've amassed relationships here which can provide a context around discussions on multiple topics. Protecting this as we scale becomes the priority IMO. I often say that structurally we are far more like twitter in some ways than we are reddit. -on my phone so apologies for any errors.
I'd usually heard the echo chamber described as more local than all of reddit: it's /r/conspiracy+alexjones+moonlanding, /r/liberalism+antigmos+politics, /r/guns+conservatism+alabama, /r/sanfrancisco+startups+paulgraham. The counter to that is +random, +bestof (In theory), and +news (In theory). At hubski, /r/guns becomes #guns, but mk is much more complex, and the hope is that mk + kleinbl00 + OftenBen ends up as a union of #economics + #selfdefense + #foodforthought + #filmindustry + #altgov.
Intellectually curious people tend to seek a diversity of thought and opinion. The important thing to do is to support this tendency. I've come to realize (and have been brought around to the opinion) that tags are a useful tool for improving diversity of content. I have no control over who is going to post an article tagged #economics, and it ends up in my feed. No one has control over it. I used to fret that tags introduced a community aspect to Hubski posts that would lead to a tragedy-of-the-commons (subreddit death by popularity) effect. However, my thinking on it has evolved. People that typically flock to a topic are those that are curious about it, and/or those that have a personal stake in it. More so than a lack of diversity, ideologues can bring about an echo chamber. However, to do so, they have to be able to control the content that others see. If the overall effect of users seeking and rewarding diversity of content outstrips the ability of others to suppress diversity, then we should be able to avoid them. At this point, I think we are ok. Of course, I could be wrong about this.
Honestly, there isn't anything that can truly stop it. If hubski wanted to figure out a solution it would probably involve with a clean slate per say. Think about it for a second. With more and more users joining (including myself) the more narrow hubski becomes with small user groups that tend to negate discussion that are not of their taste. It's just high school all over again, but on a scale that is much slower and far more diverse. You can only hope that it doesn't gain speed and the community in itself is very, and boy do I mean very, open minded.
It's kind of like death, or entropy. Things die. You have to keep pumping life into it in order to keep things flowing.
I think that's a problem with civilization in general. It's how people work. I think we'd have to change human nature entirely in order to completely get rid of the echo problem.
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.
I think adding new influence halts the echo chamber effect. Everything hasn't developed into an echo chamber because humanity has been constantly expanding. We find new ideas, those ideas settle, and then we find new ones again. The echo chamber effect happens when you stop adding new ideas.
From what I've seen, the only way to deal with it is to add outside influence. You have to keep adding new voices, new ideas. The "Echo Chamber" question is basically asking how to prevent growth from halting. When you have a limited number of people discussing a topic long enough they will eventually reach a point where they can agree with each other.