Sketch! They're talking about us on reddit r/ireland

Kilboor wrote: »

any opinions that are shared by anything less than 51% of the userbase are downvoted and hidden

That's my major issue with Reddit(not just the Ireland sub). It actively encourages echo chambers. Oh you certainly get echo chamber threads, even forums here and on any old style forum layout, the significant difference being because of the chronological non down/upvote layout you can't avoid reading contrary opinions to your own*. This is a good thing.

That said it seems outside of a pretty brief time in internetland where contrary discussion was popular nowadays it's clear people increasingly gravitate towards echo chambers of views they already believe in, where any dissent is downvoted, blocked, or never invited to join in the first place. Though you could argue that's the more natural state of man anyway. Beyond adolescence where people try on different hats to see what suits them, people tend to gravitate towards people who are similar, birds of a feather and all that. By adulthood most people's views are pretty set, by middle age those views are set in stone, rooted to deep foundations in concrete and that's comfortable for them and can be extremely uncomfortable for them to grapple with anything that questions those views.

Time is another factor. On Reddit a thread can vanish very quickly into the ether, so you can get a lot of repetition, whereas you can have threads here going back many years that are added to daily. In more technical subs for enthusiasts and the like both the "accepted view" and quickly fading threads can mean an awful lot of bad information rises to the top and becomes the Truth.





*Unless you go on a ignore poster spree, in which case your opinions are delicate anyway.