Or do people think that Lemmy is a neutral, open-minded, safe community? Not like evil Reddit.
EDIT: Talking about mainstream instances like ml or world.
See examples of violent comments towards me and instead of mods removing their comments, they removed mine.
The comment that the all caps person was replying to was me saying that there are non-human targets. Users were assuming I want to kill people and turns out they are the ones that want to kill.
I would argue that the open and often extreme hostility towards ideas that go against the group consensus still make it more of an echochamber. Like, for example, if you say something positive about AI and are spammed with deaththreats and other bad-faith character attacks, you’re not going to stick around, and even if you do, you’re not going to feel safe expressing that opinion, and that option will be effectively stompped out. This sort of behaviour is still very common, even outside of .ml, and just because some topics are more free than Reddit, doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist.
I find the mods heavy on banning death threats. I also consider your example of AI pile-ons to be unpopular, not an echochamber. The distinction is important.
The distinction is in the civility, not the topic. I just used AI because its one of the worst for it right now. People tend to see liking AI (or not hating it enough) as a good reason to attack people - again, not just death threats, but things like attacks on character, or other toxic behaviour. For a more mundane example, there was recently a post on the No Stupid Questions community, asking how Christians could justify not being homophobic or anti-abortion. The question itself, despite its validity, is downvoted significantly, and about half the responses are edgy, unhelpful quips rather than genuine attempts to answer the question - many of which with positive scores. That sort of thing is widespread, which quashes genuine discorse, thus, creates an echochamber.
I see. Good points all around. But I would not consider than an echochamber. That is just a diversity of respondants, many of which are poor quality and low effort.
Some because they are low intellect. Some are children. Some are edgelords and shitposters just trying to provoke for shits and giggles. Some just find the questions so obviously out of whack, that they presume OP to be a shitposter, and respond in kind. Lots of reasons, similar results. I noted a few recent ask lemmy questions where the questions were so malformed, people couldn’t tell it it was a bot, esl, neurodiversity etc and made jokes about op. That’s a case of garbage in/garbage out. While not cool, if you can’t be bothered to make a quality question, you can’t insist on a quality answer.
For reference: I go with the standard def:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_chamber_(media)
That which reinforces bias from innapropriate confirmation or unduly limits discussion of counter views.
The problem is that if that toxicity is widespread enough, and accepted enough, it does interfere with any discussion of opposing viewpoints. When helpful comments that advance the discussion are consistently burried under dozens of unhelpful ones, it makes it difficult to have a meaningful discussion, and incentivses those whose opinions that go against the ingrained group-think to leave. Akin to the Nazi bar allegory, allowing that sort of toxicity to fester just chases off anyone who doesn’t want to join in, leading to a echo-chamber.
Fair point. But how to distinguish it from unpopularity? If the “toxic” waste is disingenuous, bad faith, bot based flooding, we have the tools to suppress it. If something is just genuinely unpopular, you have to be careful calling it an echo-chamber. Lots of folks think toxic of anything that disagrees with their obviously superior opinions.
There is no perfect answer. Garbage in, garbage out. Welcome to humanity.