In no particular order, and not an all-inclusive list:
- How about some stories about all the women who recently joined Bluesky and describe how they don’t get rape threats on the site from MAGA C.H.U.D.s?
- I bet if you told dissidents during the Cold War that there was a place (even just a virtual one) where you could talk with other people opposing the governing regime and avoid the regime’s propaganda, they wouldn’t have called that an echo chamber.
- It’s pissing off people who have gone full 8chan–and the number of people who now think it’s acceptable to do that is astonishingly high. I don’t even know how we resocialize these people.
- All of the pundits who business model was to ride the outrage/quotetweet cycle are at a loss as people just block or mute them. This is a very good thing.
- I still wonder how different things would be if the Bluesky block had been instituted at Twitter (it wasn’t just the Nazis that made Twitter unenjoyable.
- Related to the above, when you build a social media architecture whose design isn’t to maximize use of the platform and that inhibits trolls, it doesn’t suck for most users. People even like it.
mikethemadbiologist
I still struggle to grasp how people can believe that “the left” is monolithic (let alone “the media”). Democrats as a party attempt to represent the entire political spectrum from hard-conservative-just-not-completely-insane all the way over to anarcho-socialist-but-still-willing-to-vote. Poorly, obviously, but they try.
The difference here is that of sermons versus debates. The echo chambers of the lunatic right became that way because their “thought leaders” are essentially cult leaders instructing their flock in the One True Way. They tend not to confront or attack each other unless their grifts interfere, preferring instead to generate more otherizing bullshit that harmonizes. Even when they arrive at cross purposes, they attack past each other instead of addressing each others’ points. Not that they have points, but their fascist fever hallucinations are used as if they were points.
Now certainly there are those on the left that follow the CT / cult pattern, but they fail to drive larger followings because of one key factor: critical thinking. The ability to hear a thing and consider whether or how accurate it might be appears to be vanishingly rare on the right. An environmentalist and a feminist and an economist (of the non-captured variety) can sit down and have a conversation about the intersections of their interests, meaningful conversations that might lead them to change opinions or perspectives. Such a thing is unpossible for a person who derives their attention and importance by boldly declaring the sky is green (or that vaccines cause autism or that fluoridated water is poisoning our childrens’ precious bodily fluids) and getting a few million rubes to agree.
Proper blocking on a platform means the people who can only get attention by being dicks will instead get what they deserve: to be ignored. We must not tolerate intolerance. They’re certainly welcome to express their opinions in a way that doesn’t make everyone else want to gouge out their own eyes and ears; what they lack is the ability.