#echochambers — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #echochambers, aggregated by home.social.
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DATE: May 23, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: What happens when people get downvoted on Reddit? Scientists uncovered a surprising answer
Receiving a thumbs-down on social media does not push people away from the conversation, but instead tends to encourage them to post more while softening their tone. A new study published in the Journal of Marketing Research provides evidence that negative peer feedback prompts users to remain engaged rather than retreating into isolated communities. These findings suggest that allowing downvotes on social platforms might help moderate extreme discussions without silencing individual voices.
Social media platforms continuously experiment with ways for users to interact and evaluate the posts of their peers. While almost all platforms feature a button to express approval, few allow people to explicitly express negative feedback. Recently, major networks like YouTube and X have explored adding dislike or downvote features to help regulate content.
“We started thinking about this after hearing about YouTube hiding the dislike count, and Twitter (now X) and TikTok testing downvote-style features,” said Jessica Fong, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business who is transitioning to the University of Maryland College Park. “We looked into the literature and it became clear there wasn’t much empirical evidence around the effects of downvotes on UGC. At the same time, there’s a lot of discourse about polarization and social media and dislikes have some pretty interesting implications, like whether allowing dislikes pushes users into echo chambers.”
UGC refers to user-generated content, which includes any comments or posts created by the platform’s community. Managers often worry that negative feedback might push these users into isolated groups of like-minded individuals. These isolated groups are often called echo chambers, which occur when people only interact with others who share their exact views. When individuals exist entirely within an echo chamber, it tends to increase political and social division.
To understand how negative feedback actually changes behavior in a real online environment, the scientists looked at Reddit. Reddit is a massive online message board organized into thousands of specific communities. These communities, known as subreddits, are places where users discuss everything from breaking news to niche personal hobbies. On Reddit, people can either upvote a post if they like it or downvote it if they dislike it.
The platform calculates a visible score for every comment by subtracting the downvotes from the upvotes. Additionally, each user has a public reputation score called karma. A person’s karma goes up when they receive upvotes across the site and goes down when they receive downvotes. The authors chose this environment because discussions are highly opinion-based, and the feedback system is publicly visible.
By analyzing how people react when their scores drop, the researchers aimed to see if negative feedback alters how often people post, where they post, and the emotional intensity of their writing. To explore these questions, the researchers tracked a sample of 17,525 Reddit users over a period of 61 days. They monitored these individuals on a daily basis to capture their ongoing habits.
The team collected data on nearly two million comments across more than 32,000 different subreddits. For every comment a user made, the scientists recorded the text, the community it belonged to, and how its upvote and downvote score changed over the following two weeks. Studying the direct impact of downvotes is complicated because people who post highly controversial opinions might naturally attract more negative feedback and also just post more often in general.
To isolate the specific effect of receiving negative feedback, the scientists used a psychological concept known as left-digit bias. Left-digit bias is the human tendency to pay the most attention to the first number in a sequence. For example, a price dropping from ten dollars to nine dollars feels much more significant than a drop from eleven dollars to ten dollars.
The authors applied this concept to Reddit karma. They assumed that a user would notice a drop in their karma much more if the first digit changed, such as falling from 101 to 99, compared to a drop from 102 to 100. Even though both examples represent a loss of two points, the change in the first digit makes the penalty feel much larger. By comparing users who experienced this highly noticeable drop in karma to those who experienced a less obvious drop of the exact same size, the researchers could measure how noticeable negative feedback changes behavior.
The scientists found that experiencing a noticeable drop in karma actually increases a user’s likelihood of posting again. “Downvotes don’t silence users. On Reddit, users who get downvoted actually post more afterward, not less,” Fong said. Rather than quitting the platform out of frustration, the users increased their overall content creation.
“We were initially surprised to find that getting more downvotes makes users post more on average. This pushed us to look more into the mechanism,” Fong said. “We find that people tend to post more because they’re trying to recover their reputation, which on Reddit is in the form of karma. They tend to post more after getting downvotes until their karma recovers to the level of before they got those downvotes.”
Next, the research team looked at where these individuals chose to post after being downvoted. A common worry is that people will leave the community that rejected their opinion and seek out an echo chamber where everyone agrees with them. The data provides evidence that this does not happen. Users continued to comment in the exact same communities where they received the negative feedback.
“Downvotes don’t appear to create or encourage echo chambers,” Fong said. “We don’t find evidence that users abandon the communities where they were downvoted. They keep engaging there while also branching into new spaces.” This detail is highly relevant for social media companies, as it implies that downvotes do not automatically cause people to segregate themselves into divided groups.
Finally, the authors analyzed how negative feedback changed the actual words people used. They wanted to know if getting downvoted made people double down on extreme opinions or if it encouraged them to soften their language. To measure this, the scientists used a machine-learning language tool to scan the text of the comments. This tool identifies the main topics of a sentence and assigns an intensity score based on how emotional or extreme the wording is.
For this part of the study, the researchers looked at what happened when a specific comment’s score dropped from a positive number into the negatives. They found that when an intensely worded comment was downvoted below zero, the user tended to moderate their tone the next time they mentioned that same topic. “Downvotes tend to moderate the tone of what users say next, especially when their original post was emotionally charged,” Fong said.
While these findings present an interesting perspective on platform design, there are some limitations to consider. “Our study is a case study on Reddit, so we must be careful in interpreting these effects on other social media platforms,” Fong said. “We expect these effects to generalize to settings where there is some kind of reputation, like on Reddit, but looking at whether these effects replicate in other settings would be an interesting avenue for future work.”
Looking ahead, the researchers are already expanding this line of inquiry. “My coauthors, Varad Deolankar and S. Sriram, are working on another project related to user-driven content and polarization, except this time we were interested in looking at content consumption rather than production,” Fong said. “We ask, how does the content platforms serve users, and how users interpret that content, drive polarization of beliefs?”
The research team is currently exploring how individual biases interact with platform algorithms. “This is ongoing work, but so far we find that people tend to put less weight on information that conflicts with their prior beliefs,” Fong said. “And this bias contributes to polarization nearly as much as algorithms do (algorithms have been commonly blamed for contributing to polarization).”
The authors are also looking into how different site metrics influence these outcomes. “We also ask whether the engagement metric a platform chooses to optimize (‘likes’ versus dwell time) matters. We find that it does,” Fong said. “Dwell-time-maximizing algorithms produce less polarization than like-maximizing ones. Part of the reason is that users dislike content that opposes their views but spend just as much time reading it as content they agree with, so an algorithm that maximizes dwell time is going to serve more opposing articles than articles that maximize likes.”
The study, “The Effect of Downvotes on Content Creation: Evidence from Social Media,” was authored by Varad Deolankar, Jessica Fong, and S. Sriram.
-------------------------------------------------
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NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot
Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
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It's primitive... but it works... mostly...
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Downvotes #RedditResearch #ContentCreation #KarmaSocialDynamics #EchoChambers #Polarization #NegativeFeedback #SocialMediaDesign #DwellTime #DislikeButton
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DATE: May 23, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: What happens when people get downvoted on Reddit? Scientists uncovered a surprising answer
Receiving a thumbs-down on social media does not push people away from the conversation, but instead tends to encourage them to post more while softening their tone. A new study published in the Journal of Marketing Research provides evidence that negative peer feedback prompts users to remain engaged rather than retreating into isolated communities. These findings suggest that allowing downvotes on social platforms might help moderate extreme discussions without silencing individual voices.
Social media platforms continuously experiment with ways for users to interact and evaluate the posts of their peers. While almost all platforms feature a button to express approval, few allow people to explicitly express negative feedback. Recently, major networks like YouTube and X have explored adding dislike or downvote features to help regulate content.
“We started thinking about this after hearing about YouTube hiding the dislike count, and Twitter (now X) and TikTok testing downvote-style features,” said Jessica Fong, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business who is transitioning to the University of Maryland College Park. “We looked into the literature and it became clear there wasn’t much empirical evidence around the effects of downvotes on UGC. At the same time, there’s a lot of discourse about polarization and social media and dislikes have some pretty interesting implications, like whether allowing dislikes pushes users into echo chambers.”
UGC refers to user-generated content, which includes any comments or posts created by the platform’s community. Managers often worry that negative feedback might push these users into isolated groups of like-minded individuals. These isolated groups are often called echo chambers, which occur when people only interact with others who share their exact views. When individuals exist entirely within an echo chamber, it tends to increase political and social division.
To understand how negative feedback actually changes behavior in a real online environment, the scientists looked at Reddit. Reddit is a massive online message board organized into thousands of specific communities. These communities, known as subreddits, are places where users discuss everything from breaking news to niche personal hobbies. On Reddit, people can either upvote a post if they like it or downvote it if they dislike it.
The platform calculates a visible score for every comment by subtracting the downvotes from the upvotes. Additionally, each user has a public reputation score called karma. A person’s karma goes up when they receive upvotes across the site and goes down when they receive downvotes. The authors chose this environment because discussions are highly opinion-based, and the feedback system is publicly visible.
By analyzing how people react when their scores drop, the researchers aimed to see if negative feedback alters how often people post, where they post, and the emotional intensity of their writing. To explore these questions, the researchers tracked a sample of 17,525 Reddit users over a period of 61 days. They monitored these individuals on a daily basis to capture their ongoing habits.
The team collected data on nearly two million comments across more than 32,000 different subreddits. For every comment a user made, the scientists recorded the text, the community it belonged to, and how its upvote and downvote score changed over the following two weeks. Studying the direct impact of downvotes is complicated because people who post highly controversial opinions might naturally attract more negative feedback and also just post more often in general.
To isolate the specific effect of receiving negative feedback, the scientists used a psychological concept known as left-digit bias. Left-digit bias is the human tendency to pay the most attention to the first number in a sequence. For example, a price dropping from ten dollars to nine dollars feels much more significant than a drop from eleven dollars to ten dollars.
The authors applied this concept to Reddit karma. They assumed that a user would notice a drop in their karma much more if the first digit changed, such as falling from 101 to 99, compared to a drop from 102 to 100. Even though both examples represent a loss of two points, the change in the first digit makes the penalty feel much larger. By comparing users who experienced this highly noticeable drop in karma to those who experienced a less obvious drop of the exact same size, the researchers could measure how noticeable negative feedback changes behavior.
The scientists found that experiencing a noticeable drop in karma actually increases a user’s likelihood of posting again. “Downvotes don’t silence users. On Reddit, users who get downvoted actually post more afterward, not less,” Fong said. Rather than quitting the platform out of frustration, the users increased their overall content creation.
“We were initially surprised to find that getting more downvotes makes users post more on average. This pushed us to look more into the mechanism,” Fong said. “We find that people tend to post more because they’re trying to recover their reputation, which on Reddit is in the form of karma. They tend to post more after getting downvotes until their karma recovers to the level of before they got those downvotes.”
Next, the research team looked at where these individuals chose to post after being downvoted. A common worry is that people will leave the community that rejected their opinion and seek out an echo chamber where everyone agrees with them. The data provides evidence that this does not happen. Users continued to comment in the exact same communities where they received the negative feedback.
“Downvotes don’t appear to create or encourage echo chambers,” Fong said. “We don’t find evidence that users abandon the communities where they were downvoted. They keep engaging there while also branching into new spaces.” This detail is highly relevant for social media companies, as it implies that downvotes do not automatically cause people to segregate themselves into divided groups.
Finally, the authors analyzed how negative feedback changed the actual words people used. They wanted to know if getting downvoted made people double down on extreme opinions or if it encouraged them to soften their language. To measure this, the scientists used a machine-learning language tool to scan the text of the comments. This tool identifies the main topics of a sentence and assigns an intensity score based on how emotional or extreme the wording is.
For this part of the study, the researchers looked at what happened when a specific comment’s score dropped from a positive number into the negatives. They found that when an intensely worded comment was downvoted below zero, the user tended to moderate their tone the next time they mentioned that same topic. “Downvotes tend to moderate the tone of what users say next, especially when their original post was emotionally charged,” Fong said.
While these findings present an interesting perspective on platform design, there are some limitations to consider. “Our study is a case study on Reddit, so we must be careful in interpreting these effects on other social media platforms,” Fong said. “We expect these effects to generalize to settings where there is some kind of reputation, like on Reddit, but looking at whether these effects replicate in other settings would be an interesting avenue for future work.”
Looking ahead, the researchers are already expanding this line of inquiry. “My coauthors, Varad Deolankar and S. Sriram, are working on another project related to user-driven content and polarization, except this time we were interested in looking at content consumption rather than production,” Fong said. “We ask, how does the content platforms serve users, and how users interpret that content, drive polarization of beliefs?”
The research team is currently exploring how individual biases interact with platform algorithms. “This is ongoing work, but so far we find that people tend to put less weight on information that conflicts with their prior beliefs,” Fong said. “And this bias contributes to polarization nearly as much as algorithms do (algorithms have been commonly blamed for contributing to polarization).”
The authors are also looking into how different site metrics influence these outcomes. “We also ask whether the engagement metric a platform chooses to optimize (‘likes’ versus dwell time) matters. We find that it does,” Fong said. “Dwell-time-maximizing algorithms produce less polarization than like-maximizing ones. Part of the reason is that users dislike content that opposes their views but spend just as much time reading it as content they agree with, so an algorithm that maximizes dwell time is going to serve more opposing articles than articles that maximize likes.”
The study, “The Effect of Downvotes on Content Creation: Evidence from Social Media,” was authored by Varad Deolankar, Jessica Fong, and S. Sriram.
-------------------------------------------------
DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.
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NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot
Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: http://subscribe-article-digests.clinicians-exchange.org
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It's primitive... but it works... mostly...
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Downvotes #RedditResearch #ContentCreation #KarmaSocialDynamics #EchoChambers #Polarization #NegativeFeedback #SocialMediaDesign #DwellTime #DislikeButton
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DATE: May 23, 2026 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
-------------------------------------------------TITLE: What happens when people get downvoted on Reddit? Scientists uncovered a surprising answer
Receiving a thumbs-down on social media does not push people away from the conversation, but instead tends to encourage them to post more while softening their tone. A new study published in the Journal of Marketing Research provides evidence that negative peer feedback prompts users to remain engaged rather than retreating into isolated communities. These findings suggest that allowing downvotes on social platforms might help moderate extreme discussions without silencing individual voices.
Social media platforms continuously experiment with ways for users to interact and evaluate the posts of their peers. While almost all platforms feature a button to express approval, few allow people to explicitly express negative feedback. Recently, major networks like YouTube and X have explored adding dislike or downvote features to help regulate content.
“We started thinking about this after hearing about YouTube hiding the dislike count, and Twitter (now X) and TikTok testing downvote-style features,” said Jessica Fong, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business who is transitioning to the University of Maryland College Park. “We looked into the literature and it became clear there wasn’t much empirical evidence around the effects of downvotes on UGC. At the same time, there’s a lot of discourse about polarization and social media and dislikes have some pretty interesting implications, like whether allowing dislikes pushes users into echo chambers.”
UGC refers to user-generated content, which includes any comments or posts created by the platform’s community. Managers often worry that negative feedback might push these users into isolated groups of like-minded individuals. These isolated groups are often called echo chambers, which occur when people only interact with others who share their exact views. When individuals exist entirely within an echo chamber, it tends to increase political and social division.
To understand how negative feedback actually changes behavior in a real online environment, the scientists looked at Reddit. Reddit is a massive online message board organized into thousands of specific communities. These communities, known as subreddits, are places where users discuss everything from breaking news to niche personal hobbies. On Reddit, people can either upvote a post if they like it or downvote it if they dislike it.
The platform calculates a visible score for every comment by subtracting the downvotes from the upvotes. Additionally, each user has a public reputation score called karma. A person’s karma goes up when they receive upvotes across the site and goes down when they receive downvotes. The authors chose this environment because discussions are highly opinion-based, and the feedback system is publicly visible.
By analyzing how people react when their scores drop, the researchers aimed to see if negative feedback alters how often people post, where they post, and the emotional intensity of their writing. To explore these questions, the researchers tracked a sample of 17,525 Reddit users over a period of 61 days. They monitored these individuals on a daily basis to capture their ongoing habits.
The team collected data on nearly two million comments across more than 32,000 different subreddits. For every comment a user made, the scientists recorded the text, the community it belonged to, and how its upvote and downvote score changed over the following two weeks. Studying the direct impact of downvotes is complicated because people who post highly controversial opinions might naturally attract more negative feedback and also just post more often in general.
To isolate the specific effect of receiving negative feedback, the scientists used a psychological concept known as left-digit bias. Left-digit bias is the human tendency to pay the most attention to the first number in a sequence. For example, a price dropping from ten dollars to nine dollars feels much more significant than a drop from eleven dollars to ten dollars.
The authors applied this concept to Reddit karma. They assumed that a user would notice a drop in their karma much more if the first digit changed, such as falling from 101 to 99, compared to a drop from 102 to 100. Even though both examples represent a loss of two points, the change in the first digit makes the penalty feel much larger. By comparing users who experienced this highly noticeable drop in karma to those who experienced a less obvious drop of the exact same size, the researchers could measure how noticeable negative feedback changes behavior.
The scientists found that experiencing a noticeable drop in karma actually increases a user’s likelihood of posting again. “Downvotes don’t silence users. On Reddit, users who get downvoted actually post more afterward, not less,” Fong said. Rather than quitting the platform out of frustration, the users increased their overall content creation.
“We were initially surprised to find that getting more downvotes makes users post more on average. This pushed us to look more into the mechanism,” Fong said. “We find that people tend to post more because they’re trying to recover their reputation, which on Reddit is in the form of karma. They tend to post more after getting downvotes until their karma recovers to the level of before they got those downvotes.”
Next, the research team looked at where these individuals chose to post after being downvoted. A common worry is that people will leave the community that rejected their opinion and seek out an echo chamber where everyone agrees with them. The data provides evidence that this does not happen. Users continued to comment in the exact same communities where they received the negative feedback.
“Downvotes don’t appear to create or encourage echo chambers,” Fong said. “We don’t find evidence that users abandon the communities where they were downvoted. They keep engaging there while also branching into new spaces.” This detail is highly relevant for social media companies, as it implies that downvotes do not automatically cause people to segregate themselves into divided groups.
Finally, the authors analyzed how negative feedback changed the actual words people used. They wanted to know if getting downvoted made people double down on extreme opinions or if it encouraged them to soften their language. To measure this, the scientists used a machine-learning language tool to scan the text of the comments. This tool identifies the main topics of a sentence and assigns an intensity score based on how emotional or extreme the wording is.
For this part of the study, the researchers looked at what happened when a specific comment’s score dropped from a positive number into the negatives. They found that when an intensely worded comment was downvoted below zero, the user tended to moderate their tone the next time they mentioned that same topic. “Downvotes tend to moderate the tone of what users say next, especially when their original post was emotionally charged,” Fong said.
While these findings present an interesting perspective on platform design, there are some limitations to consider. “Our study is a case study on Reddit, so we must be careful in interpreting these effects on other social media platforms,” Fong said. “We expect these effects to generalize to settings where there is some kind of reputation, like on Reddit, but looking at whether these effects replicate in other settings would be an interesting avenue for future work.”
Looking ahead, the researchers are already expanding this line of inquiry. “My coauthors, Varad Deolankar and S. Sriram, are working on another project related to user-driven content and polarization, except this time we were interested in looking at content consumption rather than production,” Fong said. “We ask, how does the content platforms serve users, and how users interpret that content, drive polarization of beliefs?”
The research team is currently exploring how individual biases interact with platform algorithms. “This is ongoing work, but so far we find that people tend to put less weight on information that conflicts with their prior beliefs,” Fong said. “And this bias contributes to polarization nearly as much as algorithms do (algorithms have been commonly blamed for contributing to polarization).”
The authors are also looking into how different site metrics influence these outcomes. “We also ask whether the engagement metric a platform chooses to optimize (‘likes’ versus dwell time) matters. We find that it does,” Fong said. “Dwell-time-maximizing algorithms produce less polarization than like-maximizing ones. Part of the reason is that users dislike content that opposes their views but spend just as much time reading it as content they agree with, so an algorithm that maximizes dwell time is going to serve more opposing articles than articles that maximize likes.”
The study, “The Effect of Downvotes on Content Creation: Evidence from Social Media,” was authored by Varad Deolankar, Jessica Fong, and S. Sriram.
-------------------------------------------------
DAILY EMAIL DIGEST: Email [email protected] -- no subject or message needed.
Private, vetted email list for mental health professionals: https://www.clinicians-exchange.org
Unofficial Psychology Today Xitter to toot feed at Psych Today Unofficial Bot @PTUnofficialBot
NYU Information for Practice puts out 400-500 good quality health-related research posts per week but its too much for many people, so that bot is limited to just subscribers. You can read it or subscribe at @PsychResearchBot
Since 1991 The National Psychologist has focused on keeping practicing psychologists current with news, information and items of interest. Check them out for more free articles, resources, and subscription information: https://www.nationalpsychologist.com
EMAIL DAILY DIGEST OF RSS FEEDS -- SUBSCRIBE: http://subscribe-article-digests.clinicians-exchange.org
READ ONLINE: http://read-the-rss-mega-archive.clinicians-exchange.org
It's primitive... but it works... mostly...
-------------------------------------------------
#psychology #counseling #socialwork #psychotherapy @psychotherapist @psychotherapists @psychology @socialpsych @socialwork @psychiatry #mentalhealth #psychiatry #healthcare #depression #psychotherapist #Downvotes #RedditResearch #ContentCreation #KarmaSocialDynamics #EchoChambers #Polarization #NegativeFeedback #SocialMediaDesign #DwellTime #DislikeButton
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"That shift is the focus of a new preprint that Törnberg co-authored with University of Amsterdam colleague Richard Rogers. “When we talk about social media, there are certain assumptions about what it is,” said Törnberg. “It’s user-generated, and there’s a platform that organizes interaction, but the platform cannot produce content on its own. So instead the platform allows people to connect with each other, and it just provides infrastructure for that. The [terms] social network and social media is almost synonymous. Those describe pre-algorithm Twitter circa 2012 quite well.”
Now that more and more users are disengaging and often leaving those platforms entirely, the AI bots are moving in, often at the instigation of the social media platforms themselves. “We don’t need the users anymore,” said Törnberg of the reasoning behind such decisions. “We don’t need them to generate content. We can generate our own content and we can automate the users. So there’s a splintering of what used to be social media.”
Törnberg identified three new kinds of emerging online media platforms, starting with private or semi-private group chats like WhatsApp. “The social part has just moved into these private group chat features,” he said. Then there other protected communities like Substack, often organized around a certain influential leader, “where there are more boundaries to joining in such a way that bots doesn’t make sense. The dynamic and logic of those places are very different from social media and much more driven by parasocial relationships.”"
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/rip-social-media-what-comes-next-is-messy/
#SocialMedia #EchoChambers #FilterBubbles #Polarization #Algorithms
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#Tradition Instead of #Progress ⛔ Why #innovate and improve the world when you can simply cling to the good old days?
#Dangerous #Diversity 🏳️🌈 Diversity? No thanks! Who needs new #perspectives when you can just stay in your comfortable #echochambers?
#CriticalThinking – But Only When It Suits You! 🧐 #Questioning things is great, as long as you only question things that don’t fit into your own world view.
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#Tradition Instead of #Progress ⛔ Why #innovate and improve the world when you can simply cling to the good old days?
#Dangerous #Diversity 🏳️🌈 Diversity? No thanks! Who needs new #perspectives when you can just stay in your comfortable #echochambers?
#CriticalThinking – But Only When It Suits You! 🧐 #Questioning things is great, as long as you only question things that don’t fit into your own world view.
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#Tradition Instead of #Progress ⛔ Why #innovate and improve the world when you can simply cling to the good old days?
#Dangerous #Diversity 🏳️🌈 Diversity? No thanks! Who needs new #perspectives when you can just stay in your comfortable #echochambers?
#CriticalThinking – But Only When It Suits You! 🧐 #Questioning things is great, as long as you only question things that don’t fit into your own world view.
-
#Tradition Instead of #Progress ⛔ Why #innovate and improve the world when you can simply cling to the good old days?
#Dangerous #Diversity 🏳️🌈 Diversity? No thanks! Who needs new #perspectives when you can just stay in your comfortable #echochambers?
#CriticalThinking – But Only When It Suits You! 🧐 #Questioning things is great, as long as you only question things that don’t fit into your own world view.
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https://www.europesays.com/africa/171920/ Political polarisation in South Africa is breaking public discourse #CollapseOfGoodFaith #ComfortOfAgreement #DeeplyUnequalSociety #DialogueCrisis #DichotomousThinking #EchoChambers #FearOfChallenge #InvaluableDisciplineOfEngagingTheOtherSide #nuance #SocialMediaPolarisation #SouthAfrica #SouthAfricans #TalkingPastEachOther
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🧵1/7: A #longthread on #bluesky / #bridge / #echochambers.
Following @Gargron's decision to opt out of the Bluesky bridge, most likely driven by the platform's official verification of the #ICE account, and one last pointless interaction with a Bluesky account holder,
I decided to follow suit & sever my own Bluesky ties. I realised the idea of echo chambers was probably a myth invented by the giant #socialmedia platforms to prevent users from fleeing. Let me explain.
https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/115912977448929626 -
The Shepherd’s Algorithm
I. The Freest Flock
In the valley of Verdant Meadows, the sheep lived well.
Each morning, they grazed on clover that seemed to grow exactly where they wandered. When thirst arrived, streams appeared as if summoned. At night, they slept in hollows that sheltered them from winds they never felt coming. And so the sheep of Verdant Meadows considered themselves the freest flock in all the land.
“We go where we please,” they told each other, wool puffed with pride. “No wolf dares enter here. No gate holds us. We are fortunate sheep.”
Perhaps they were, or perhaps they only believed themselves to be. In Verdant Meadows, the two amounted to the same thing.
Meanwhile, the shepherd watched from his tower on the hill. Unlike the shepherds of old (those crude men with crooks and dogs who drove their flocks through fear) this shepherd was a student of gentler arts. He had learned that a sheep pushed will push back, but a sheep guided will believe it chose the path itself.
His fences were invisible. Not walls, but gradients. In certain directions, the grass grew slightly sweeter. Along favorable routes, the ground sloped almost imperceptibly downward. Some paths felt inexplicably pleasant, while others carried a vague unease that no sheep could name but all could feel.
The shepherd called his craft “The Kindness.” The sheep called it freedom.
II. The One Who Remembered
Among the flock was a ewe named Vera.
She was not smarter than the others, nor more suspicious by nature. However, she had a peculiar habit that set her apart: she remembered.
While other sheep lived in an endless present (each day’s grazing as fresh as the first) Vera kept a map in her mind. She noticed that Tuesday’s “spontaneous” path to the eastern brook was identical to the previous Tuesday’s. Moreover, she observed that whenever the flock grew restless, a new patch of wildflowers would bloom in exactly the direction the shepherd’s tower faced.
One evening, she stood at the edge of the meadow and tested a theory. Deliberately, she walked toward the northern ridge, a direction the flock never went.
Beyond the Gradient
Beneath her hooves, the grass grew coarse. A subtle vibration rose through the ground, unpleasant in a way she couldn’t articulate. In the air, a faint metallic taste lingered. Every instinct told her to turn back.
Yet she pushed forward anyway.
Twenty paces on, the sensations vanished. Now the grass was ordinary, the air clean. And in the distance, she glimpsed something the flock had never seen: another valley, vast and unknown.
When she returned, she tried to tell the others.
“There’s something beyond the meadow,” she said. “The barriers aren’t real. They’re feelings, manufactured feelings. We can leave.”
The sheep stared at her with patient concern.
“Why would we leave?” asked an old ram named Clement. “Everything we need is here. The clover is sweet, the water fresh. You speak of barriers, but I have never felt barred from anything I wanted.”
“That’s because you only want what you’ve been guided to want,” said Vera.
Clement chuckled softly. “Listen to yourself. You sound unwell. Perhaps you grazed too near the western thistle. It can cause delusions.”
Of course, there was no western thistle. Vera knew this. But she saw the other sheep nodding sagely, and suddenly she understood: the shepherd had prepared for questioners too. For every doubt, a pre-built explanation existed. Any dissent could be reframed as symptoms of something else.
III. The Gentle Correction
From his tower, the shepherd watched Vera with interest.
He did not punish her. Punishment was crude, a tool of lesser shepherds. Instead, he simply adjusted. Near her favorite resting spot, the grass grew slightly less sweet. For the sheep who listened to her, the water began tasting faintly sour. Nothing dramatic, just enough friction to make Vera’s company subtly less pleasant.
Within weeks, the flock had drifted from her. Not with cruelty, of course. Her former companions simply found themselves grazing elsewhere, sleeping in different hollows, walking paths that didn’t cross hers. In their minds, they still liked Vera. They just… didn’t see her much anymore.
In this way, isolation became its own fence.
But the shepherd made one miscalculation. He assumed loneliness would break her. What he did not account for was what solitude can teach a sheep who remembers.
IV. The Lambs
During her exile, Vera spent her days watching.
She traced the patterns of the meadow, how the flock moved like a single organism, each “individual choice” part of a larger choreography. She noted the timing of the wildflower blooms and the precise days when new streams appeared. Looking at the shepherd’s tower, she finally understood it for what it was: not a watchtower, but a conductor’s podium.
Above all, she noticed the lambs.
Each spring brought new lambs into Verdant Meadows, born knowing nothing of fences or gradients. For a few weeks, they bounded freely in all directions, tasting grass the flock had forgotten existed, drinking from streams no adult sheep would approach. Then, gradually, their wandering narrowed. Their preferences aligned. By summer, they grazed the same paths as their parents, certain they had chosen them.
And so Vera began to visit the lambs.
She did not preach. The shepherd had taught her that much. Direct challenge only invited direct resistance. Instead, she played a different game: she asked questions.
“Why do you think the southern hill feels strange?”
“Have you ever wondered what’s past the ridge?”
“What would you do if you could go anywhere, truly anywhere?”
Most lambs forgot her questions by the next day. After all, the meadow’s comforts were warm, and curiosity fades fast when every need is met. But a few remembered. A few began their own experiments, walking ten paces into the unpleasant zones, then twenty, then fifty.
Slowly, they started keeping maps in their minds.
V. The Refinement
Eventually, the shepherd noticed.
His instruments detected anomalies: small clusters of sheep whose movements defied prediction. Lambs who grazed against the gradient. A growing patch of the meadow where his gentle fences seemed to fray.
He could have escalated. Harsher tools existed in his tower, techniques passed down from the old shepherds. But escalation was admission of failure, and a shepherd who must force his flock has already lost them.
Therefore, he refined instead. He made the pleasant paths more pleasant, the sweet grass sweeter. He introduced new delights: fermented clover, salt licks that sparkled in the sun. Consequently, most of the questioning lambs drifted back, seduced by comforts their brief rebellion had taught them to appreciate more deeply.
But not all.
A handful remained with Vera at the edges. Though they were not many (a dozen, perhaps, in a flock of hundreds) they grazed the ordinary grass and drank the ordinary water and found it enough. In time, they taught their own lambs the art of remembering.
The shepherd watched them with something he had not felt in years: uncertainty.
VI. What Remains
This is not a story with a triumphant ending.
Vera did not free the flock. The invisible fences still stand in Verdant Meadows, and the sheep still graze the sweetened paths, still drink from convenient streams, still believe themselves the freest flock in all the land.
But at the northern edge, where the grass grows plain and the ground carries no vibration, a small band of sheep lives differently. These few teach their young to taste the discomfort and push through it. They keep maps. They remember.
What lies beyond the valley, they cannot say. Most have never gone that far. Freedom, it turns out, is not a destination. Rather, it is the capacity to walk a path that was not laid for you.
The shepherd still watches from his tower. His flock remains vast, content, profitable. By any measure, he has won.
Yet some nights, looking at that stubborn cluster at the edge of his meadow, he wonders if winning is the same as succeeding.
And in the morning, the lambs are born, knowing nothing yet of fences, and everything remains to be decided.
The shepherd’s tools grow gentler with each generation, while the fences grow harder to see. But the capacity to remember, to question, to walk against the gradient… this too passes from parent to child, if someone thinks to teach it.
The question is not whether the shepherd will stop.
The question is whether enough lambs will learn to see.
Key Takeaways- In the peaceful Verdant Meadows, sheep enjoy what they believe is freedom, guided by a shepherd using subtle manipulations.
- Vera, a ewe with a remarkable memory, begins to recognize patterns and questions the perceived barriers around her.
- The shepherd responds to Vera’s curiosity by subtly isolating her from the flock, yet her solitude inspires her to share her insights with the young lambs.
- As some lambs begin to explore beyond the shepherd’s invisible controls, the shepherd faces uncertainty and refines his methods without harshness.
- Ultimately, the story reflects on the nature of freedom and the importance of teaching the next generation to question their environment.
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It occurred to me just now that I never was a part of the algorithmic social media platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise…), I only used twitter via third-party app and never had the algorithm shoved into my eyes. When Twitter killed apps, I moved to #Mastodon.
I watched everyone I know fall into that it though. Nothing I ever told them about how unhealthy it was ever seems to land properly.
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Facebook #Meta #Algorithms #EchoChambers #ForceFed
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It occurred to me just now that I never was a part of the algorithmic social media platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise…), I only used twitter via third-party app and never had the algorithm shoved into my eyes. When Twitter killed apps, I moved to #Mastodon.
I watched everyone I know fall into that it though. Nothing I ever told them about how unhealthy it was ever seems to land properly.
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Facebook #Meta #Algorithms #EchoChambers #ForceFed
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It occurred to me just now that I never was a part of the algorithmic social media platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise…), I only used twitter via third-party app and never had the algorithm shoved into my eyes. When Twitter killed apps, I moved to #Mastodon.
I watched everyone I know fall into that it though. Nothing I ever told them about how unhealthy it was ever seems to land properly.
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Facebook #Meta #Algorithms #EchoChambers #ForceFed
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It occurred to me just now that I never was a part of the algorithmic social media platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise…), I only used twitter via third-party app and never had the algorithm shoved into my eyes. When Twitter killed apps, I moved to #Mastodon.
I watched everyone I know fall into that it though. Nothing I ever told them about how unhealthy it was ever seems to land properly.
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Facebook #Meta #Algorithms #EchoChambers #ForceFed
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It occurred to me just now that I never was a part of the algorithmic social media platform (be it Twitter, Facebook, or otherwise…), I only used twitter via third-party app and never had the algorithm shoved into my eyes. When Twitter killed apps, I moved to #Mastodon.
I watched everyone I know fall into that it though. Nothing I ever told them about how unhealthy it was ever seems to land properly.
#SocialMedia #Twitter #Facebook #Meta #Algorithms #EchoChambers #ForceFed
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The new brainiacs of the right-wing tech world convene 🔗💡, proving once again that Silicon Valley is the place for echo chambers to thrive 🎉. Brace yourselves for riveting #discussions on how to mix #libertarianism with your morning latte ☕️. Meanwhile, enjoy the latest on ethical capitalism with a side of irony 🍿.
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/ #rightwingtech #echochambers #ethicalcapitalism #SiliconValley #HackerNews #ngated -
The new brainiacs of the right-wing tech world convene 🔗💡, proving once again that Silicon Valley is the place for echo chambers to thrive 🎉. Brace yourselves for riveting #discussions on how to mix #libertarianism with your morning latte ☕️. Meanwhile, enjoy the latest on ethical capitalism with a side of irony 🍿.
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/ #rightwingtech #echochambers #ethicalcapitalism #SiliconValley #HackerNews #ngated -
The new brainiacs of the right-wing tech world convene 🔗💡, proving once again that Silicon Valley is the place for echo chambers to thrive 🎉. Brace yourselves for riveting #discussions on how to mix #libertarianism with your morning latte ☕️. Meanwhile, enjoy the latest on ethical capitalism with a side of irony 🍿.
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/ #rightwingtech #echochambers #ethicalcapitalism #SiliconValley #HackerNews #ngated -
The new brainiacs of the right-wing tech world convene 🔗💡, proving once again that Silicon Valley is the place for echo chambers to thrive 🎉. Brace yourselves for riveting #discussions on how to mix #libertarianism with your morning latte ☕️. Meanwhile, enjoy the latest on ethical capitalism with a side of irony 🍿.
https://bayareacurrent.com/meet-the-new-right-wing-tech-intelligentsia/ #rightwingtech #echochambers #ethicalcapitalism #SiliconValley #HackerNews #ngated -
"As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study, coauthors Petter Törnberg, AI and social media assistant professor, and research assistant Maik Larooij simulated a social media platform that was populated entirely by AI chatbots, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4o large language model, to see if there was anything we could do to stop social media from turning into echo chambers.
They tested out six specific intervention strategies — including switching to chronological news feeds, boosting diverse viewpoints, hiding social statistics like follower counts, and removing account bios — to stop the platform from turning into a polarized hellscape.
To their dismay, none of the interventions worked to a satisfactory degree, and only some showed modest effects. Worse yet, as Ars Technica reports, some of them made the situation even worse.
For instance, ordering the news feed chronologically reduced attention inequality but floated extreme content to the top.
It's a sobering reality that flies in the face of companies' promises of constructing a "digital town square" — as billionaire and X owner Elon Musk once called it — where everybody coexists peacefully.
With or without intervention, social media platforms may be doomed to devolve into a highly polarized breeding ground for extremist thinking."
https://futurism.com/social-network-ai-intervention-echo-chamber
#SocialMedia #AI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Chatbots #Echochambers #Disinformation
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Interesting experiment that shows emergent dysfunctional characteristics in simulated social networks
"Can We Fix Social Media? Testing Prosocial Interventions using Generative Social #Simulation"
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Gizmodo: Researchers Made a Social Media Platform Where Every User Was AI. The Bots Ended Up at War. “A recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands put AI chatbots in a simple social media structure to see how they interacted with each other and found that, even without the invisible hand of the algorithm, they tend to organize themselves based on […]
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Explore how social media algorithms deepen polarization by reinforcing echo chambers and ideological divides — and discover actionable strategies to promote healthier online discourse.
#DigitalDivide #SocialMediaDivide #EchoChambers #AlgorithmBias #DigitalPolarization
https://www.scitechsociety.com/the-impact-of-social-media-algorithms-on-polarization/ -
The Fediverse, a network of independently run servers using the ActivityPub protocol, is #segmented by #serverblocks.
🚧 These #blocks, often based on imported #blocklists, create #echochambers and hinder message threads.
🏔️ While #decentralisation is a goal, the Fediverse’s current state, with heavy-handed #moderation and #serverblocking, undermines this principle.
👉 https://battlepenguin.com/tech/the-broken-fediverse?Fedizen.EU #Fedizen #Fediverse #ActivityPub #News
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@Greengordon @dyckron just like human narratives do in their #echochambers
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Study in French, destructuring the "anti-covid-vaccine" language used by the #farright #echochambers
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:psrllnuhypzsvmufn5gwqobo/post/3lnvnpcr2lc2v -
What a good idea, especially for anyone on social media. Let's develop our listening, comprehension, debating, and empathy skills. Here are free resources provided by UCL to do that: the "Disagreeing Well" series.
Echo chambers aren't useful or healthy in the long run, as we're seeing in global politics right now.
We need to talk to each other in the right way to make progress and make the world a better place.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/about/disagreeing-well
#DisagreeingWell #EchoChambers #Politics #Sustainability #UCL #FreeResources #SocialMedia #SoftSkills
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Concordia University: New Concordia research shows social networks are vulnerable to relatively simple AI manipulation and polarization. “It seems that no matter the topic of conversation, online opinion around it will be split into two seemingly irreconcilable camps. That’s largely a result of these platforms’ design, as the algorithms driving them direct users to like-minded peers. This […]
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Concordia University: New Concordia research shows social networks are vulnerable to relatively simple AI manipulation and polarization. “It seems that no matter the topic of conversation, online opinion around it will be split into two seemingly irreconcilable camps. That’s largely a result of these platforms’ design, as the algorithms driving them direct users to like-minded peers. This […]
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Concordia University: New Concordia research shows social networks are vulnerable to relatively simple AI manipulation and polarization. “It seems that no matter the topic of conversation, online opinion around it will be split into two seemingly irreconcilable camps. That’s largely a result of these platforms’ design, as the algorithms driving them direct users to like-minded peers. This […]
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Concordia University: New Concordia research shows social networks are vulnerable to relatively simple AI manipulation and polarization. “It seems that no matter the topic of conversation, online opinion around it will be split into two seemingly irreconcilable camps. That’s largely a result of these platforms’ design, as the algorithms driving them direct users to like-minded peers. This […]
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Is bothsidesism killing us? (And why scientific consensus matters) - Healthy Debate https://healthydebate.ca/2023/08/topic/bothsidesism-scientific-consensus-matters/ “While the issue of #falsebalance is usually linked to how journalists represent topics, false balance is increasingly driven by #socialmedia #echochambers, the fragmentation of the news media and the ideologically motivated embrace of fringe ideas. Too often this has allowed a small cohort of vocal contrarians to have an outsized impact on public policy and public perceptions.”
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Though I was aware of how algorithms work, I bought into the belief that there was no way the Harris campaign could fail. There was too much on the line and at stake, and how could so many experts in my feed be wrong?
https://buff.ly/4gH57Aa -
Yeah, what they don't realize is: That is the way #echochambers are born.
#Defederate with this, defederate with that.
Imagine that user also blocking everyone except themselves? Then they'll only be able to listen to themself 😆 🤣
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How often do you dive down rabbit holes?
After reflecting on recent essays, I thought it would be useful to make a single webpage with literature on echo chambers & rabbit holes.
Know of a useful paper on this topic that I should include? Let me know.
#FilterBubbles #Media #SocialMedia #Journalism #POL204 #RabbitHoles #EchoChambers #essay #StudentLife @snurb
https://www.christopher-james-hall.com/blog/echo-chambers-and-filter-bubbles
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Bolle, totem, echo chambers. Intervista a W. Quattrociocchi.
Intervista di M. Kep a W. Quattrociocchi
Abbiamo intervistato il Prof. Walter Quattrociocchi, docente di Social nethttp://rizomatica.noblogs.org/2020/10/quattrociocchi-intervista-bolle-totem-echo-chambers/
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#Fediverso #Politica #Rizoma #Strumenti #Tecnopolitica #bolle #comunità #echochambers #interazione #modelli #opiniondynamics #opinioni #social #rizomatica
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https://rizomatica.noblogs.org/chi-siamo/ -
Bolle, totem, echo chambers. Intervista a W. Quattrociocchi.
Intervista di M. Kep a W. Quattrociocchi
Abbiamo intervistato il Prof. Walter Quattrociocchi, docente di Social network analysis e Knowlwdge,http://rizomatica.noblogs.org/2020/10/quattrociocchi-intervista-bolle-totem-echo-chambers/
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#Fediverso #Politica #Rizoma #Strumenti #Tecnopolitica #bolle #comunità #echochambers #interazione #modelli #opiniondynamics #opinioni #social
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[email protected] -
@positiva coxsa.blogspot.com/2018/12/chi… la comicitá è sempre conformista e conservatrice..
#meme #tribu #conferme #bolle #echochambers -
#fascists use #fearmongering to amplify their #usvsthem mindset, which puts them down the #rathole:
https://newsie.social/@blackburied/113176623617058701
Maybe the solution is to accentuate what’s going well? It won’t be as sensational as the fear-mongering #echochambers in social media.
Folks not wanting to fall down the rathole should prolly focus on positive events to insulate themselves from division.
They said humans are too smart to react like “too many rats in a cage”, so we need to think if solutions.
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#TheMetalDogArticleList
#MetalSucks
Ringworm’s Latest Single “Thought Crimes” Seeks to Destroy Your Echo Chambers
Play this loud. The post Ringworm’s Latest Single “Thought Crimes” Seeks to Destroy Your Echo Chambers appeared first on MetalSucks.#Ringworm #ThoughtCrimes #EchoChambers #Metalcore #MetalSucks #Powerviolence
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@rwg for me: I don’t want to be #googled again, where they start with #donoevil, wind you into a myriad of useful but interconnected apps that you come to rely on, go public, become beholding to shareholders, reduce functionality, charge for things they promised would be free forever, have zero support, reenforce #echochambers, (I could list problems all day) and no easy way to get out.
Never again.
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@kep Si, è pa tendenza di un certo storiciamo anglosassone alla Harari e Diamond, per cui ci sono ragioni preistoriche se l'occidente ha la bomba atomica e sottomette il resto della popolazione mondiale che non è riuscita a produrre caccia supersonici con testate tattiche.
Come al tempo di Hegel, il classico giustificazionismo del più forte.
#storia #banale #ftontieradigitale #tribù #echochambers #totem #etologia #social -
I see far fewer (not none, but definitely fewer) #opinions I #disagree with on here, compared to the before place.
Contrary to a #belief I used to hold a long time ago, that does not in any way make me feel like my opinions are #mainstream. I still read #news, I am still very aware of #contradictory opinions to mine existing and I’m definitely aware that on many topics (including not a few I’d consider very important) I am most definitely in the minority. But I feel better, I #stress out about it less, I definitely have far less (basically none) negative experiences around such things happening.
It’s much easier to either not engage at all or at the very least engage in a much more polite and constructive way with differing opinions when there isn’t an overwhelming amount of them.
#EchoChambers are obviously bad, but we’ve seen very well that forced continuous cross-pollination of opposing opinions doesn’t really lead to any constructive outcomes or bring us to understand each other better and manage to either find a middle ground or to have one side persuade the other.
