Upvoted, because this is a thought a lot of people have, especially our sorts of people. I really ought to answer it. I have worried about accelerated community-formation exacerbating toxic tribalism for years, but I’m increasingly of the position that it’s not a real problem at all. To the extent that it is, there are reasons to think that tools like this would not make it worse, and may help.
The one who wants to preach to their own choir influences no one. The political power that they seem to have is illusory. Even political parties in fully degenerated duocracies orient mostly around appealing to the median voter because those are the only ones whose minds are open to change. The one who doesn’t seek out people who disagree with them learns very little, which weakens them in many ways. They wont have a very good time online, and the terrible things they try to do in the world wont work, because they wont know the world as it is. Eventually, most of them will realize on their own that they have to seek out people who believe strange and shocking things, if they want to see the interesting stuff.
In short, the people who build and engage in echo chambers are harmless, look more dangerous than they are, are ultimately probably not worth worrying about.
The intractable class of Facebook Boomers will soon literally die of old age. Exclusionary, hateful communities inevitably continuously alienate their own members and will be looked at by the rest of the world as a mistake.
There is an extent to which, tools for avoiding people we dislike, can make it possible for us to coexist with them. The people you wouldn’t want to meet in a political venue, you may later meet on friendly terms somewhere else, and then maybe they’ll have more of an interest in listening to you respectfully if politics ever comes up between you.
If you don’t give people those tools, they might just leave the entire platform, (or exile the people they dislike) and build their own spaces, at which point there wont be barely any dialogue at all, and things will only get worse. I have a specific example in mind. When I meet the sorts of people who get pushed towards that place, it often feels like no adult has ever tried talking to them. They have been asking questions of people who didn’t have the courage to answer them, they have been receiving no good answers and it has been driving them mad. I genuinely feel like under a system like what I’ve proposed, they would have found their way to us instead of the people who can only drive them mad, and when they asked their questions, instead of being given a load of hostility and conspiracy theories as answers, we would have given them the truth.
Could naming a formerly unnamed distinction (as naming territories in organically splitting webs would do) create conflict between them? I don’t think this is the case. When a web splits, we don’t have to frame this as a conflict, we can also frame it as the creation of a conceptual distinction between two content categories that were formerly being confused. When people think that they’re disagreeing about one thing, that is a much worse state of conflict than when they have come to agree that they just want two different things. The conflict is not created by the split, it is revealed, it was there wreaking before we had words for the sides, knowing about it doesn’t make it worse, common misconception.
Once the sides can describe what really differentiates them, once everyone’s desires are out on the table, they can arrange terms, they can negotiate, and only then can they really figure out how to come back together, or whether they even should.
Upvoted, because this is a thought a lot of people have, especially our sorts of people. I really ought to answer it. I have worried about accelerated community-formation exacerbating toxic tribalism for years, but I’m increasingly of the position that it’s not a real problem at all. To the extent that it is, there are reasons to think that tools like this would not make it worse, and may help.
The one who wants to preach to their own choir influences no one. The political power that they seem to have is illusory. Even political parties in fully degenerated duocracies orient mostly around appealing to the median voter because those are the only ones whose minds are open to change. The one who doesn’t seek out people who disagree with them learns very little, which weakens them in many ways. They wont have a very good time online, and the terrible things they try to do in the world wont work, because they wont know the world as it is. Eventually, most of them will realize on their own that they have to seek out people who believe strange and shocking things, if they want to see the interesting stuff.
In short, the people who build and engage in echo chambers are harmless, look more dangerous than they are, are ultimately probably not worth worrying about.
The intractable class of Facebook Boomers will soon literally die of old age. Exclusionary, hateful communities inevitably continuously alienate their own members and will be looked at by the rest of the world as a mistake.
There is an extent to which, tools for avoiding people we dislike, can make it possible for us to coexist with them. The people you wouldn’t want to meet in a political venue, you may later meet on friendly terms somewhere else, and then maybe they’ll have more of an interest in listening to you respectfully if politics ever comes up between you.
If you don’t give people those tools, they might just leave the entire platform, (or exile the people they dislike) and build their own spaces, at which point there wont be barely any dialogue at all, and things will only get worse. I have a specific example in mind. When I meet the sorts of people who get pushed towards that place, it often feels like no adult has ever tried talking to them. They have been asking questions of people who didn’t have the courage to answer them, they have been receiving no good answers and it has been driving them mad. I genuinely feel like under a system like what I’ve proposed, they would have found their way to us instead of the people who can only drive them mad, and when they asked their questions, instead of being given a load of hostility and conspiracy theories as answers, we would have given them the truth.
Could naming a formerly unnamed distinction (as naming territories in organically splitting webs would do) create conflict between them? I don’t think this is the case. When a web splits, we don’t have to frame this as a conflict, we can also frame it as the creation of a conceptual distinction between two content categories that were formerly being confused. When people think that they’re disagreeing about one thing, that is a much worse state of conflict than when they have come to agree that they just want two different things. The conflict is not created by the split, it is revealed, it was there wreaking before we had words for the sides, knowing about it doesn’t make it worse, common misconception.
Once the sides can describe what really differentiates them, once everyone’s desires are out on the table, they can arrange terms, they can negotiate, and only then can they really figure out how to come back together, or whether they even should.