I'm sympathetic to criticism of a community that's locked into its own information space and incapable of accepting anything else.
However, every community is going to have norms (implicit or explicit) about what kind of things are so egregious to say that they are unacceptable.
People who want to say those things are going to condemn that community as an "echo chamber."
I don't think there's any solution to the general problem of "being an echo chamber" that doesn't result in "becoming the Nazi bar" https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Nazi_bar
This is something every community has to work out for themselves, and there are always going to be people who think it's too much or not enough.
I'd say it always comes down to moderation, how strict the mods are and if they enforce the rules/spirit of the community. I think the decentralization of servers should help with that too, as long as not everyone just joins the few main ones (like we did lol)
In my experience, emphasizing efforts to avoid being an echo chamber tends to lead to slowly becoming a far right echo chamber, as people end up tolerating intolerance until the victims leave for elsewhere and only the intolerant are left.
Hivemindiness and issues are probably inevitable, as anywhere, but I think the lack of a downvote button goes a long way towards mitigating that, to be honest. It limits the degree to which the community can bury or punish a comment just for saying something like "I didn't like popular game xyz". And people who would actually deserve that kind of downvote rain should typically probably be booted anyway, per beehaw bee nice rule.
This might be a good place to ask, so how do we report something that needs a mod to look at it? Is it the little flag inside the three dots menu?
Yep!
Thanks! I figured that was it but didn’t want to start pressing buttons on a platform I’m not familiar with!
I'd argue that it already is an echo chamber and there's nothing that can be done to prevent such things, much like everyone has biases and always will. However, much like biases, they can be reduced where they become problematic.
Exactly, everywhere on the internet is one but minimizing this should be done.
Have you had a chance to review the two posts in the sidebar? I'd love to hear your thoughts on where you think there's room for an echo chamber to grow with the current system of governance and how you'd like to combat it.
I believe in the long term we'll need to formalize some kind of governance structure with regards to how moderators are chosen by the communities they moderate and a structure to provide feedback and/or potentially remove problematic individuals, but that seems a long time out and may never actually be necessary (I truly believe that in-person communities can self police much better than existing online communities because of the way they are structured). However, there are limitations of the platform that don't exist for in-person communities (can't exactly mutiny here) and thus we may need to explore appropriate safeguards.
I read through both of them a couple months ago. No, I don't see any issue currently but as beehaw grows I fear that issues could arise. It's better to fix those issues before they arise in my opinion (such as the issue of beehaw becoming an echo chamber). My main fear is still that years down the line some mods might get cocky with their power in the way that reddit has. That's why I proposed something like sortition in the discord server. Overall though, this is a beautiful community that is going to sail to far horizons on smooth seas.
I think that having more than a handful of mods and the users having a way to remove a troublesome mod would be a couple potential solutions. Reddit has that issue with their mods, if you have a mod causing trouble pretty much the only thing you can do is make a new subreddit. (I suppose that is true here too, you can just move to a new instance but that seems like a drastic solution)
well, i think in order to answer this question we need to first define what is meant by "echo chamber", because that's a somewhat loaded term with no standard or commonly agreed upon definition.
Good point. By echo chamber I mean to say I hope this community doesn't become a place where liberals get mad at conservatives, (or vice versa) those sentiments are agreed with by others, and it just becomes a big place for hating on conservatives. That also raises the question of how we bring different viewpoints into this community without causing it to become one big cesspool of hate. How do we have civil discussions among different viewpoints.
~I hope this makes sense, I didn't proofread~
Getting mad at each other is not nice behavior. There are times in which anger is warranted and times in which you can still be nice but hostile (we have a zero tolerance policy for intolerance, if you tell a Nazi to fuck off we aren't about to step in and tone police and tell you to be nice), but we would encourage you to instead report any comments like this so we can keep intolerant individuals off our platform.
How do we have civil discussions among different viewpoints.
The key here is mostly being nice. Assume good faith. If the person is acting in bad faith, do your best not to engage and just report the person. Past that point it's all a matter of how good your communication skills are, and this might be a good place to practice them while keeping things nice.
Mods here seem to have some good experience, so my guess is hateful discussions will be removed and the offending users will eventually migrate to other instances more tolerant to their viewpoints, but debates will be left alone. Seen a few good debates with opposing viewpoints so far that have gone well
