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I was talking with someone about this phenomenon years ago, unrelated to Reddit. We were discussing people’s extremist, polarizing and asinine views and attitudes they have and how it mixes in with the Internet. One thing people forget is that these people have ‘always’ existed, long before modern tech was a thing. Lunatics abound in every community, we used to call those people the “village idiots.” All the Internet has done is given it visibility. I had that epiphany once when someone sent me a YouTube video of some redneck who was hosting a talkshow and my first thought was, “so microphones and a video camera have just now come to Alabama for the first time…”
Back when Jack Dorsey was still running Twitter and their content moderation policies were generating a lot of controversy, he did an interview with someone where he was talking about the difficulty of trying that part of the platform correct and he made a remark about “making Twitter a better place,” by “cross pollinating people view different views to interact with each other,” and I started laughing when I heard that. Because that was never going to work and this has been the way of the world for thousands of years. People naturally don’t stomach the views of others they disagree with very well, and tend to have an intense emotional dislike of people whose core values to their identity oppose their own. It doesn’t occur even to more intellectually minded people that most actors out there aren’t like them and most people are bad faith actors; just not in ways they realize.
Reason really is an acquired taste for most people.
Yeah, I think there's a dark pattern that results from being relegated to an echo-chamber about 90% of the time, then the algorithm feeds you a rage-inducing post from someone from the outgroup so you can unload on/dogpile them, then immediately return to your echo chamber before you have to possibly learn something from them.
That's what cross-pollination does in practice.
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