In the past week I’ve been absolutely roasted for criticising two different countries. Normally I’d be okay with that, I can handle a mild toasting and after all debate is a good thing.
On both occasions though I was flamed for mentioning human rights issues that are established facts and have been known for many, many years. I was critical of the actions/laws of their governments and not the people, their race, religion, general political ideology or nationality.
On both occasions I was bombarded by long posts that parroted propaganda, and in the case of one country I was told (on multiple occasions) that I was ignorant, racist and even fascist for mentioning the issues I did. I’m not complaining about how I was treated, but as a reminder, I was discussing internationally-recognised human rights concerns that can be verified and based in fact.
I could just be paranoid but I’m fairly convinced the responses weren’t from patriotic citizens. I think they were paid trolls or bots, and I think their purpose was to quiet negative talking points about the countries that were mentioned.
Has anyone else had a similar experience?
It’s a trade-off between accessibility and power. On platforms like Reddit, power is totally concentrated within the corporation that controls the service, but they allow any old dunce without any technical skills to make a subreddit, making it very accessible to the average person.
On the flip side, if every community was its own server, the power hierarchy would be much more flat, but the ability to make a community would be reserved mainly for people with sysadmin skills and money. It also would make discoverability and community more difficult to maintain.
In other words, I think the Threadiverse strikes a nice balance. It’s certainly not perfect, but there’s no right answer.
That may be true but I’m talking about echo chambers here and how to avoid them better.
And in that case I would argue that a place where a generell topic (music, sport, television), is the driving point for accumulation of user is better at preventing that, then something like a whole ideology themed reddit which then has a ideology themed sports community, ideology themed music community, ideology themed television community and so on.