I think the whole echo chamber / not an echo chamber thing is going nowhere. Unless we can define echo chamber or agree upon an echo chamber test, I think the term is just getting in the way of discussing what people are actually concerned about.
Based on people’s arguments that this place is or is not an echo chamber, I’ve put together the following list of issues:
- Posts being banned because other people don’t agree with the poster
- Concern about the bar that a comment has to pass to be flag-worthy
- Change in boingboing’s tone away from weird stuff and towards anger
- People criticizing people rather than what those people are saying
- Lounge threads that allow regulars to collude in singling people out for having different opinions
I don’t think (1) is actually happening on any significant scale. I say that because I’ve read lots of controversial topics and seen a very wide range of opinions. Also in the tread discussing reasons for flagging, @codinghorror indicated that there is no evidence to suggest this is happening. (N.B. That’s from a position with privileged access to information about flagging) I understand if people are still concerned about this, but I just think it’s empirically wrong and I’d need to hear an empirical argument to be convinced, acknowledging that I don’t even know what that would look like without access to information we don’t have.
The post about flagging out opinions has it’s own entire topic. Apparently we, as a community, don’t actually flag all that much to the point that people are discussing why we don’t flag. The overlap between that topic and this one is large. So I think (2) is discussed there, and the discussion shows a very high level of tolerance for shit and a lot of concern about flagging being used to widely.
For (3) I can understand that concern but I only know the BBS that I know. I’ve seen some very interesting user-created threads on a number of “weird” topics, so I don’t think that’s gone totally, but I’ll take on faith that this has diminished. Still, I wonder if that has more to do with the main site than the BBS community. If you want to find out about the BBS furry community, I don’t see how that’s going to happen if the main site isn’t posting about furries. I think we might be weirder than we normally discuss, and I’ve made a topic as an explicit echo chamber of positivity about weirdness in order to explore that: The Flying of the Freak Flags
(4) is a terrible habit. Should we be calling that out more, regardless of who is doing it an what the topic is? Posting more to say, “Hey, I feel like you are veering away from talking about ideas and actions and into judging about the person you are arguing with.” I think we all have the potential to do this, so maybe we need more reminders? (Or would that turn us into an echo chamber of respecting one another?!?)
(5) I was a regular for a little while. To get it I gamed the system a bit (opened threads I wasn’t interested in and held down j until I hit the bottom). I got mad at the BBS and left for two months and I feel better not being a regular. I don’t have a lot of perspective on what goes on in that thread. Do people feel the existence of a lounge for regulars is a problem in itself?
