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I think it's more that pre-reddit/twitter/facebook we all had separate online forums, chat rooms, etc and now it's all centralized to the same few sites.

For example before reddit we didn't have popular fascist subforums hosted on the same site as a liberal politics subforum, where people could cross-post and PM between them.

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This is a good point. I used to frequent DemocraticUnderground back in the 2004 days during the Kerry campaign. It was as bad an echo chamber as anything we see today. The alternative site was FreeRepublic (or 'freepers', as we called them). However, the fact that you didn't have to go to that site or see those people's opinions if you didn't want to, made a big difference to how vitriolic the whole thing felt.

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