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Comment by gosub100 | Hacker News Reader

Reddit is not hostile as long as you only parrot back ideas that the hive mind agrees on. And the reward system is mis-aligned. I'd call it a Twitterification, because the karma points are awarded to succinct, snarky/funny conversation-ending quips. Nobody has time or attention span to debate an issue, and even if you did you risk being shut out of the group for wrongthink.

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I would say the same thing is true for hackernews, and any other public square platform.

For hn, it's even more interesting because the "wrongthink shutout" is packaged in intellectualism. But you see it more pronounced on the edges. Good examples are posts that discuss climate breakdown.

I see a lot more civil and rational disagreement here. The liberal politics are more popular, but there's a healthy conservative voice too. I don't see anything wrong with using intellectual methods to be persuasive, I mean, what are the alternatives?

That's right, there's no debate, except on the rarest of occasions. It's actually an odd feeling whenever some discussion with divergent opinions ends amicably.

In my experience, genuine "clashing of views" with amicable discussions happens pretty frequently on Mastodon. It's pretty astonishing to see sometimes, because it's so unusual for the past X years in online social spaces. Like, potentially-multi-day-threads of max-character-count messages discussing topics that people fundamentally disagree on but are trying to hash out each others' perspectives and "get somewhere" with it. Very interesting, and great to read. Sometimes it goes the other way and the people talk past each other, but that's pretty standard lol

Eternal September problem.

Those on Mastondon are a self-selected group who have opted out of Xitter and Reddit.

Any new social media platform is always better than the previous by self-selection. And then it gets popular and becomes just as bad as the previoius. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Many servers on Mastodon are also rather aggressive at blocking other "disagreeable" servers. Some even apply this by association, i.e. blocking any server that doesn't block those that they consider inappropriate.

Guess what happened to the entire notion of the internet? Sigh

You and GP are both correct. I've observed how many posts are set up with the "hive mind does (or does not) agree on" outcomes. Here are concrete examples:

* Does Anyone Else foo?

* Pretty sure I'm gonna get downvoted for this, but foo.

* Unpopular Opinion: foo.

...and many more such patterns.

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