How to avoid echo chambers: Stop sorting comments by popularity.

submitted by uwubunny from self.SaidIt

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[–]magnora7 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (3 children)

You can look at: https://saidit.net/new/

And you can see the quality is just not as high as the front page. The votes are useful for finding higher-quality content, even if those vote systems are sometimes hijacked to push propaganda, it's still a net benefit. I have wondered what saidit would be like with no votes at all, but I do think it would be a bit boring. People stopped using the old forum designs for a reason, even though they do have their benefits too.

[–][deleted] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

The classic forum format pushed a meld of popular/controversial/new to the top since it was based on most recent post descending. I ran several largely uncensored old style forums over the years, and miss them in a various ways.

Since controversial content stayed on top and people felt obligated to read/reply to posts that had a load of responses, these sorts of forums rapidly lost favor as alternatives like reddit and facebook promised to surround people with only those that agree with them. Most people are more comfortable in an echo chamber, and in those sorts of pre "social media" forums there were constant calls to ban people that frequently posted divisive content, or the divisive topics themselves.

[–]magnora7 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Yeah but in a way it just changes the brigading tactics from fake upvotes to fake comments, to ensure the threads they want stay at the top. In the end it can still be gamed the same way

[–][deleted] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

No doubt, however - those sorts of forums can't really scale to tens of thousands of active users. It just ends up being a confusing blend of things constantly vanishing off page 1. As a result of the diminished number of users forum sliding efforts were generally easy to spot and less successful.

Sliding is still very much a thing on image-boards.