W from oren, internet political discourse is one of the dumbest excuses for intelligent conversation i’ve ever seen. while hateful rhetoric should never be tolerated (the alt-right pipeline of 2016 is a great example of what happens when you let things like that be spewed), different perspectives are VERY important to developing your own perspective. for neoliberals, go to r/politics to see how idiotic echo chambers are - their response to a news article is entirely defined by whether it says democrat or republican, literally NO OTHER FACTORS MATTER FOR THEM. conservatives are similar in that way, where many of them may follow someone like aoc on twitter just to leave hate replies, but never actually read about something like the green new deal, or read any statistics or science or anything because they feel as if the world is inherently against them and everything is lying to them. the alt-right knows some statistics, like the infamous idiotic crime statistic, but they’re never going to admit the truth about it. online far leftists are probably the second worst because they are far more interested in contrarianism than they are in ideology. far leftists heard noam chomsky say “the US is evil so everything they do is inherently evil” once and let me just tell you they take that to an extreme. i’ve heard online far leftists support the classist capitalist north korea. north korea removed all references to communism in 2009. only the rich thrive there. it’s just dumb
I love how people don’t like anything even remotely logical online. It’s like the internet is tuned against trying to understand all sides of an issue.
It leans very, very heavily towards tribalism. I’ve seen it a lot. It’s because you have a lot of choice about who you associate with, so you usually choose someone who agrees with you.
This tribalism leads to you always thinking that you’re right (because you’re only listening to people who agree with you constantly).
That’s one of the big reasons why i personally try to follow and interact with everyone. I don’t want to be surrounded by yes-men all the time. I need people to disagree with me.
This lack of negative feedback is one of the biggest problems with the internet. And like I said, it comes from the choice you have about who you listen to.
So really, the huge connected network of the internet (which connects billions of people) really leads to less communication between groups, less sharing and debating, and more tribalism.
Instead of hearing from everyone on earth, you only hear from the people you agree with. You just hear from more of them, not less.
Basically, one of the big reasons the internet sucks is because most people choose to only hear from people they agree with.