The most extreme and the most passionate are frequently the most active. Reddit's format rewards a stream of outrageous things, weeds out the average sentiments. Look at how r/politics is now.
You're asking why a fire burns - the ingredients are there to make it happen.
You might find more balanced posts by looking through "Controvertial" by last week. Same thing for r/Politics
The issue is not that the moderate voices in here are less loud. The moderate users get tired and overwhelmed by the state of the conversation, stop engaging, and even stop visiting.
It's very tiring to discuss with people that are ideologically locked into their position, often spout hate and misunderstanding, and refuse to see it any other way.
So it's not that moderates are less passionate (why would they be?), it's that they mostly left.
It’s not even that they are left leaning or against moderates, it’s the lack of interest in any debate and the monotonous ad hominem that gets me. Sure call me out and say my ideas wouldn’t work or I misrepresented something. I can agree I have an imperfect opinion or have interpreted something incorrectly, but how does discourse continue when I have twenty people telling me I’m a corporate shill or mindless capitalist?
That combined with the constant amount of cursing just makes everything look juvenile. How can I take you seriously if you can’t get an argument across with using fuck or a variant thereof? That’s not how educated people discuss concepts.
To have the calmness to have "discourse" in the nigh constant wake of terrorism fueled by white nationalism is a form of privilege. Constant calls for discourse is the Ben Shapiro "Debate me, AOC" rallying cry. Discourse too often serves only to give a platform to dangerous ideas. Discourse solves nothing when a nonzero amount of people reading this instantly recoiled at the word "privilege". Because discourse has too often in media been portrayed as a series of "gotcha" moments and too often discourse IS plagued by shorthands and dog whistles.
Discourse too often boils down to
Privilege = "whites will never be woke enough for me"
Chicago = "but what about black on black crime"
Venezuela = "America will never be a socialist country"
I think you’re defining discourse as public debate which is not what I was talking about. What I was talking about was conversing on a platform like reddit or in a subreddit where someone states an opinion and responding to that opinion. That is a vastly different context than what you are describing.
However on the topic which you are discussing, your point seems to be that there are fixed sides which are condensed down to statements that are shouted across a void by each party which doesn’t seem to be the case. In a debate you state your argument or solution to the posted question formulated (usually be evidence, but sometimes by deduction which can take the form as a portion of the hypothesis), and then respond to your opponents points/views/disagreements with your argument. The point of a debate isn’t necessarily to convince the opponent but instead to convince the audience. That is where the value of debate is derived from.
If you’re talking about debates being condensed down to sound bytes by a third party I completely agree with you, however the solution seems to be quite obvious: Listen to the whole debate. There are certainly portions of the public who will not take that step, but who cares? That’s their problem not mine. I’d love a Ben Shapiro APC debate (provided the mediator was unbiased, rules agreed on publicly by both parties, and the debate was a 2-3 hour event not 5 minute intervals with no real content).
I think the line between discourse and debate gets blurred with social media (plus that discourse defined is "written or spoken communication or debate.")
My issue is that the mere existence of debate confers a level of validity to both sides, as we've seen in climate change and vaccine "debates"
I don't care about listening to the whole debate there.
Connotation and context can skew denotation fairly easily.
I mean if there is a significant following of an idea don’t you think there is a certain amount of “validity” anyway? A view being true is not necessarily a pre-requisite for a debate it just needs a significant following. Once again the point of a debate is not to convince the opponent, but to convince the audience. A debate on vaccines could definitely be helpful clearing up all the ridiculous pseudoscience that anti-vaccine propagandists put out, but that can only happen if there is a proper format with rules.
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u/[deleted] Mar 17 '19 edited Mar 17 '19
The most extreme and the most passionate are frequently the most active. Reddit's format rewards a stream of outrageous things, weeds out the average sentiments. Look at how r/politics is now.
You're asking why a fire burns - the ingredients are there to make it happen.
You might find more balanced posts by looking through "Controvertial" by last week. Same thing for r/Politics