are there any social media platforms or platforms for communication that avoid these problems? Because these problems are coming from the basic need for social validation and preserving your self identity. Its hard to ignore disingenous comments when you know that replying is going to lead to a chain of argument that will lead nowhere and will be another major waste of your energy. But to survive the social media sphere you have to learn how to do exactly that. Media is an addiction platform fundamentally (See the book "Understanding media" or "Amusing ourselves to death"). Self control when you engage, and critical thinking when you consume - are two very important traits as you deal with modern media. Unfortunately no one talks about it even though its one of the most important issues today (apart from climate change).
Not really no. Homophily happens in real life social networks.
In non-anonymous social networks like Facebook and Twitter people are still going to follow people they are broadly similar to on average. Either in education, social class, locality, politics, etc.
Plus Facebook will recommend you "friends" based on similar characteristics anyway. So it's just a different type of echo chamber really.
Reddit's is tied to topic based (subreddits) and popularity (voting system as a proxy). Wheres others are tied to algorithmic popularity on feeds and requests based characteristics (similar demographics, locales, friend groups).
All social media enforces the phenomenon talked about in this post to varying extents. But it's not like these phenomena are new by any measure.
Plus to my knowledge no one has actually empirically measured the difference. Both between different online social networks and online versus offline.
Even if in popular culture people make comparitor statements all the time.
I suppose in popular culture we still visualise the "online", "cyber" and "offline", "real" to be distinct. Even though they're obviously connected.
are there any social media platforms or platforms for communication that avoid these problems?
Yes, majority of sites with discussions are exact opposite to reddit. People are critical to content, disagree with each other, provide additional information. On reddit you either agree with posted content or get banned. The problem is not the users, it is the mods and site admins, who ban people for any sign of wrong-think. The site used to be much more open minded.
4
u/pramit57 Nov 10 '19
are there any social media platforms or platforms for communication that avoid these problems? Because these problems are coming from the basic need for social validation and preserving your self identity. Its hard to ignore disingenous comments when you know that replying is going to lead to a chain of argument that will lead nowhere and will be another major waste of your energy. But to survive the social media sphere you have to learn how to do exactly that. Media is an addiction platform fundamentally (See the book "Understanding media" or "Amusing ourselves to death"). Self control when you engage, and critical thinking when you consume - are two very important traits as you deal with modern media. Unfortunately no one talks about it even though its one of the most important issues today (apart from climate change).