Echo chamber? Sign me up!
As the great Xodus to BlueSky gathered pace over the past fortnight it was fun (ie, not fun at all) to see the entirely predictable “it’ll just be an echo chamber in BlueSky” pieces. Because they are attempting to legitimately monitor content lots of trolls feel hard done by. “Come back” they say “the racists and misogynists just want to chat”. Before all the Mastodon gang pile in, I want to stress that this isn’t necessarily a pro-BlueSky piece, more an anti-X one. I’ve seen enough enshittification to know that BlueSky will probably go that way on day too. But for now, let us enjoy the frothing from the Musk fanboys.
The first argument they like to put forward is that, hey, they like to hear the views of different people because they’re open-minded. What they usually mean is they like to shout at people who they disagree with because that’s how they get their kicks and how dare you take that fun away from them.
Others protest how will we know what the far right are thinking if we don’t have a shared platform? LOL, you could go and live in a hut in Tristan da Cunha and Trump, Musk, Murdoch etc are so noisy that you’d still hear them. Or a variation on this is that we should all engage more. Yeah, because famously the likes of Trump, Farage, etc are all about the two-way engagement. As this nice piece of satire puts it “But some snowflakes didn’t like constantly being bombarded with all of those valid right-wing concerns about the economy, and taxes, and what kind of genitals everyone should be allowed to have.
John Naughton says BlueSky feels like a breath of fresh air, and I agree. I don’t use social media anywhere near as much as I used to, and when I do, you know what, I kind of want to find it enjoyable. And not be immersed in crap. But I’ll go further, the fact that so many of the people you don’t want to hear from think you shouldn’t be on BlueSky (or Mastodon, or Threads) is a compelling argument to join. It’s an act of mini-resistance. They want to, as I said in the last post, operate their “flood it with shit” policy and if you’re not there, then they can’t. They also don’t want you to be off enjoying yourselves somewhere else, they rely on people being ground down and miserable. So, yeah, head off to BlueSky or wherever and chat about the weather, cats, food, sports, reasonable politics without the reply guys popping up to tell you, well actually. We used to worry about the echo chamber a lot back in the early days of Twitter, and now look back on those days fondly. It’s not really an echo chamber, it’s just ignoring assholes.
(Image via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Disinformation_and_echo_chambers.jpg)
