Maybe Bluesky has "won"

> It feels like Twitter becoming a monoculture and others are having their monoculture somewhere else because Bluesky also doesn't feel diverse to me - more like the opposite of Twitter.

Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

> Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

The issue with Twitter and a lot of social media is that you don't often encounter opposing views that are nuanced, thoughtful and constructive, but rather hot takes, rants and memes. Even when those share your same worldview they can be tiring, but when they don't, they can drain your mental energy quickly.

Perhaps people do want to live in their own bubble, but I wouldn't say we can judge that based on Twitter just because of how toxic it can be.

It's not that I want an echo chamber of my own beliefs. Twitter has been plenty challenging for years without an issue.

I just want to post and interact with people without getting bombarded with wishes about my death for posting that I biked to work. There is no discourse there anymore, only loads of hate.

Painting people that leave as people that enjoy echo chambers is just dishonest.

This. I don't use twitter for political discourse and since new guy took charge and made his political inclinations clear I'm being bombarded with political content and "news"/"hot takes" that skew a certain way. If wanting to use the tool for topics that are of interest to me, is me being in an echo chamber, then so be it.

"I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward."

How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true? Or even being constantly exposed to folks who you tangentially know presenting a constant barrage of ideas that you find stupid and mean in ways that explicitly target you and yours?

After many years of being around that (I'm a queer/non-binary, an atheist, and politically far left) I stopped enjoying it and just started blocking folks.

I still seek out contrary opinions- that is why I regularly look at HN.

However, in my daily feed of stuff like "pictures of my nieces" and "birth/death announcements from my larger community" I don't really feel like I need to be confronted by folks who consider me to be literally demonic.

And, for the record, I don't expect those same people to be constantly subjected to my own opinions.

So it doesn't feel sad for me: if you consider places like "churches" or "chambers of commerce meetings" to be "safe spaces" for particular kinds of folks, then it just seems "normal".

What they're saying is rather, "I don't want to engage in a social network that is an echo chamber of someone else's beliefs."

I kind of want to engage on a platform that just shows me technical posts without being interspersed with dildo ads.

> How would you feel about, multiple times a day, being required to defend your core beliefs that you find trivially true?

Do you have to defend, or can you just ignore. I assume those statements are still being made, even if you don’t read them. So why not just ignore and move on?

FWIW, Twitter (not saying Twitter is the best or only site) allows you to have a feed of only people you follow. That probably approximates going to another site of only people who share your core beliefs.

> There is no discourse there anymore, only loads of hate.

I guess we just follow different people.

I found Twitter to be much better on that front pre-Elon, but the changes he introduced have really incentivized and highlighted the hot takes, rants, and memes. Twitter used to be the kind of place where I could see an interesting comment and then look at the replies to see more interesting comments and maybe a new person to follow. In post-Elon Twitter, replies are inevitably a complete cesspool of boosted blue checks farming engagement or bots. It certainly wasn't perfect before, but it's absolutely become more toxic since Elon purchased it.

My guess is that as a queer person, scarecrowbob gets regularly exposed to opinions that rise far beyond a mere difference of belief, and looks more like perpetual small doses of unmoderateable hatred. People who are willing to say that queer people are "literally demonic", for example, are not really offering some kind of thoughtful argument that queer people need to be engaging. But this toxicity is often expressed in ways that platforms are unable, or unwilling, to stop.

That's an easy way to dismiss all concerns, and backhanded also blame the ones complaining for "holding it wrong".

It's not about who I follow. It's about the replies I get when I participate in discussions around my interests.

People aren't built to ignore attacks on them and if they make themselves do it constantly it really has an effect on their self-esteem. See: bullying.

All I’m saying is, “There is no discourse there anymore, only loads of hate,” doesn’t reflect my experience. Apologies if I offended you.

I like your point and analogy about safe places being a normal aspect of society, where like-minded people gather. Perhaps you're right that it's not the end of the world to have multiple massive social networks.

Secondly, I find it so interesting that you come to HN for "contrary opinions" from your self-described "politically far left" viewpoint.

I hold a politically right viewpoint, and I come to HN for the same reason - it feels far left of my own world view.

I think it's pretty cool that HN can serve as a more neutral safe meeting place of minds.

When the effort to ignore/mute/block hateful content outweighs the rest of the user experience... guess what happens?

It doesn't matter if you interact only with people you follow, given that anyone with a bit of an audience gets plenty of hateful replies.

I’m torn here. I would personally use whatever was fun and interesting. Threads was immediately political and I assume bluesky is too.

It’s just a lot. Twitter will be awful. Bluesky will be a little over the top. I don’t know what’s happening in threads these days…

People want to yell into the void and don’t want to think about more than 140 characters… and there really isn’t a place for just easy going goofy fun

HN is literally owned and operated by a VC company. And a lot of the conversation is absolutely celebrating capitalism. It's as far from "far left" as might be imagined.

> Do you have to defend, or can you just ignore.

There's a concept of "background radiation" expressed in social spaces. Dealing with a constant barrage of people who hate you or your existence[1] is tiring.

[1] Or perhaps they claim they don't hate you in particular, just, you know, anyone like you who they don't know in particular.

I think GP made a pretty neutral comment, and you interpreted it rather poorly.

It's a bit of an overreaction which, ironically enough, is the kind of engagement Twitter thrives on.

Depends on what you mean by left. Some people, including many who would describe themselves as such, think "leftist" means things like pronouns and reparations, and are even happy to engage with capital when it supports their pet causes.

> He bought Twitter to be able to shape the platform to his image of the world, while claiming it was about freedom or some such thing.

Musk tried to back out of buying Twitter. But this detail is not very relevant.

It’s populated by a lot of leftists that, while unhappy with the right, can have a sort of reasonable discussion about it though.

I’m left, but I can listen to people that identify as right on HN and not roll my eyes, because they have good points as well.

If you pick a random person off the street (left/right), your chances aren’t nearly so good.

This is exactly my take as well. The people leaving and putting out the call for others to follow them are the same ones that lost their power when the platform changed hands and the ideologies of the people who run it changed.

Not necessarily? Non-echo chamber is more interesting, but I’ll take one that echos my beliefs over one that doesn’t.

Having watched the explosion of Bluesky over the last week, and being on Mastodon for years, I have a different take on it. It's sort of consistent with what you're saying but sort of not.

The problem to me is more that whenever you have a centralized platform that's associated with a single owner, it inherits all the issues of that owner, good and bad. It's inevitable. I'm not sure it's an issue with people not wanting to hear other viewpoints, it's more so people have decided they have had enough of, say, Musk, and don't want to support him. With Facebook stuff came up about that. The other stuff, about feeling like they're drowning in abusive right-wing stuff is also part of it but I think if it were just, say, like the web, they'd say "well this is the web" like people say "this is the news". Once you can point to, say, Musk, and say "he made it this way" or "I don't want to support a person like this", regardless of whether or not it's true or whatever, if enough people feel that way, they're going to want an alternative.

This won't really go away until there's a decentralized open system that's easy to use, and not associated with any given "owner". Mastodon/AP is close but things there are so closely associated with hosts that the host starts to become a dominant issue (see Threads), as does figuring out where to go, and transferability of accounts across servers.

As for "why Bluesky"? Probably because it looks like Twitter and a lot of journalists and politics people were complaining about Threads rules prohibiting things they wanted to post. Not because it's left or right wing, but because of links and political content period. I don't know enough about Threads policies but independently lots of journalists on Bluesky were saying they just couldn't post content on Threads even if it was fairly neutral, or that it wouldn't get any visibility?

Bluesky is easy to sign up for and fairly open. Once you get the journalists and news organizations on there, and a critical mass it grows.

Personally from a technical standpoint I'd like to see Nostr take off but that community currently is very heavily crypto-focused. Network effects and feedback loops are a pain.

"I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

I really don't. I know you mean this as an insult, but like, it gives this weird reverence to social media that I don't get. I am all sorts of interested in long form media that explores striking/dangerous/novel ideas that really expand my mind and help me to see the world in a whole new way, or interviews with people who have a set of beliefs that are different from mine.

I am not interested in 140 character hot takes that just pounce at my amygdala, just like I wouldn't want my Thursday night football game to cut away to a five minute diatribe on the pros and cons of abortion access, or my video games to lecture me on free market economics.

Engaging in as social network that isn't an echo chamber of my beliefs is like being interrupted every five minutes during dinner time to be yelled at by a different evangelist. Church is on Sunday, thanks.

So basically you don’t actually want diversity of thought. That’s fine if it’s what you want but at least be honest and admit it. Let’s not redefine standard terms please, it makes it hard to have a discussion.

Mono-cultures are forming because as a whole, we are becoming less tolerant. Tolerance is the ultimate challenger of belief because it is gentle. No extremist is going to change their ways because people keep yelling at them to change. It'll be because they see the people they revile living perfectly fine lives and willing to accept them as they are.

"B-but they believe these morally reprehensible things!" So what? Have we not all hurt people and been the villain in someone else's life? People get lost along the way. Show them grace. We can't force people into different ways of living, but we can show them.

I don’t use Twitter myself but if having a “bad person” own a service disqualifies you from using it I have some bad news for you.

Well, not that I agree with them, but Trump's victory shows that people don't really seem to care about these things, otherwise, they would have voted.

It was an echo chamber, the Tumblr Exodus made society much more leftwing overall when they moved into Reddit and Twitter, despite still using 4chan memes to this day.

Speaking as someone who self-identifies as far left, the conversation here can go either way. I know it's a common trope that HN is dominated by "Silicon Valley libertarians", but in my experience that isn't really the case when you look at up- and downvotes.

> only people you follow

No ads?

There are different levels of how bad that is, and it's not just owning the thing, but buying it in order to prop up right-wing propaganda and trolls. I don't belong to Gab or Truth for a reason. I wouldn't participate in a Fox News run website either.

…source? I’ve literally never once met a capitalist leftist, only ones that still use the word to avoid alienating people, e.g. Sanders. No offense but I think this is a case of echo chambers in work impeding our discourse —- leftism is anti capitalism, and has been since its inception in France.

That doesn’t make sense with the given scenario. It’s followers that have visibility int your posts, not people you’re following

The amount of antisemitism in the replies of any Jewish person on X, when the topic is the technical topics that I pay attention to, is revolting.

If that pure noise, a litany of uninteresting ad hominem attacks at best, which drown out relevant conversation, is "diversity" that's required, what is gained? If not wanting to be subjected to uninteresting insults is an "echo chamber" is that so bad?

Twitter was interesting because you could have on-topic conversations with world experts and random people. By protecting the uncivil, and even elevating it with for-purchase blue checks, people find better uses of their time.

The destruction of value in the transition of Twitter to X is something to behold. The person who bought it had no clue about the value of what he bought and what drove the value. Social networks are about the people; Twitter in particular was about the specialists, the journalists, the exchange of ideas, far more than any other social network. And that was all destroyed so that more bots can spam people and so that personal attacks can be left up.

I'd love a proper spectrum. But my spectrum pretty much stops when we start excusing unironic prejudice. I think "your body, my choice" was pretty much the tipping point for many people deciding to move ship.

Fortunately I do have a few other smaller hubs for a more "diverse" (in the original sense of the word) conversation, while not allowing bigotry.

HN is a very strange beast. I do rather enjoy it, though.

But X for them is an echo chamber of opposite beliefs.

The premium account system where comments are not sorted chronologically but where paid accounts post first (on top of a poorly moderated platform) leads to drive-by toxicity, not intelligent discourse.

> Threads was immediately political and I assume bluesky is too.

Life is political. Believing that it’s not only means that someone who is also pretending that life is not political will make the rules.

> HN is literally owned and operated by a VC company

So? I have never seen instances where YC's organizational viewpoint controlled the overall discussion, and I think dang is probably the best moderator on the planet.

Sure, HN has a focus around the "tech startup ecosystem", and that may attract a certain type of viewpoint, but I've never seen that viewpoint pushed from an institutional perspective.

no, to my mind there's diversity, and there's "there are always two sides to everything and both have to be given equal consideration". the latter is a huge mistake and is how we get climate change deniers and transphobes platformed in major newspapers.

I don’t think of myself as less tolerant, but I’ve definitely become less patient with the qanon-level discourse that has come to dominate the reply section on twitter, which used to be a place for interesting conversation.

Maybe somebody being patient with them will change their mind, but that’s not what I want to spend my time online doing.

> I find it incredibly sad

Sounds great to me, if its true. Prior to social media, "echo chamber" was the status quo, and I think everyone can agree things were a lot more peaceful during that time.

I don't doubt that you find HN to be left of your political position.

A lot of folks I know find all kinds of things "left wing". A lot of my liberal friends think they are leftists, though most of my leftist friends would disagree. My conservative friends don't really draw that distinction between liberals and leftists, and at the same time my liberal friends often think my anarchist friends to be about on par with literal Nazis, horeshoe-theory wise.

I suspect a lot of the Dem establishment neo-liberals (who are rapidly becoming neocons ala Rumsfield/Cheney) who make up a lot of this site see themselves as slightly left. Rationally left, but not part of the "revolutionary" left.

Which, from my position, puts them fairly close to the Reagan conservatives, if you overlook some issues about gay folks and are took the 80s conservatives at their word rather than their deeds when it comes to race issues. However, I don't find this place to be a meeting of the minds.

I find that HN is a place where I can observe what the sociopaths who have real capital and thus material political power think about the world, or at least what the their sycophantic mandarins work for those folks might think.

I listen to what folks say here because I am genuinely curious about what their alien-to-me understandings of technology and political ethics will do in the larger world.

I listen to folks here for the same reason I listen to left-wing folks digest nazi propaganda, read a lot of history, and try to hear what conversations are happening at the red neck bars and at gun shops I hang around.

Cause that's who has no problem fucking with my world, and fuck with my world they have indeed.

HN is not a place where I think any of my actual politics will find an audience.

Though I am (likely unwisely) communicating now, I mostly just shut up when I am here, unless someone has something worthwhile to say about music.

Majorities can be tyrannical, ignorant, easily motivated by fear, etc. One election doesn't prove that most people don't care about such things. After all Obama was elected twice and he brought things significantly closer to single payer healthcare. And in 2024 some very red states made the right to abortion constitutional and dropped prohibitions on same-gender marriage.

>it feels far left of my own world view.

Strange, because I've noticed over the past few years that HN has been sliding further to the right. Or at the very least it's susceptible to brigading. To be clear, it's not "right winger equals brigade[0]", it's "oh gee someone posted a story about EU external immigration and now the comments are full of people angry about asylum seekers who think the correct solution[1] is to shut down international law and start retroactively deporting citizens".

For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.

[0] I live with right-wingers, so I kinda have to be tolerant of them

[1] If this had been anticipated and dealt with ahead of time, the correct solution would have been to invest in integration and have generous family visas. That's why the US doesn't have a migrant integration crisis like the EU does - we know how to welcome and inculturate people. The EU doesn't really do integration, it assumes everyone is a self-motivated tech worker who will do all the integration work themselves.

Thanks for being open - I've learned a lot in this thread.

I honestly had no idea that anyone "left of center" felt they couldn't openly share here, as I have always mentally categorized HN as a leftist echo chamber (hopefully that's not too blunt - it's just my honest perception).

I naively assumed that it was only those more right-of-center that felt their worldviews and opinions were unwelcome here, judging from the instantly dead posts I see of anything remotely right-aligned.

From your short share, I see that the echo-chamber is unwelcoming to a much broader sphere of humans than I realized. I find that super helpful to understand - so thank you for sharing.

The audience here skews towards those the truth.

Of course, the ones that cannot tolerate any dissenting opinion will either whine or leave.

Remember, the Gentleman's agreement of "no politics" was left unsaid until one party broke it, which divided america.

HN is largely US centric and largely suffers the blinkered bimodal view that the US itself mostly suffers from.

It's a problem amplified by Murdoch type media outlets who have weaponised the us-vs-them worldview for clickbait outrage and spread that dumbing down as far across the world as they are able.

For those of us not within that mindset such views seem very childlike and unsophisticated, there's a slew of nuance to the world that doesn't easily reduce to L v. R, "woke agenda" and all that et. al. jazz.

FWiW IMNotACommunist .. but I have an endearing love of this short interaction twixt Piers Morgan ( UK outrage talking head ) and Ash Sarkar for higlighting the pitfalls of not paying attention to what people actually think and believe in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD7Ol0gz11k

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ash_Sarkar

> The audience here skews towards those the truth.

The truth is that this sentence is believed by every audience ever convened.

However, this format doesn't immediately squash critical opinions (besides ␟ stuff), which eventually allows critical discourse to actually occur.

Other side promote engagement. This site still rewards discourse.

But there are two sides to everything and both should be given equal consideration. There are also extremes on both sides that should be recognized and rejected as such. And the only way to sift out the two and make sure you're not accidentally skewing towards one extreme is to consistently try to understand other people's perspectives.

This practice is both educational—it helps you see where you might be wrong after all—and crucial for anyone who wants to actually make a difference in the world. Rejecting the perspectives of 50% of the population out of hand is a great way to lose popular support and elections.

Who's requiring you to defend your beliefs? I'm asking, but not requiring.

I think what you're noticing is that a simple left/right along a line is a poor way to express someone's political views.

I suspect that because a huge portion of the HN crowd are educated IT workers / would-be founders, overall there's both a strong support for capitalism mixed with progressive social views. That doesn't really connect well with the political landscape in most of the western world and typically gets you labeled a centrist, regardless of how important those particular issues are to you.

Ok, two sides to this equation:

Lolinder has no right to continue existing.

Lolinder has every right to continue existing.

Explain why you feel you personally are required to entertain the idea of both of those options. This is effectively what you are arguing must be done in the context of this thread.

I'm not politically informed, and I don't watch traditional media, so I had to Google "Murdoch".

If I understand you correctly, you feel it's the right-leaning outlets like Fox News that have weaponized us-vs-them mindset?

The origin feels flipped to me, but regardless who started it, I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days - mature discourse where each side is willing to listen and acknowledge the elements of truth and assume positive intent in the other side's positions.

As you say, the media on both sides, including social media, feels extremely childlike and unsophisticated.

"Murdoch type media" outlets are those with a greater interest in pure profit, exercising influence, and serving owner interests that extend outside of media alone. The balanced presentation of news is of minor interest and a means to an end rather than a primary goal.

This, with Murdoch, harks back in a lesser way to his father, then to his expansion into the UK Fleet Street and eventual transition in US media, in Canada with Conrad Black, in the US pre Murdoch with Hearst, Pulitzer, Samuel Insull and Harold McCormick, in the UK pre Murdoch with Alfred Harmsworth and the like.

These are people who have all had large significant media outlets that have engaged in extremely partisan positions with respect to wars, the economy, favoured political candidates and dumbing down discourse.

> I see little to no actual respectful and thoughtful discourse these days

    In the 1890s the fierce competition between his World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal caused both to develop the techniques of yellow journalism, which won over readers with sensationalism, sex, crime and graphic horrors. 

~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Pulitzer

I said this:

> There are also extremes on both sides that should be recognized and rejected as such.

"No right to continue existing" is obviously an extreme that doesn't need to be entertained. But the existence of that extreme is used to argue that anything short of full endorsement of everything labeled a right is that extreme of denial of the right to exist, which is patently false.

A less extreme formulation that regularly gets lumped in with "no right to continue to exist" is: Some people are born with various shades of physical differences that lead to different mental and emotional states. Those who are different from the majority deserve our love and support, but we should attempt to provide that support in a way that doesn't encourage people to self-diagnose with these very real diversities when they don't, in fact, have them. It's a tricky balance to maintain and one that we hope we can get right, but when it comes to sweeping cultural change it's better to move slowly and observe the outcomes carefully. In the meantime we should try as hard as possible to support those who we do identify as being truly divergent.

I'm willing to bet that a substantial number of people reading the position described above will be unable to distinguish it from "no right to continue to exist", and therein lies the problem.

My account is two years old and I have more updoots than you. Maybe address my comment instead of my username.

> Generally, it seems to me that a lot of people are saying, basically, "I don't want to engage in a social network that isn't and echo chamber of my beliefs."

> I find it incredibly sad. But it does feel like the direction society is moving toward.

It's not that I don't want to engage. I just don't want to be submerged there all the time. I want to spend most of my time surrounded by 'my people' and only once in a while peek outside.

Let me recommend an article by Noah Smith where he argues (IMO convincingly) why he thinks that the internet works better as a fragmented thing https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-internet-wants-to-be-fragm...

You're being downvoted but as a lefty European tech worker this rings true. I come to HN for interesting technical content (obviously) but I find the politics of the site by turns confusing and hard to stomach.

It is certainly the case that many well-meaning, Dem-voting Americans don't seem to know what leftist politics is (having never been exposed to it), and don't seem to realize that they are right-wing. It's an interesting phenomenon, but quite alarming when the consequences for the rest of the world are Not Good.

Maybe the social networks promoting the most radical, outrageous, loud, and disturbing posts are the problem.

If the political alignment of those posts resonates with you, it isn't as annoying.

It's noteworthy that with AI, so far we will just get more / louder / more awful posts, rather than a potential for superior moderation and appreciation for nuance.

After all, the busted metrics that AI will be aligned to are the same old flawed ones that reward sociopathy.

Dude, we used to live in strictly segregated ghettos everywhere. If it wasn't ethnically divided, it was strictly segregated by class, and if that wasn't the division, it was religion.

The internet for a while was a big melting pot, probably because there was an inherent IQ filter to using the early/medium web.

But once the stupids came on, then came the stupid-manipulation companies chasing them, and everything went to hell.

Usenet was kind of like this too, until tools made usenet more accessible.

I've been too busy to look at Mastodon/Bluesky out of laziness. I never did Twitter. Mastodon may require some technical work to make use of, which may be a wonderful long term thing.

You only need to look at the 2024 US presidential election to see how many people disagree with that point.

Out of 245 million eligible voters, only 65% voted.

For many people politics is an abstract concept in a faraway place.

As an Australian here, I just had my mind blown that someone in the anglosphere didn't know "Murdoch".

Murdoch is more than Fox News. Just ask any Australian or Brit .

There is a difference between a social network or forum that has different beliefs but interesting discussions, and one that is solely focused on attacking the other camp.

Abstaining is a political decision too.

Twitter has systematically broken the tools for ignoring it. No more mass blocklists, no more third party clients, an algorithm designed around shoving the content of the sort of idiots who pay for self-promotion in your face… I mean, no thanks.

Which bad news exactly? I already use decentralized/distributed systems whenever I can to avoid the enshittification.

I feel like people's perceptions around certain topics might shift quite a bit, depending on how those are implemented.

Suppose you have a fairly open border policy. Lots of folks get to contribute to the economy, there’s some cultural exchange, it’s pretty okay.

What if there isn’t a good plan in place for making people integrate with the local culture and you end up with large groups of people whose beliefs and behaviour are incompatible with those of the local population, e.g. calls for religious rule in an otherwise democratic country and increased violence? Not the blown out of proportion election claims in the US, but rather the real question of what happens to people after they cross the border? If that detail is unaddressed then people might grow to desire more closed borders, even if the issues lie elsewhere.

It’s a bit similar to the self-described “pro-life” movement, except when you look past those strongly held beliefs, things get more complex. For example, if children are born in families that can’t really afford them, will there be enough government assistance to school and feed them? What about daycare? What about neither of the people being mature enough to be good parents? That’s setting the personal freedom argument aside for just a second, it’s like they care about the births but don’t have the rest figured out, similarly to the discourse about borders.

I think you’re correct that the right solution would involve focusing on integration.

I find it weird those analysis that forget the obvious Brazil moment. It provided the coordination needed to execute the exodus.

The momentary Banning of twitter in Brazil, provided the impetus for a large amount of normal people there to look for a close alternative. And BlueSky is a more normie friendly.

Now a simple network analysis will show you that a lot of "tech-normie" people, but heavy user of social networks, in the US have an extended network that touches Brazil, especially for people of color and blacks. their social contact primed them for changing to Bluesky. In a sense it was the dry powder.

Now came the election, where Elon Musk took a central role and where more than 80% of black voted against his prefered candidate. It just gave the sparkle inside an implicit network that was already playing with BlueSky.

> "your body, my choice"

The sad thing is you could be referencing the left with Covid vaccines or the right with abortion.

> we are becoming less tolerant

This is partly true. But also - life is too short. There isn’t enough time in the day to engage socially with people you don’t have a connection with.

>The EU doesn't really do integration, it assumes everyone is a self-motivated tech worker who will do all the integration work themselves.

The EU consists of welfare states. Thus the incentive structure for an immigrant is totally different than in the US. Further more MENA immigration which is what Europe has most of is not the same kind of immigration that the US enjoys. The amount of state expenditure on facilitating and integrating immigrants in western Europe is insane.

Western Europe has bendt over backwards the last 50 years to accommodate people of cultures that have pretty much nothing in common with European culture, values and historically has been the enemy both culturally and religiously - the world did not start in 1945 as many on the left in Europe thinks.

> The EU consists of welfare states

That's a stretch... those welfare states aren't that universal and realistically most people in such situations would be barely above subsistence level.

But yeah, Europe generally gets people who can't get into US with all the outcomes of that.

These are completely different issues.

When people don't vaccinate themselves they become a walking vector that affects society as a whole. Yes, personally, they might be healthy. But there's people out there who can't take the vaccines and should they get sick of COVID they could die. There's people out there who, even after being vaccinated, are still at higher risk should they get the disease (the vaccine doesn't prevent you getting sick, rather it makes it more difficult for the virus to transmit and lowes it's effectiveness and how dangerous it is for you). So people not vaccinating puts the whole of society at risk.

On the other hand, abortion is very much a familial issue. It affects the woman that is pregnant the most. The rest of the people around her are affected only tangentially, yes, the parents might want to become grandparents or the person that got her pregnant might also want to have a child. And those are inputs that are necessary when coming to the decision of performing an abortion or not.

Now, where does "your body, my choice" come into play? Do abortions cause the societal harm that vaccines cause? I don't think there's any evidence to this, it's all moral standings. But we legislate for everyone, we don't legislate for a group of people that happen to have a particular religious view of the world. Now, these people have a lot of power and influence and that's why their view is imposed on most of society.

Ultimately though, these issues are different and shouldn't be treated as mirrors of each others. I think that's a mistake.

you are absolutely correct. this is why blueski and mastodon will ultimately fail.

I don't want to engage in a social network where if I state my views, a horde of people who disagree can get me shaddowbanned. Now I state my views to an empty room.

Does a person self-diagnose as Black? Jewish? Indigenous? Being gay?

Your attempt at nuanced discussion falls apart when the context is about whether people should be expected to stay somewhere by "blocking and moving on" comments suggesting they go cease existing.

What you're failing to recognize (to a point that at least appears bad faith) is that it is the extremes here.

Have people not always been this way? It seems like people forgotten their Emily Post —that it is generally considered a faux pas to discuss controversial topics like religion or politicd outside of intimate social settings with close friends and family.

Anyway, I don’t want an echo chamber for my beliefs. I just want to be able to discover and discuss scientific articles and watch sports highlight clips without being bombarded by a bunch of bullshit.

> What you're failing to recognize (to a point that at least appears bad faith) is that it is the extremes here.

This is exactly what I'm warning against. Refusing to see that it's not that simple is why Trump's anti-trans smear campaign works so well. The best thing we can do for trans rights is acknowledge that we recognize it as a complicated issue that needs to be worked through carefully, but internet rhetoric invariably breaks it down into extremes. Given two extremes as the only options, we shouldn't be surprised when people pick the one we wouldn't prefer.

My comments here will be labeled transphobic by a lot of people, to the point where if I weren't writing under a pseudonym I wouldn't write them at all. Never mind that I'm an ally—the fact that I'm the kind of ally that calls out a counterproductive theory of change for what it is makes me an enemy in the current environment, and that is why we're seeing a regression on the national level. Cassandras like me have been warning about this for years now, and it's high time we're heard rather than pushed out of the tent.

It’s just an objective fact that in any political thread the top comments are one of either:

1. A lazy attempt at seeming impartial while holding a subtle, elitist anti-republican opinion.

2. A not-so-subtly marxist or socialist outburst.

Under each comment the top 3 direct replies are an agreeing sentiment that pretends to add some nuance to the discussion. The fourth might be a contrarian (either right wing or conservative) opinion that gets barraged by downvotes and angry responses.

I guess I'm one of today's lucky 10,000! https://m.xkcd.com/1053/

Have you thought of potential solutions for how to appease this problem? It doesn’t look like things are trending less polarised, but more. Do you have suggestions for turning the tides?

If it’s just going to keep getting worse and worse, what’s the final destination?

Well yeah, I should've stated Western Europe more with regards to the welfare state, - Central/Eastern Europe hasn't been that enthusiastic about MENA immigration and they don't have that level of social security nets.

Also even the illegal immigrants that come to the US is easier to integrate than the immigrants from MENA in Europe. Culturally they are much closer, even though there has been a influx of illegal immigrants from other places than Americas last couple of years.

This is a very deep difference in immigration in EU vs US that is quite foreign to many Americans.

It’s not an echo chamber to refuse to accept hate speech and shitty right wing media. It’s an interesting but continuous claim that if you don’t accept far right and increasingly fascist viewpoints, you live in an echo chamber. This is a lie.

I think it's more due to political ignorance and the overton window shifting right the last 50 years. People tend to equate modern liberalism, which is very much pro-markets and pro-capital, with leftism.

These topics are very clear cut to me. Forcing someone to take an experimental drug is not okay, and murdering small babies is not okay.

>That's why the US doesn't have a migrant integration crisis like the EU does - we know how to welcome and inculturate people

I believe you got this other way around. The US doesn't have a migrant immigration crisis like the EU does, because it's a big isolated island with relatively strict immigration policy. The people who immigrate to the US are exactly the kind of self-motivated workers who do the integration work themselves.

Many here believed that investing in integration will magically make open borders policies work, and the countries did. Less people in Europe believe it now.

Another thing is, how much immigration does US get? In Europe, many countries can have a significant fraction (a few percent) of their population immigrate over a few years (for example check how big UA immigration was). That makes integration much harder.

To be clear, I'm not against immigration, but it's a complex topic and I believe you're a bit too optimistic and extreme about it.

>For the sake of full transparency: I'm an open borders maniac, which makes me left wing by American standards and basically persona non grata in Europe.

I don't get dividing people into two neat categories (left and right). And you're welcome in Europe, it would be great to have you and I'm sure you would do well here!

the only thing I can think of to do, as an individual, is to build community with people who say "no, there really are not two sides to some issues, and we don't have to embrace the viewpoints of those who disagree on fundamental issues like human rights". also to support news orgs and other media who take a similar stance.

this is unfortunately what (mostly right wingers) decry as "bubbles" and "echo chambers", but I think if the left is going to win hearts, minds, and political power it needs to focus on engaging its own people on its own issues rather than waste time and energy endlessly fighting with the right.

also, inviting conservatives in to find common ground is largely a trap anyway, and has shifted the overton window a good deal to the right because people feel that "okay, maybe we can come to some sort of compromise". the writer a r moxon put it very well: "meet me in the middle, says the unjust man. you take a step towards him, he takes a step back. meet me in the middle, says the unjust man."

on the other hand, I've read that when people complain that their kids went to college and got "brainwashed with liberal ideas", what actually happened was that they met gay people, and black people, etc, and realised that most of what their parents were getting off conservative media was bullshit at best and hate-mongering at worst. so maybe the real solution is to welcome conservatives, but hold the line on making no space for conservative ideas and attitudes.

This is the literal definition of bigotry.

The government did not force anyone to take the vaccine. The death count in US proportionally speaks to that.

If you're comparing walking into a store or concert (both private establishments) to your state telling your doctor thru cannot operate on you, you clearly don't understand or won't understand how freedom works.

I have a few family members who chose not to take the vaccine. They are dead, but that was indeed their body, their choice.

Wherre is this story on a person forced to take a vaccine?

    > The audience here skews towards those the truth.

  The truth is that this sentence is believed by every audience ever convened.

Actually you are correct, I should had known better to type "truth", as if a thing existed.

This site definitely skews towards objectivity.

I don't think you get to decide if you qualify as an ally, and that's maybe part of the problem here.

There are a lot of well-meaning well-intentioned people who do great harm. The adage "the path to hell is paved with good intentions" exists as an observation of this.

What you say is partly true, but it goes beyond that. It's not that uncommon to see even straight up anti-capitalist comments here that still get upvoted, or the kind of "market solves all" talk getting downvoted into oblivion. So I'd say there's a hefty chunk of the userbase that is also leaning strongly left economically.

Two different things: left liberals and socialists.

That's the reason why people are moving to Bluesky: because there you don't have a make a constant effort to ignore posts.

On Twitter, I have a make an active effort to not click on the "For you" tab because I'll be bombarded with posts about Trump or "woke" games, which I simply don't want to see. On Bluesky, I can actually discover new content without having to think about my mental health when using the "Discover" feed.

You’re talking about a different thing. I’m strictly talking about actual forcing, and by that I mean giving legal repercussions to people who wouldn’t do it.

Private businesses can place whatever bans on whomever they want, for all I care.

Agreed. A lot of people call themselves allies while actively sabotaging relationships with the 60% of the population that they need to get on board with change to actually make a difference. We just got a very visceral illustration of the harm that that kind of ally with good intentions has caused.

I've done more to advance LGBT acceptance by quietly listening to people in deep red states and then (after listening to them!) helping them to see the other perspective than 100 internet commenters raging about how everything comes down to extremes.

You can label me whatever you like, but I'm going to keep up my approach, because it's obvious that the mainstream left's approach is a total failure.

> I’m strictly talking about actual forcing, and by that I mean giving legal repercussions to people who wouldn’t do it.

Where? I've yet to hear of a court case where the plantiff is arguing that they were forced to take a vaccine by a government. Bodily automomy has plenty of case studies and it'd be an easy slam dunk if any federal entity tried doing that.

There was an executive order:

https://oversight.house.gov/release/wenstrup-opens-investiga...

>the Biden Administration implemented Executive Order (E.O.) 14043. This E.O. required federal employees to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by November 8, 2021, or risk removal or termination from their federal employment.

But I believe the precedent for political discrimination in the workplace is thin, at best. I don't think the Hatch Act would have much ground here. You're not owed a job for your political nor religious beliefs if it puts others in danger (there's a lot of case law on the latter with regard to rituals).

----

EDIT: Oh yea, there was the overreaching argument of the president. That one was swiftly shot down:

https://www.theusconstitution.org/litigation/feds-for-medica...

>Finally, our brief argued that Supreme Court precedent supports the president’s broad authority to regulate federal employees, including their out-of-office conduct, when such regulation is justified by the government’s interest in the safety, effectiveness, and security of government facilities. In one case, for example, the Supreme Court sanctioned Reagan Administration regulations requiring drug testing of government employees and prohibiting drug use outside of the workplace

Noam Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" is great place for anyone wanting to learn more about the various biases that influence what gets covered in the media, and how it is discussed. It's a book, but there's also a great documentary of the same name that's half about Noam Chomsky's life, and half the ideas discussed in the book.

It's from the late 80s, but it is still relevant (and it also helps it feel a little above the current political hot-topics of today.

> right to continue existing

Unless you're talking about state-sanctioned murder, this is just emotive rhetoric with no relevance to what people are actually disagreeing on.

It is an echo chamber if you classify everything that's against your ideology as "hate speech" or "shitty X media".

While it's true no one has a gun to my head to defend myself, folks post stuff that assert my politics are indefeasible quite often.

> we should attempt to provide that support in a way that doesn't encourage people to self-diagnose with these very real diversities when they don't, in fact, have them

What diversities are you talking about here?

For things like autism and ADHD I see very few people suggesting that self-diagnosis is reliable.

For gender and sexuality, there isn't a test for that, what do you expect people to do? From there, being cis or trans, straight or gay is a direct consequence of gender+body or sexuality+body. Do you think there's a significant rate of false positives for trans/bi/gay? I haven't seen evidence of that being the case.

Do you have something else in mind?

I’m not speaking of any application of such measures, I’m stating my opposition of them.

Although now that you’re making my argument for me, it’s not cool that tax payer funded jobs would be terminated over that.

Saw a post on Twitter about how Bluesky autobans for posting "there are two genders". Went over to Bluesky's subreddit to ask how they feel about it -- got banned on their subreddit too

That's trivially falsifiable.

https://bsky.app/search?q=%22there+are+two+genders%22

You were comparing this to abortion, and I'm saying the situations are the opposite. Losing something over your choice is the exact consequences of free speech. Being unable to do something over someone else's choices is the opposite of speech.

They would be replaced, not terminated. We lost a few million people in COVID, cso firing a few people is better than the government basically having a class action launched at the United States.

> What if there isn’t a good plan in place for making people integrate with the local culture and you end up with large groups of people whose beliefs and behaviour are incompatible with those of the local population, e.g. calls for religious rule in an otherwise democratic country and increased violence? Not the blown out of proportion election claims in the US, but rather the real question of what happens to people after they cross the border? If that detail is unaddressed then people might grow to desire more closed borders, even if the issues lie elsewhere.

Integration is primarily a numbers game. Most people don't integrate into the local culture unless they are cut off from their own. If you have so many immigrants that you either need to build immigrant housing or fill up entire towns with them then you don't get immigrans assimilating into the local culture but rather them bringing their own culture no matter what other measueres are implemented. So yes, a good implementation of immigration needs closed borders at least for foreign cultures - these things are not independent.

If you take off your bias googles you might see that "right to continue existing" typically actually means "right to hove everyone else forced to support them".

You can exist without

- others being forbiden from expressing opinions that you find distateful

- your personal wishes being financially supported by everyone else

- being given a platform to target children with your views

- whatever facet you define yourself with being represented in every media ever made

Framing it as the "right to continue existing" in order to make "the other side" seem more extremist is exactly the kind of thing an extremist does.

> For gender and sexuality, there isn't a test for that, what do you expect people to do?

I expect kids to be given a chance to go through puperty before being encouraged to make permanent changes to their bodies. Teemagers in general are still finding themselves and usually have opinions differrent from those they will have when grown up.

> Do you think there's a significant rate of false positives for trans/bi/gay? I haven't seen evidence of that being the case.

Perhaps that's because you have shielded yourself from it. This is exactly the problem with (social media) bubbles, both ones created urself with excessive blocklists and more systematic manipulation of what can be shared.

> I don’t think of myself as less tolerant

Most people don't think of themselves as [insert negative trait].

> I expect kids to be given a chance to go through puperty before being encouraged to make permanent changes to their bodies. Teemagers in general are still finding themselves and usually have opinions differrent from those they will have when grown up.

Nobody's doing permanent changes to kids that haven't gone through the age of puberty. Sometimes blockers are used to delay the effect of puberty itself, but those are the opposite of a permanent change.

And as far as my question goes, that just pushes the it down the line by a few years.

> Perhaps that's because you have shielded yourself from it. This is exactly the problem with (social media) bubbles

Well I've never seen someone try to put together even a couple detailed anecdotal examples either. And there are a lot of flat out lies that get spread and even get on the news so I'm not going to accept a vague claim of "it happens".

Paradox of tolerance. Tolerance means you have to be intolerant of intolerance.

There's no point in stating your opposition to something that does not exist and is not happening. That's just fear mongering and straw-manning. If nobody is doing this, you're simply building a strawman to fight against because it's easy.

I've never seen anyone on the Internet write "there are two genders" in good faith. 100% of the time it's rage bait, intended to boil down the conversation and to be as obnoxious as possible.

Most of the time it's undebatable, it is just hate speech. I'm talking slurs and "you're destroying America" type rhetoric. It's so common on a lot of social media platforms, including Twitter. Nobody wants to put up with that, it's obnoxious and completely impossible to debate against.

If people think I deserve AIDS what the hell am I supposed to do with that? That's not useful information, and I don't understand why you're demanding people have to put up with it. They can leave, and evidently, they are.

That would mean in this case being intolerant of leftists, as they are the ones trying to suppress ideas and debate (by "making no space for conservative ideas and attitudes").

In my experience, racism, homophobia, transphobia, slurs, misogyny, and general bigotry almost exclusively resonates from conservatives. So naturally when those opinions get filtered out that almost only affects conservatives.

There's nothing wrong with having conservative ideas and attitudes. But are you able to express them without bigotry? Are you able to be pro-life without calling women sluts and whores, for instance?

The answer for some conservatives is no, including our president elect. Nobody is required or even expected to tolerate that, and in fact tolerating it only spreads intolerance.

I guess it depends on the definition of "forcing" someone. I was generous in my definition and cited placing legal repercussions on people who wouldn't take the shot. Now that didn't happen (to my knowledge), but people got fired, ostracized, and denied all kinds of services and access because of their choice. That's not cool, and I'd hope we learned from that experience as a society.

I didn't mean to fear monger or construct a straw man. I didn't directly address anyone's argument, I stated my own opinion on this subject confidently on this message board that's meant for just that.

> but people got fired, ostracized, and denied all kinds of services and access because of their choice. That's not cool, and I'd hope we learned from that experience as a society.

Welcome to the free market. If you would prefer a larger government to enforce this lack of ostracization, perhaps a change to the first amendment as well, feel free to advocate for that.

Companies are risk averse. They don't want to deal with people getting sick and the PR nightmare of their employees not wearing masks. So that's that, and from a business perspective it's by far the best choice. You're always free to quit your job and go work somewhere that aligns with you more ideologically.