Outside the Beltway

A Tale of Two Reddits

Is there an echo in here.

James Joyner
12

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The social sharing site Reddit has been around for almost twenty years and I’ve used it almost as long, joining roughly 13 months after its founding. In the early days, I mostly used it to drive traffic to this site. For a variety of reasons, I largely stopped contributing for many years until getting active again about a year ago, mostly in niche subs unrelated to what I post here.

The Politics and World News subreddits, which I used to participate in rather heavily but now only occasionally frequent, are rather rabidly anti-Trump. Here’s a screenshot of the Hot posts trending on r/politics at the moment:

While I’m pretty vociferously anti-Trump, I’m not a fan of echo chambers.

This morning, though, I stumbled on another subreddit that makes r/politics look like a bastion of productive discourse: r/trump:

I spent a few minutes going through the comments there and . . . hoo boy.

Suffice it to say, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are veritable Berkeley hippies in comparison. I suspect some of our regulars here that are Trump supporters get their talking points from r/Trump.

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12 responses to “A Tale of Two Reddits”

  1. Bubba HoTep Avatar
    Bubba HoTep

    Use R/moderatepolitics for non echo chamber discussion

    4
  2. Jen Avatar
    Jen

    I continue to believe that the development of a sense of community for those who would otherwise be the ignored, lone nutballs is one of the more pernicious outcomes of the internet.

    13
  3. JohnSF Avatar
    JohnSF

    @Jen:
    Well, at least it stops me being an ignored lone nutball.
    😉

    3
  4. Neil Hudelson Avatar
    Neil Hudelson

    r/neoliberal sometimes is a good forum. About once a month they have to go on an extended hippie punching/fart sniffing/rending of garments spree (usually all three at once, not individual sprees). But other than that, pretty good forum.

    4
  5. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    I spend a lot of time on Reddit, both for work and other reasons. Like anything else, you have to be discriminatory about which subs you visit and/or participate in. I’ve always stayed away from the political ones, as they are mostly trash.

    2
  6. Mister Bluster Avatar
    Mister Bluster

    @Neil Hudelson:..fart sniffing…

    They would fart in the bathtub and bite the bubbles. I never did that but when my younger brother was in the tub with me I would open the drain and listen to him yell and scream for help from mom because he thought he would go down the drain too!

  7. James Joyner Avatar
    James Joyner

    @Andy: Oh, for sure. But it’s occasionally worth being reminded how easy it is for anyone, regardless of the weirdness of their belief system, to find a likeminded community to reinforce their weirdness and even drag them further into the abyss.

    3
  8. al Ameda Avatar
    al Ameda

    James Joyner … Suffice it to say, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson are veritable Berkeley hippies in comparison. I suspect some of our regulars here that are Trump supporters get their talking points from r/Trump.

    I’ll admit it, I troll some conservative sites/platforms (Reddit-subs and elsewhere), and quite often my comments met with an admonition to, ‘stop getting your information from CNN.’ Of course generally there’s no point in responding, but if I do it’s along the lines of, ‘I get my news from Russian Bots.’

    2
  9. Eusebio Avatar
    Eusebio

    The r/politics screenshot looks solidly mainstream to me. The only anti-dt hyperbole I see is that insurrectionists “melt down”… but maybe I’ll reserve judgment on whether or not that rhetoric is warranted since I haven’t actually read that entry in the sub.

    3
  10. Stephen Avatar
    Stephen

    The r/politics screenshot looks solidly mainstream to me.

    Yeah, it’s hard to draw the line at what constitutes an echo chamber in this climate, right? Do I need to see pro-Trump stuff to get the full picture? Sometimes the echo chamber is obviously correct.

    2
  11. DrDaveT Avatar
    DrDaveT

    Every time I hear someone say “Government isn’t the solution; government is the problem!” it automatically translates in my head to an 8-year old complaining “Parents aren’t the solution; parents are the problem!”

    8
  12. Rick S Avatar
    Rick S

    @Eusebio: And one of the /r/politics rules is that headlines “must be comprised only of the exact copied and pasted headline of the article.” Obviously, the users choose which articles they link, but the headlines themselves come from the original publisher. I don’t think that’s the case for /r/trump.

    3

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