Is #mastodon becoming an echo chamber?

@De_Minimis @scottjenson @pmdj @dalias > Don't hear anyone complaining about ai application in the science fields. People are just focused on the slop side of things, not the tangible.

You haven't seen the reports about medical errors and the whitepapers about failing reliability & deskilling of professionals?

From the sound of it the video you're liking is a major case of the latter.

@pmdj @dalias
First, I'm using AI as an example, I'm not endorsing AI at all.
Second, and only as an example, there are open source people working on ethically trained local small language models. Again, I'm NOT endorsing them, but I can pretty confidently say that they would NOT be welcome here.

The same applies to journalism, there are VERY strong emotions here, basically telling them to fuck off (their words, not mine)

My point is that there is a pattern here: there are topics this community actively hates and "patrols" against. If that's what the community wants, cool, I'm not here to dictate anything. My point is that it might be nice to have a slightly more open way of sharing ideas: Follow, block, filter. You have the tools to make the feed you want (there are clearly more tools that would be helpful)

I'm just saying that focusing on your feed seems more healthy that attacking people whose opinions you don't like. Here, let me me give you an example of what I got 10 min ago

@AccordingtoWouter @scottjenson

Case in point: your average mastodon user sees a star of David, and that awakens in him a deep, ancestral memory of inking judenschwein and issuing blood libels.

@scottjenson you don't want an echo chamber, but you also want people to ignore other peoples' posts that they don't agree with for "inclusivity", but that's what creates echo chambers? You're literally pleading with us to allow other people to come in and establish their echo chambers.

@scottjenson I'll suggest that you reflect on what the implications of including (2) in the list are when you've made it very clear that you see "inclusiveness" as demanding that people are more tolerant of AI.

Especially by placing (2) above any actual apology for your earlier comparison this reads very strongly as your doubling down on the claim that Mastodon being "inclusive" should necessarily put exploitative and extractive tech products over the marginalized people hurt by those products.

@scottjenson @cratermoon @evan Passing judgement on the quality of someone’s thoughts is good. It’s how science works, in fact it’s the basis of all academic study.

You might have a point about people being too rude when they pass judgement, but the idea that people’s thoughts shouldn’t be judged at all is anti-intellectualism.

@scottjenson @dalias So, any social network if a significant size has always had enclaves and subcultures; the federated nature here actively encourages that, so making generalisations about “THE community” is even more of a reach than elsewhere. There are thousands of communities here, most of them overlapping, some very much not because of defederation.
You can quickly get shitty replies if your audience is big enough for whatever reason. Yes, it’s a problem. But…

@scottjenson I'm also white, and I've fucked it up before. Apologizing is important, but so is doing better. This is absolutely a textbook example of failing to do so, of not actually considering what about your actions was harmful.

@scottjenson
@alessandro

I think it's a human problem. Human beings have limited capacity for inclusivity. We *constantly* find ways to separate into us/them groups. Many of us here are Twitter refugees who chose Mastodon *because* it wasn't Twitter: us vs them again.

I personally don't understand the need to engage aggressively with those I disagree with, but I recognize the behaviour as human.

Mastodon is a platform, not a political or moral leader. If the platform itself starts to issue behavioural edicts—even ones that seem like moral "goods"—then it moves into a completely different role.

Changing a behaviour such as community border policing (e.g. who is and isn't "allowed" to belong to a community) has to be bottom-up, not top-down. If we want other members of our community to be more inclusive, then we have to model that behaviour and gently try to push folks to behave differently.

Of course, specific server moderators can choose to enforce qualitative, ethical behavioural rules, but that is a huge responsibility. I'd place it up there with leaders of religious communities (i.e., churches, synagogues, mosques, gurdwaras, temples, covens, etc.). But that is a role for server mods and community leaders, not for Mastodon as a technical platform.

Mastodon (and ActivityPub more generally) created an almost infinite public square. We all chose to either pitch a tent in it (start a server) or join a community in an already-pitched tent (get an account on that server). Each tent is responsible for the behaviour of its members inside the tent, and can choose to be responsible for their behaviour when they're wandering into the public square to engage with other tents. But the builder of the public square is just there to maintain the infrastructure and provide helpful utility upgrades from time to time.
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tl;dr: Humans will always create us/them divisions. Ethical leadership is not the role of the platform (Mastodon) but rather the server mods and the individual users themselves.

@kevin

@scottjenson @carnage4life no, not an echo chamber, just don't want 'AI' slop, and their supporters here. 'AI' makes people stupid, and everything worse.

@pmdj @scottjenson @dalias Yeah, this. The swarm of loud anonymous voices will always deafen you. (I block on an instance by instance basis because some of these put out nothing but anon hit and run accounts). But they're not everyone, and they're certainly not representative of everyone on Mastodon.

@pmdj @dalias Yeah, social media always attracts jerks. Just saying I'm not having a great day right now...

That reply is likely a distraction. I'm just saying that I'd like the fediverse to have more discussion more ideas more exploration and I feel that many of the people we'd like to attract don't feel safe doing that.

I'm not dictating anything, I'm just trying to create an environment that attracts more people that think outside our bubble.

@scottjenson But it’s not “the community’s” fault - we don’t vote on who gets to join, and that’s kind of the point. You can run and moderate your *server* however you like, but if you’re just a user, you don’t have all that much control.
The people who have been bearing the brunt of the toxicity over the years have however suggested many a way to improve the situation, and so far it’s mostly gone unheard.
@dalias

@scottjenson I'm with @pmdj on his point that, there's no good reason to consider that the opinion of all or even the majority of people here. The way this works, wouldn't even make that any individual is connected to every other individual, same applies to instances. This by itself would make it likely not representative, but people might even be blocking topics and words and accounts about AI and have no idea of what's happening on AI threads.

@dalias

@scottjenson we also know that nay sayers and assholes are usually more vocal than, people who like, or aren't concerned about something, and who are polite and respectful.

This doesn't mean that this noisy people aren't problematic, or act problematic about some particular topic, just that they need to be put into perspective, reported and blocked.

@pmdj @dalias

@scottjenson my point, which you sailed right by, is that the kind of thinking that leads to a comparison like that is _THE_ problem

An apology doesn't make up for the fact that you reached for an false equivalency that compares the most marginalized with the least marginalized and keep responding with a too-late take-no-real-responsibility apology instead of examining the underlying assumptions that led you there in the first place

You can't fix societal problems with technology

@scottjenson @pmdj @dalias I'm hoping in here far down on the chain but I feel I understand the conversation here and hopefully can be an alternative voice to the majority here. It seems a lot of people are getting caught up about the AI sentiment but I do believe what the real message is about is that there seems to be a very strong alignment towards one voice on this platform. I for one am one of the AI believers, and I hope eventually to sway a few more. But I would hardly consider my stances on the level of a puppy killer or a nazi as some in this thread have implied and I like to think its important that cross dialog between us all exist, otherwise we risk falling to an echo chamber of people who only validate our poorly challenged ideas.

On that note, I think what mastodon currently has is great, in that it shows a raw presentation of the platforms voices, instead of pandering you as many platforms do, which draws many people like me to the platform. I'm not here for the specific voices I hear amplified but because it still feels like an open discussion without too much manipulation and I would hate to lose that, even if it meant I got to see more voices like mine. However I think there are areas of mastodon that could serve to connect us less popular creators who want to find more people who think the way we do. For example the for you section or whatever feels very under-developed. Hopefully this is some actually helpful feedback to the original conversation.

@scottjenson I can imagine it’s no fun. Perhaps the Mastodon core team could learn from this experience by listening to the people who are hanging around *despite* the toxicity they experience?
And I’m sorry, but Fedi (& everywhere else) has been *chock full* of discussion and debate over disagreeing viewpoints on the whole AI thing for years. It gets rammed down our throats absolutely everywhere, so I don’t think arguing for more debate on that topic will get you much sympathy.

@scottjenson @Gargron literally no one is stopping you from forming an “AI community” here. There is no algorithm and no shadow banning.

If no one likes your ideas here, maybe it’s because… no one likes them ‍️

People blame platforms for muffling them all the time, and it’s a real thing that happens… on other platforms. Here all you’re getting is an authentic reaction from people who aren’t buying what you’re selling

@scottjenson clearly the author of the post you screenshotted was not prevented from joining Mastodon, nor from attaining 18k followers on the fediverse. I fail to see the problem.