"Echo chambers" have been the default for almost all of human civilization right up until about 10-20 years ago. You communicated with your immediate circle of friends and coworkers rather than arguing politics with LLM bots on Twitter.
No, this is different. A local bubble populated with a normal-ish distribution of people is different from a distributed bubble populated with people who became grouped either voluntarily or algorithmically.
At some level there is always a private mode. Think family and friends. Do you not have any issue with everything being public? I think the parent suggests we’re not made for very large groups and I kind of agree. I can’t name 100 people I know or known in my life. Maybe I can (barely) but with great effort.
Its not a coincidence that the printing press brought devastating war to europe in the form of the wars of reformation [1] .
The internet is another real tool for knocking down fences for free, by anyone. Its only a matter of time when there's pushback by angry fence-owners.
We absolutely need less friction and more of minding our own business and focusing on our own back yard instead of chiming in on someone thousands of miles away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm 100% for the free flow of information, but what people (HN crowd?) don't understand is that a significant subgroup of humans cannot tolerate relentless change or challenges to their worldview for too long.
The fact that you made a throwaway in order to make a personal attack rather than substantively engage with the point indicates that you don't actually have a good argument against it.
