Is Grouvee an echo chamber?

I don’t see at all how you’re getting this from the example exchange I quoted. The person asking about “Black Lives Matter™” isn’t asking if you support black people’s rights, because the organization is not synonymous with the rights. It’s like me asking you if you support PETA and when you say “no” I say “so then you think its okay for animals to be abused”. It’s just very possible for a person to disagree with an organization even if they agree with the basic principle being espoused by the organization, for many reasons. If you agree that people don’t have to like the organization, then that means your answer to the person asking that question would just be “no”! No need to pivot or assume what they “really mean”. (And that can apply to a movement as well)

I think you missed my point. I’m referring to the song itself. The song is explicitly anti-protest, and romanticizes violence against the people who are the object of the song. Jason Aldean’s use of BLM footage is his way of showing that the police protests referred to in the song are in fact the circa 2020 anti-police brutality protests. That is the only reason BLM is brought up.

The song can be boiled down to “If you try to protest against police brutality, particularly against black people, in my ‘small town,’ I will commit physical violence against you.” So this is where the sentiment of the song is racist, in my view.

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I don’t think it is particularly controversial to say that if people don’t want people to have the same rights based on race that this ideology or position is rooted in racism, is it?

Obviously, it is. (rooted in racism). But you’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who is “anti-BLM” who would ever tell you that the reason for their disagreement is that they don’t want certain people to have rights. Of course, people who think that will lie about their true intentions, but you’re going to get a lot of false positives if you assume that’s true of all of them, when many just think the org/movement does things that are counterproductive to the goal. (Again, even if they’re wrong about that)

Anyway, you claim the question about BLM was the change of topic, and I don’t really agree it is. Looking back at it now, farmboy brought up BLM because it was suggested that Small Town being anti-BLM made it bigoted. So it seems directly relevant to me? He was trying to question the claim that the song being anti-BLM makes it bigoted. But the convo was messy so I can see why you’d have this interpretation.

People are perfectly capable of looking at that and saying “that doesn’t apply to me because I want people to have the same fundamental rights” and know that they are not racist.

Ehhhhhh. So if I say Grouvee is an echo chamber and that people are ignorant, do you brush it off because, well, “I know that doesn’t apply to me, because I try to be open-minded and I’m not ignorant” or do you get slightly defensive because you feel my generalized comment is probably lumping you in and it doesn’t feel pleasant for someone to show a judgment about you like that?

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I think you missed my point. I’m referring to the song itself. The song is explicitly anti-protest, and romanticizes violence against the people who are the object of the song. Jason Aldean’s use of BLM footage is his way of showing that the police protests referred to in the song are in fact the circa 2020 anti-police brutality protests. That is the only reason BLM is brought up.

Then we’re probably talking around each other? My point on the “do you support the org” vs “do you think people deserve rights” was about whether judgments were being made about people’s moral character. I interpreted the reframing of the question as a judgment, BMO says it wasn’t intended that way. But like I said, re-reading the exchange, this means that the question of whether one supports BLM or not, does seem relevant to your exact point about the song. Your stance is that being against those protests is indicative of racism since the protests for a good cause. If farmboy (or any hypothetical person) disagrees (i.e. thinks the protests were counterproductive) then that’s why they’d ask. But I’ve lost what our point of contention here is, I admit.

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I’m pretty conformable with who I am and with my values. I also think knowing when a critique applies to oneself is a skill everyone should develop. I know that introspection is also often needed in life and that some critiques I was not ready to hear at a particular point in my life were valid and that I needed to take time to internalize them. But I also know, or have learned when to dismiss invalid claims pointed at my person.

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Well. That’s good, I guess! For me, I can be upset about an accusation even if I know it’s wrong. I’m really not that thick-skinned. Quite sensitive, even. I’m not sure any level of personal growth would make that go away, and I think it’s fairly normal for people to be upset about implications about themselves, even if they’re not true.

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I’m not that versed in the whole BLM topic or country music as a whole, as that is not so much a thing here in the Netherlands as it is in the USA.

However, isn’t the whole point you are making here a bit of a contradictio in terminis?
You’re projecting a view, about there not being motives behind interest in certain songs/lyrics, which other people are clearly disagreeing with. Both are opinions, i’m not saying either is wrong or right, i’m just neutral for the sake of good argument.
But then you say the opinion of people who don’t agree with you is wrong and problematic, all the while claiming everyone should be open to other’s views and opinions, even going as far as claiming that their opinion is formed because they haven’t been ‘exposed to different views’ (which they clearly have, as your own opinion is one of different view ;)).

Again, i’m not on either ‘side’, i’m just analyzing your post, and from that i think you can’t have it both ways. Saying everyone should be open to other’s views and opinions, but then instantly flagging off someone elses opinion as ignorant and wrong just doesn’t work. If you want people to be open to argument, you also need to be open to argument.
I think a more elegant way of argument is asking or trying to understand why the other person feels that way (and this goes for both sides, really), and then if you don’t agree, you don’t agree. You shake hands and agree to disagree. Concluding that the community is an ‘echo chamber’ just because other people don’t agree with you, could funnily enough be seen as creating your own echo chamber :slight_smile:

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I take criticism of me as an opportunity for introspection, it’s not that I’m specifically thick skinned. If, through introspection, I realize the critique is valid I try to internalize it and adapt my way of thinking. If someone points out that I’ve overlooked how someone feels due my privilege, I try to take that in. On the other hand, if through introspection I don’t find anything valid about the critique, I feel comfortable in rejecting it.

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If I were to call every online place that I didn’t fit into, or that didn’t suit me, an echo chamber, there would be a lot of them. Not every place has to be a place for everyone, and this site is usable without ever getting involved in the front page discussions.

Farmboy was actively seeking heat at every possible moment, making the fire bigger and then complaining when he got burned. He used religion to argue things that had nothing to do with religion and he talked down to people he did not know in an environment he was still new to. I remember BMO discussing something with him page by page and he wouldn’t let up at a certain point, he just went on and on. It was 90% about him having difficulty breaking into a tight-knit online community and 10% about his political opinions. He could have started out talking about games in a low-key way, like most people do that are new, and worked his way up to a point where having a controversial opinion would be accepted because people know “he’s all right”. He did not try that or know how to do that. He just jumped into the fire and expected the fire to burn everyone but him.

Yes, this is a left-wing place. Nothing wrong with that. If you want to see what a real echo chamber looks like, I can show you some. Express the slightest left-wing opinion and you will not only be called out, you will be crucified, spat on, followed by death threats and moderators will actively hinder discussion about controversies to come up in the first place. THAT’s an echo chamber.

This is more of a: “Do you really like a song that repeats “city is violent hell, village is heaven” (totally not exactly what some politicians say in their speeches every day) and “don’t take away my gun or my friends will shoot you” (by a guy who was on stage when 60 people were shot in Los Angeles in 2017, the deadliest mass shooting by a gunman in American history), accompanied by a video of a BLM protest shown on a building - a courthouse in Maury County, where a black man was lynched by a white mob and hanged from the courthouse window in 1927? Because I think that might tell me that you are racist”. - kind of place. And I haven’ talked yet about the dogwhistle Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk, Carjack an old lady at a red light, Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store, Ya think it’s cool, well, act a fool if ya like

I don’t think it’s fair to call Grouvee an echo chamber for this and lump it in with extremely bad online places. And I especially do not take such an accusation from someone like farmboy, who has just arrived here and has actively sought every opportunity to join or start a heated discussion.

Yes, he didn’t use slurs. He said some of the things he said very nicely. It didn’t mean that what he said was nice. I think this was the wrong place for him for political discussion, he could have engaged in everything else just fine, but he rather decided to make an accusation to the whole site and then leave and frankly I am fine with him being gone.

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I think a more elegant way of argument is asking or trying to understand why the other person feels that way (and this goes for both sides, really), and then if you don’t agree, you don’t agree.

But this is exactly my point, and exactly what I said they were wrong about, because they’re not doing this. They’re just assuming character flaws. If they got into a discussion and said “I’m not just assuming you’re racist or etc, tell me why you believe what you believe” then I wouldn’t have had any reason to speak up at all. But you’re right, I do draw a distinction between being wrong about a topic and being wrong about a person. If you don’t meet the baseline of showing respect to other people and trusting that maybe they have valid reasons for feeling the way they do, you can’t even begin to have a real discussion about who is right or who is wrong.

And I think when you say “well clearly they’re exposed to different views, they’re reading yours!”, that’s the same fallacy the other poster made above. If they’ve spent hundreds of hours reading thousands of views of people who all feel one way and then there’s me and farmboy as 2 dissenting opinions vs hundreds, I don’t really count that as proof that they’ve now been “exposed to different views”. (Nevermind the fact that I haven’t even expressed a view on BLM or whatever, I’ve only expressed the view that people should be open to views)

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This is my whole point though.
You keep saying other’s opinions are ‘wrong’, but this is from your point of view. From the other person’s point of view that opinion isn’t ‘wrong’ at all, i think by starting off saying someone’s opinion is ‘wrong’, you’ve already set precedent for not allowing any discussion on the matter, and this is exactly the type of argument that you’re accusing this community of being (echo chamber discussion).

In the original thread i haven’t seen anyone particularly shutting down argument or being disrespectful, i’ve seen, from both sides of the discussion, people actually invoking argument on the subject.

Secondly, you’re making the assumption that people are basing their views on only reading one view on a subject, but how do you know this? How do you know these people haven’t been in argument elsewhere and formed their opinion on their own by being informed from two sides of the coin? It’s not all that black-and-white.

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Well like I said, you got me on that. I don’t disagree. I will never claim they’re “wrong” about whether BLM is good or bad, whether the lyrics are offensive or not, or about basically any subjective opinion. But I will say they’re wrong about just writing off every person who disagrees as having racist motives. Different things are different, and while some topics are subjective and hard to nail down (most of them), the idea that basically 50% of americans are just driven by hatred is a complete non-starter for me. The core principle of “show respect to other people” is the basis from which every other possible conversation can happen, so I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with treating that one a bit differently.

I don’t know what you’re saying by saying that I’m somehow pulling an echo chamber. An echo chamber is a space where everyone agrees and dissenting opinions are shunned. I can’t be an echo chamber, I’m one person here. I guess the idea that my ideal space is one where the opinion of “We should call people racist if they say they liked this song” couldn’t be expressed, which would be an echo chamber?

Well, I already gave some evidence for why I thought their view was one-sided. The creator of one of the songs explicitly condemned conservatives who were using the song for hate and clarified he’s not a conservative. The comments clearly were not aware of this, based on what they implied about his motives for writing the song. So I think I have actual backing for my claim there. But yes, I am of course relying on some assumptions as I don’t know why every single person has the views they do.

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There are a lot of them. :joy: In fact, I’m not sure I can even think of a place that isn’t one. Grouvee is not unique at all in this aspect. Literally any gaming community I’m part of has the exact same opinions as the regulars here, and people who say what farmboy said would be treated exactly the same way. I used to vaguely participate in one “right-wing” subreddit and what do you know, they all mass downvoted me every time I questioned any of their prevailing narratives, among other things, so I unsubscribed from there too! (And yes, they’re a lot more vicious about it)

Anyway, hitching my wagon to farmboy may not be the best idea. (Again, “may” because I just am not going to judge interactions that I didn’t see myself) Yes, I can tell even from what I read that he’s not exactly a people-pleasing type. And yes, I agree that while he was “nice”, he was not always “nice” - he was of course speaking accusatively about some people’s behaviour. But it’s not really all about farmboy. Grouvee being an echo chamber is a thought I’ve had for a long time, and it’s because 95% of the time a comment like the one about the country music is made, it is followed by similar comments deriding the type of people who like those songs, and taking shots at “reactionaries”, racists, etc and there isn’t someone like QuiB who speaks up to say “well guys idk if that’s really true”. If every single case of it went like this one, (or rather, if sometimes, comments expressing a “right-wing” view popped up in unrelated threads) it wouldn’t be an echo chamber! But, such a place almost certainly does not exist, for reasons that we seem to all agree are natural.

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By that definition Grouvee isn’t an echo chamber. We don’t delete posts or threads, even those that may include ideas that differ from the perceived majority. We don’t police threads on either the main site or the forums. Even after threads end, even in community disagreement or conflict, we don’t delete them. That means ideas on all sides remain on the site, available to anyone to see. The vast majority of time we delete anything it’s due spam or phising attempts. I think I can count the number of times I had to delete a post over th course of 7+ years and that was for very severe ToS violations. In most ToS violation cases we just issue a reminder or warning. And threads are never shut down by Grouvee staff, nor are they generally shut down by users unless an OP asks that the thread return to the original topic, or we have to issue a ToS warning (again ToS warnings are so rare I don’t even know if we average more than one annually).

No one shut the conversation down yesterday. They just disagreed. People on different sides continued engage in discussion, and it only ended when the OP asked to return to the original topic prompt. Even after that the conversation moved here, and continues. It hardly seems like anyone has prevented this discussion, which is the opposite of what would happen in an echo chamber.

It’s important to remember that disagreement is not silence. People disagreeing with another does not silence the latter. If a person shares an opinion that others disagree with, people are free to share that disagreement. If a market of free ideas is what is wanted, people need to accept that other people might disagree with them, and share that disagreement. And I think that is what we have here. Yes some people might be hyperbolic, or even angry, when sensitive subjects come up. But that doesn’t mean others have been silenced.

You’ll also probably find that when a different subject comes up, many of the people in the discussion may realign to different sides. That’s because no one person holds 100% of the same ideas as anyone else. Any given day I may find myself in agreement with a Grouvee member, and then disagreement the next day. The important thing is that they continue to have the ability to engage in discussions, which they do. So it’s hard for me to see the site as an echo chamber just because people disagree with one another and that on any given topic there will likely always be those in the prevailing majority, and those in the minority, which will likely always be in flux.

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I think you’re conflating the mechanics of an echo chamber on a mechanical/systemic level (i.e. admin enforcement) with on a social level (i.e. social dynamics)

Yes, the site is not mechanically an echo chamber, and you know what, I should probably express a bit more gratitude for that. Compared to reddit where the mods will just delete your threads and posts so that literally the dissenting opinion cannot even be spoken. I feel that’s more “censorship” than “echo chamber” maybe? But maybe it overlaps.

Social dynamics though is really what I was talking about. And yes, of course, people can just have “thick skin” and wade in to debate anyway, but when you know that 80% of people are, not just going to disagree with you, but judge your character for speaking on a certain thing, you tend to just not bother. And because you stopped bothering, now 85% of people all agree. And then more people see that and stop bothering, and now 90% of people agree, etc. (Maybe it didn’t start at 80! It probably only needs to start at 51% and it just snowballs, because like we’ve said, it’s natural)

It’s entirely possible that I could have not checked Grouvee today and even seen this, because I could have just left ages ago because of sensing that it was an echo chamber. Then this thread would be even more one-sided! (90% of why I don’t visit Grouvee is because I self-imposed myself to do more games journaling and try to review every game I beat and I fell behind and felt bad so I gave up. But the other 10%…) If only I hadn’t posted at all, it would really help prove my point!!!

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I’ll be honest with, as an admin who constantly monitors the site, I really don’t see Grouvee as a place that is extremely one sided. This is a place with quite a lot of debate and discourse on a regular basis. I see dissenting opinions all the time, and none of them are being shut down, they are just being debated.

I also think that no society holds all ideas as equally valid, but I do find that some of this debate hinges on the idea that people don’t just want a free market of ideas, they want their ideas to be give the same respect and weight as all other ideas. And I don’t think that’s organically going to happen. Especially if people perceive certain ideas as hurtful or harmful to specific groups. Grouvee members tend to exhibit a lot of empathy, especially for the marginalized, and I think that drives a lot of them to passionately defend certain stances. When ideas bump up against that perspective, sometimes it gets heated.

But I guess to your point, like-minded people with similar values tend to congregate. In fact, like-minded ideas and shared values are foundational elements of any social group, up to and including civilization, because on a certain level people do need to share a reasonable number of values and perspectives to organize into a larger functioning social unit. That’s going to be replicated on a smaller scale in places like Grouvee, where the users form a community. And so people will share values and ideas, with a reasonable amount of both overlap and dissention. But I don’t think you’ll find that dissention, or at least basic disagreement on various topics will ever vanish from a community because humans have evolved and are socialized to maintain both communal and individual values. So as long as everyone still has and holds individual values, disparate perspectives will never disappear.

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This is something I really appreciate about Grovee. I’ve been to sites that are heavily policed and where any dissenting opinion can get you banned.
Here I’ve never felt like I can’t have a dissenting opinion and be able to voice that, and I really hope that people aren’t scared to do that. As long as everyone is respectful enough it’s only healthy.
A place where everyone just agrees with each other is nightmare fuel lol.

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Wow a large conversation. I have to say grouvee reminds me of a fun community compared to the “police-state” that is gamefaqs. I remember sharing my story of zamboni driver and was made fun of on gamefaqs.

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Interesting question at the root of this, and I think most of it has been revealed throughout the topic already. I prefer being in an echo chamber, it’s nice to be surrounded with like-minded individuals. Yes, it’s healthy to be challenged, but it can often be very uncomfortable when those challenges touch on your inherent identity, so I think most people prefer to spend the majority of their time in places that don’t feel like a constant struggle.

As for;

there’s an absurd amount of socio-political commentary on a site ostensibly for cataloguing videogames

I’d argue that nearly everything is politcal. So may games carry such a large amount of political messaging, whether intentional or unintentional, obvious, or subtle. It’s really no wonder that this sort of discussion is going to pop up.

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The whole thing about the ‘Rich Men North Of Richmond’ song I don’t really understand. A lot of the lyrics definitely aren’t great, such as talking about ‘obese welfare queens’ ( a topic which I’m sure has been discussed to death in the first place) and ‘politicians visiting Epstein island’ but I think some of the lyrics just really hit home. The male suicide one for example, that saddens me greatly. It has always been a problem, but I think it’s bigger now than ever. As a male, the amount of times I have felt inadequate or hid my emotions when I was younger are too many to count, so I feel a great deal of sympathy for lost young men like those, no matter political disagreements, how extreme. They are still human beings in my eyes, and no one deserves to die that young by their own hand. Same for the lyrics about ‘selling your soul’ to jobs and corporations. The fact that so many working class people make money off of tips and earn minimum wage in society is saddening as well. The lyrics about taxes as well feel like they come from a deeply personal perspective of the singer. I might heavily disagree with some aspects, and the instrumental is bland and forgettable, vocals are alright I guess, but I can agree with some aspects of the song without agreeing with all of them. Just wanted to put my perspective out there, I guess.

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I doubt any social site has a balanced 50/50 split of opinions. I also suspect that if Grouvee was 70/30 one way or the other, and if you were in the 30, it might feel like 90/10.

Anyway, while i disagree Grouvee has a problem, this thread was thought provoking. I hope you still feel welcome, because you are.

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