I'm not going to hold the line that echo chambers don't exist, because they certainly do. I'm not even going to argue that we aren't one, because we certainly exhibit some of those tendencies - but over the past 10-15 years we have gone through a massive period of social media consolidation on the internet. 15 years ago, the internet was an amalgamation of tens of thousands of different message boards, link aggregators, personal blogs. We have reached a point now where Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have enclosed the entire digital commons we nostalgically remember.

What is going to happen now that the Internet has been monopolized, is that these corporations will begin taking advantage of the leverage their monopolies grant them. They will begin tightening their grasp on the limits of acceptable discourse. They will begin removing communities which harm their ability to turn a profit. The value of every community to them is nothing more than a cost/benefit analysis.

Every time they decide to cut these communities loose, they will come up with a reason to justify it to the remaining members of their platform. The_Donald was cut loose from Reddit because they generated bad press, spooked advertisers, and since the quarantine had been generating the site no revenue. Even though ChapoTrapHouse was the polar opposite of The_Donald, it was banned for the same reason - it was a sound business decision made by upper management types to ensure that corporate relationships with investors and advertising partners aren't put at risk.

After arriving at the decision of what is good for business, these companies will engage in a public relations campaign to explain their decision. These campaigns will aim to win them as much goodwill as possible while slandering their upstart competitors. In the case of The_Donald, they will run victory laps celebrating the fact that they took action against one of the most vile, bigoted cesspits on the mainstream Internet - when in reality, they enabled this community with every passing day of inaction. They waited until it was far too late, several people got killed, and these cretins ultimately decided to show themselves the door. In the case of ChapoTrapHouse they will say that our heated rhetoric was too extreme and equate our aspirations for people to forcefully stand up against an oppressive state with the right's celebration of actual acts of vigilante terrorism committed in the name of upholding these violent systems of oppression.

In both cases they will slander us, with the support of the liberal media, as being echo chambers. They need to reassure their users that the problem lies outside of their organization. They need to place the blame at someone else's feet. In an age of such concentrated social media consolidation, accusations of being an echo chamber will be the first label slapped on any community which attempts to break free from their hegemonic control. Hell - they won't be wrong either - but that is besides the point. We are faced with the choice of establishing ourselves on a small, independent platform, or dissolving our community and being assimilated into the passive consumers of police dog puppies on r/Aww and pop culture fandoms sharing photos of all the shitty products they bought from Amazon as they battle it out for the top of r/All.

So basically my point is, we may be a circlejerk. We may be an echo chamber, but if we are, we are only a smaller one. Twitter is a circlejerk and an echo chamber. Reddit is a circlejerk and an echo chamber. The small communities which established themselves on IRC channels and bulletin board systems in the bygone days of the earlier internet were all echo chambers to some degree. Every community is going to have its problems. No one is perfect, and when you get a group of people together, it is inevitable that social problems will arise.

I just find these criticism to be a cheap copout coming from people established on massive platforms who pat themselves on the back because they followed the rules.