Echo Chambers

I was reading a r/privacy post a couple of weeks back, and one of the comments I read reminded me that most people do not care about privacy and that I was in an echo chamber. Shit.

I started thinking. The people I know and the people I see using their phones on public transport. Most of them do not care and would not have a second thought sharing faces of their kids on Instagram, scrolling endlessly on Facebook or even messaging without encryption.

I would have thought that it’s definitely a “no” to message without encryption, but the echo chamber is that I congregate in a space like forums or social media, and I keep consuming the same content that I likely agree with.

But I need to remind myself: Everyone’s tolerance level for privacy would be different. I am in an echo chamber.

It’s the same thing I noticed with being in echo chambers directly or indirectly related to AI.

I have my main Twitter/X account which is mainly for me to consume tech news and it’s filled with all the AI-written slop these days cirlejerking about how certain things are so damn good.

On the contrary, I have a burner account where I constantly see people shitting on AI slop and people are generally anti-AI. (But it’s funny because I’m not anti-AI, but somehow that particular echo chamber I am in happened to have a lot of anti-AI people.)

Each account’s algorithm is built to show you what you want to see or what you agree with. And everyone’s “echo chamber” will be based on whether they are engaging in political content, religious content, productive content, pets content, and more.

This got me thinking: What do I do with this awareness of being in different echo chambers?

To be honest, I don’t know an answer to this. But I do know that I get to see different sides of a coin. But I don’t know what to do with this information.

Recently, I read this blog post about AI burnout and can resonate with the author’s views. And another blog post about how AI slop is killing online communities, too. My own take: AI is a good tool, but many people are misusing it.

Also, I watched this video from Ali Abdaal today with the thumbnail coining “journeymaxxing”. It made me think: what’s the point of going so fast in life and not enjoying the process?

Maybe it’s time to step back from social media and avoid echo chambers as a whole.