Content Quality, Echo Chambers, and more

[Damocles]

I feel like there’s a time and place for both kinds of posts. There’s some posts where I’ll expand at great lengths and get really into the nitty gritty of a particular subject, but there’s other times where I’ll have a more jovial or witty or even sort of sh!tpost-y tone. You have to do both, I believe, to be a quality poster. The former is what really shows your very best quality writing and argument construction, and the latter is what gets people to pay attention to you and read your posts more often.

If you lean too hard one way or the other, you come off looking like a poindexter in the former case; and you look like just another sh!tposter in the forum in the latter case. How that balance shakes out depends on your reputation and the depths of the topics you’re interested in, but there is a balance. There should be an emphasis both in terms of absolute quality (how good the post is), and relative quality (the post relative to other posts in its category). It’s possible to appreciate both.

[Damocles]

While I cannot comment on posting quality, I will say that way, way back in the days of 2004-2006 Atlas was at least a lot more ideologically balanced from what I hear, possibly even marginally right of center back in those days.

"where things went wrong" is hard, if not impossible to pin point of course, not to mention the old posters from way back then also have posted that things were far from perfect at the time either.

Being that this is primarily an American forum, you could probably pin the reaction to favor mainly left-wing politics from the emergence of my generation that remembers watching our parents lose their jobs in the 2009 recession. We were forced to mature early and wonder why all these bad things were happening, which led to natural skepticism of such institutions as banks and other economic and political institutions. We’re also the first generation to grow up without remembering a time before the Internet. That would time more or less perfectly with this generation maturing and becoming active on the Internet, as a younger and more left-wing youth becomes politically active.