[robwilliams]

The New York Times comments are free from trolls and spam, but it's a frustratingly obvious echo chamber when it comes to politics. I'm a liberal guy but I can't stand it. David Brooks wrote an interesting column (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...) a week or so ago and most of the comments are just bashing him for being a Republican, as if that has anything to do with the subject matter.

[lucretian]

i think your diagnosis is wrong. show me a conservative news outlet on the web with a high SNR of thoughtful and intelligent comments, free of frothing, conspiracy-laden bullshit. maybe the NYT is an echo chamber because modern conservative positions are so weak and contradictory, they can't stand the withering critique of a well-moderated forum. instead, they only survive in troll havens.

as for brooks' column, you might be missing some context. brooks has made a career of talking out of both sides of his mouth and (annoyingly) providing intellectual cover from the NYT for a plethora of bad conservative ideas. now that they're blowing up in his face, he's backing away from these stances.

this comment articulates it well:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluenc...

"He should realize that we’ve been trying to bring the tribal ethos to the U.S. for a long time, with strong local communities providing the sort of help and social services that bind people together and take care of each other as we get older, or fall short in some way.

But He Who Talks with Forked Tongue likes to imagine an egalitarian utopia where 99 percent of us are quietly stitching blankets while a few get to hoard the vital resources. When the tribesmen and women protested and occupied Wall Street, Brooks nearly went on the warpath, and wrote a column in the Times entitled “The Milquetoast Radicals,” (10/11/2011) in which he castigated the unwashed hippies who dared to protest the insane degree of income inequality in this country."

[robwilliams]

I was not comparing NYT to any other news outlet. It's an echo chamber regardless of the fact that conservative news sites also have echo chamber comment sections.

The David Brooks article was just an example. When Bernie Sanders was still campaigning every comment on Hillary/Bernie-related articles was about how the New York Times is wrong and that Bernie is the best, people will learn about the political revolution soon enough, etc. I was a huge fan of Bernie and I got bored of those comments instantly.

[unethical_ban]

Holy Hell, you are right. I actually have the distinguished privilege of having one of my NYTimes comments be a "Times Pick", meaning the ed. board actually read it and recommended it for insight, I suppose.

My comment was mostly meta, calling out people for missing the point of an op-ed. The op-ed was from a privacy/civil liberties person about why a "no buy" list for guns would be a bad idea. He wasn't arguing on the merits for or against gun ownership, just that these secret lists on which LEO acts are dangerous.

Every comment was something along the lines of "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!" - I tried to point this myopic view out, and every reply to my comment was "What about my right not to be shot in the streets?!".

As a smallish-government liberal (Public services are well and good but government should be kept in check by a powerful and vigilant population) I get torn up whenever I defend gun rights or spending reductions on that website.