I know what he's saying.
I'm more or less pointing that he's being disingenuous.
Both because a lot of the people hammering about some of these well known issues here do the same in other boards as well... and because the assumption that everyone should just say things once and then shut up is doomed to fail miserably in practice, when you realize that the only purpose this would serve is
1) to make newcomers to the forum overlook that issue
2) to let other people "control the public discourse" with what are often far less pressing matters.
I couldn't give half of a dehydrated stinking shit about giving more lines to Minthara if that means I'm doomed to play a final release with controls so bad that it feels like the developers were purposefully baiting people into give them a brutal trashing.
What I am trying to say can be summarized by the old philosophical example of pouring more water into a glass which is already full. Pretty much everyone on this board has heard you, there is a 29 page mega thread about that particular topic, if someone new arrives here they can be simply linked to the topic and they can be made aware of where to throw their opinion. Its not that I think raising awareness of an issue doesn't have somewhat of an effect, its that I think there comes a point where you are preaching to the choir and you need to find another group of people to have any impact.
The subreddit has the stereotype of being the place to discuss romances at the moment, which means by its stereotype, its already a different group of people. Those are the people you need to get complaining about this. I know you actively post about this here, occasionally on the RPG Codex and rarely on the subreddit. If you really want to have an impact, then you should take a leaf from the book of Pink Eye and his campaign for monks in Wrath of the Righteous, where he was all over the place, on reddit, on various forums, in twitch chats, on twitter, in youtube comments sections, on steam and even making posts on 4chan. You could not go somewhere without seeing Pink Eye's monk campaign, but at the same time, he didn't have 1000's of comments concentrated in a single place on the subject.
And sure some contrarians came and went. But is that really an echo-chamber effect? Could they have realized their argument lacked merit?
I very strongly doubt it was a case of them changing their opinions, most of them just up and left after they had had their say and had had enough. I think Firesnake stopped commenting when Cyberpunk came out, for example. I can say from my personal perspective its very tiresome to keep rehashing the same arguments with the same group of people when the reality is neither side is going to budge and even if they did its not them you need to convince of anything but the people making the game.
The echo chamber effect is usually formed by an algorithm feeding the user information. When it comes to forums a user has to post (show an intellectual investment) and the thread gets bumped to the top. The echo chamber effect is usually driven by "liking a post" => "user sees more similar posts" and "user dislikes post" => "user sees less posts that are similar". The algorithm will prevent the user from seeing certain information. (Forum rules and moderators are usually the limiting factor of information shared on a forum).
Knowing that, forums are based up human action and the formed status quo is usually similar to what can happen in an environment with limited members. Whether that be school, work, or a small town.
Also most forum members are similar, a lot of folks have played Baldur's Gate 3 and are gamers. Similar people usually form similar opinions.
There is more than one way to create an echo chamber. You could have a moderator who removes everything which goes against a specific narrative in a community and that community would, by virtue of that moderator's actions, over time become an echo chamber as people who do want to discuss contrary opinions drift away to discuss topics elsewhere. Alternatively, you could have a concentrated group of users who share a similar view and discuss the same topics over and over again who immediately jump on anyone who shares a contrary opinion. This could lead to people being discouraged from joining said community and create the impression that that specific view represents everyone's opinion. This is more of a "soft filter" than either hard admin action or algorithmic manipulation of post ordering, but it can achieve the same effect. I would argue this is what has happened in the case of the BG 3 forums.
