I'm not trying to be a contrarian on this point but some social forums (e.g.: reddit, where this was linked from) end-up being sgemented into their own forms of echo-chambers, where any dissenting outliers - however valid - are voted into oblivion, simply because it doesn't agree with "muh viewpoint".
IMHO, that reinforces status quo, rather than influences it. I realise that this mightn't be the case with all or even the majority of social forums but it's the loudest that gets the most attention and since we're discussing something directly linked from redditstan, I figured it worth mentioning (since the aspect of influencing the status quo angle crumbles in this specific regard).
To give an example: Create an account on reddit and comment a valid point in the donald, even if it's down-voted into oblivion, go and then comment on something in politics or worldpolitics or the like. Wait for someone to go look at your post history and see that you commented in the donald and watch the tide turn against you, simply because of your participation - even if that comment is directly contradictory the original post in the donald. Just by association, that influence of the status quo is immediately eroded way because it's deemed "invalid" because, again, "muh viewpoint".
Any possibility of influence is lost, at that point. Repeat it day and night, it won't eventually influence the status quo until enough people repeat it and I think that's, probably, more along the lines of what you meant: It's not the number of times it's repeated, it's the volume of that repition's saturation into the larger group that's intrinsically more important. A single person repeating a message over 30 years has far less weight than people (en masse) repeating the same message. Granted, it - sometimes -takes a single person to incite the spread of that message, simply repeating it ad infinum won't reach the end-goal of influencing the status quo.
/endRantThatWasntParticularlyAimedAtYou
1. Mentioning Gab as a possible site to sign up for is "pretty blatantly out of line" and a violation of the Stack Exchange Code of Conduct, and
2. If they discovered that a job candidate had a Gab account, they would throw out the application based upon that fact alone.
So it's not just internet communities; we've got academics openly bragging that even engaging with a community they politically disapprove of, regardless of your individual views, will lead to them barring you from employment in academia.
New ideas in this context are not limited to what disagrees with the overall consensus. Simiple refinements make real changes over time.
Again, I'm not trying to be contrarian because you bring up valid points - save for Theories of Relativity because they were review before being published by someone.
A good example, which was quashed from its inception, was the Copernican Theory of Heliocentrism: Though, very much valid, it was oppressively pushed from gaining ground by "muh religious viewpoint[s]". Even when substantiated by Galileo, this wasn't influential enough to change the status quo - with Galileo living the remainder of his in house arrest.
To lazily quote Nietzsche, in this regard: "All things are subject to interpretation, whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth."
Even assuming that's true (and I don't know or care if it is), it's unclear to me why it should reflect on the community. If tomorrow somebody were to leak a tape of Paul Graham or Joel Spolsky ranting about their hatred of some race, it wouldn't somehow reflect poorly on the character of anyone with a Hacker News or Stack Overflow account.
First and foremost political opinions have no place in most professional settings and no influence on someones work. If I recall correctly it's even illegal to judge someone based on their political affiliations in many countries.
Further, someone could have an account there to comment against the radical opinions or because he has friends with those opinions, which brought him to the network. And surely some more reasons why someone might have an account without sharing the extremist views of the outliers there.