It’s pretty hard to take seriously the contention that QubeTV is being launched because conservatives feel that YouTube is biased against them. The far more likely explanation is that Qube’s founders are smart enough to realize that conservatives (and anyone else, for that matter) will swarm to a site that allows them to vilify their opponents together, and avoid the cognitive dissonance that would come from being part of a community with people of opposing viewpoints. And the PR that they get from dissing YouTube for bias is a great launching pad for their service (which, after generating loads of traffic, will be sold to Rupert Murdoch and they’ll be rich rich rich beyond their wildest dreams).

The echo chamber serves a useful purpose - it allows us to ignore that dissonance by permitting us to hang out with those with whom we already agree. I doubt very much that the political blogospheres or other social media spaces overlap very much across the political spectrums (spectra?); people read and listen to opinions that agree with their own, and don’t really spend very much time trolling contrarianly (eck) - unless it’s to look for content they can sneer at. Qube is a great way to exploit political xenophobia. It’s a terrible way to get your videos discovered by the larger audience, of course, but Qube’s founders no doubt understand well that the only audience that really matters for that content is the loyal base.