Re:Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy
by xgess on Tuesday January 31, 2017 @02:49PM
(#13534534)
I've played in this space! A few years ago, I half-assed the world's worst startup for asynchronous political debating that focused more on identifying and understanding opinions as opposed to expression and dialog, because dialog necessarily breaks down to dichotomies and outgroup homogeneity which are exactly the problem. I never really figured out how to elevator-pitch the damn thing, but here are some blog posts I wrote back in the day: http://blog.agreethepeople.com/
If you do follow that link, start at the bottom and work your way up. And let me know what you think!
What I was thinking is that some policies regarding responsibilities incurred by posting a comment in an asynchronous discussion forum are needed. For example, one should not be able to simply post a comment then leave the discussion. The persistence of their comment should be tied to whether they continue to participate, and respond to refutations and the like. Similarly, I see a lot of specious reasoning and appealing lies get posted, rapidly upvoted, but only eventually debunked: the people who upvoted should be notified of the refutation.
It would be nice if karma could actually be useful, and this always reminds me of PageRank [2]. Surely there must be some way to normalize the weights of highly-voted comments in less populated but serious subforums (like subreddits) so they are not overwhelmed by the karma granted to silly jokes in unserious but hugely populated frivolous subforums (again, I'm thinking of reddit here).
I think all of these things would do something to counter the fake news and echo chambers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert's_Rules_of_Order
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank