Thanks for this Rob! I organized with 10 engineers/political scientists/designers/educators during the pandemic and cocrreated a social platform that gamifies citizen assemblies and acknowledges archetypes. I'd love to share that with you, we have tons of notes and even the UX developed. I feel it would be great to test something like that in a small town like the one I live in now (3,000 people)
Great article! Thanks for sharing in public what you've learned from all of this. I really want better a better future for public discussion and it gives me hope to see that people are actively talking about and working on this.
I'm curious what it means to you to solve online polarization. I really want online communities where we can expect everyone to be civil. But meaningful and engaging conversations require diversity of thought. With that comes differing opinions on what it means to be civil. So I feel that the best we can do is to build the best environment that we can, do the best we can to protect it from those mean harm to it, and accept that sometimes discussion gets ugly.
It would be really neat to see a system that rewards civil discussion (especially in the presence of very different opinions) and gradually removes privileges from those that cannot be civil. I could see LLMs being helpful with this work in scoring comments given the context of the conversation. Although I guess there is the potential of this entering censorship territory as well.
For what its worth, I liked your TalkWell solution best. I like the idea that you have to earn trust to participate in the discussion.
Thanks for this Rob! I organized with 10 engineers/political scientists/designers/educators during the pandemic and cocrreated a social platform that gamifies citizen assemblies and acknowledges archetypes. I'd love to share that with you, we have tons of notes and even the UX developed. I feel it would be great to test something like that in a small town like the one I live in now (3,000 people)
Great article! Thanks for sharing in public what you've learned from all of this. I really want better a better future for public discussion and it gives me hope to see that people are actively talking about and working on this.
I'm curious what it means to you to solve online polarization. I really want online communities where we can expect everyone to be civil. But meaningful and engaging conversations require diversity of thought. With that comes differing opinions on what it means to be civil. So I feel that the best we can do is to build the best environment that we can, do the best we can to protect it from those mean harm to it, and accept that sometimes discussion gets ugly.
It would be really neat to see a system that rewards civil discussion (especially in the presence of very different opinions) and gradually removes privileges from those that cannot be civil. I could see LLMs being helpful with this work in scoring comments given the context of the conversation. Although I guess there is the potential of this entering censorship territory as well.
For what its worth, I liked your TalkWell solution best. I like the idea that you have to earn trust to participate in the discussion.