René is looking for Community Managers, Community Moderators
and
2 more
A discussion about better discussions
I am curious about having better (online) discussions. My personal focus here is on social media opinion building and how better discussions could improve the quality of democratic decisions, make common voices more relevant and heard by the ones who will finally make decisions.
For this I have set-up a so far closed-source project with the following goal:
VeriVotion — Esperanto for “reasoning” — is a secure website for civilised debates — no shouting, rudeness or irrationality allowed! - that supports more relevant opinion-building as a foundation for smarter decisions and votings along social, political and organisatorial debates and large scale problem resolution activities.
From a technical perspective, the project's primary Phase I deliverable is a generic Commenting- and Discussion-WebSite-Plugin that supports smarter social debates on otherwise public accessible websites.
For this I have set-up a so far closed-source project with the following goal:
VeriVotion — Esperanto for “reasoning” — is a secure website for civilised debates — no shouting, rudeness or irrationality allowed! - that supports more relevant opinion-building as a foundation for smarter decisions and votings along social, political and organisatorial debates and large scale problem resolution activities.
From a technical perspective, the project's primary Phase I deliverable is a generic Commenting- and Discussion-WebSite-Plugin that supports smarter social debates on otherwise public accessible websites.
What is Polywork?
Polywork is a social network where you share the unique intersection of what you do and who you are. Meet, discuss, and discover opportunities with your Community.
Use René's VIP link to skip the waitlist
Hi René!
It's really an interesting topic, and I do feel that now is the right time to discuss the issues of current social media platforms — and to start working on creating effective and plausible solutions.
I have to say, at this time I do not feel competent enough to discuss such a complex topic, but I do have some thoughts.
There's been a lot of talk about censorship lately, and even though I feel that some level of censorship is necessary for all online social spaces — I do think that people who interact in these spaces should be able to present themselves to the public as they are, even (and especially) if it's not in the best light.
That brings me to the topic of discussion threads and user interfaces. I believe that interaction between users in most online social spaces is too restricted.
In my opinion, it should in some ways be able to replicate real-life human interaction.
Unfortunately, most people in real-life scenarios are not always calm, collected, polite, or even civil — and I personally do not support the idea that we should moderate and control social spaces to the extent where these people or their opinions are removed as it doesn't portray society accurately.
What I do support is the creation of tools and a UI that would allow users to moderate the social space themselves, by rating and reacting to each other's posts and content, which would help other users perceive a specific user, or their post as credible, misleading, respectful, disrespectful, inconsiderate, impolite and so on.
Having 'like' and 'dislike' reaction buttons is in my opinion insufficient, and most platforms don't even have the 'dislike' option anymore.
But people in real life don't offer positive feedback only, and not every person's feedback is valued the same.
So perhaps, there could be a system that regulates which users' posts and comments would be pushed to the top, based on select criteria that would also be chosen in collaboration with the community, or perhaps the users would be able to filter out the posts of users that were given certain labels by the community.