Positive Internet Arguing

Category: Internet

Published: 12/17/2009 07:51 a.m.

The web is a great place to argue with someone. I have occasionally wasted time doing so on the web and have learned that comments and forums are a disjointed place to prove a point. I think there could be a better way.

Imagine a website that pits opposing points of view against one another using links to articles and blog posts that users can then rank or upvote in order of importance. A person can create a topic, e.g. the healthiness of Taco Bell. Once the topic is created they can then submit links either for or against the topic. You could submit a link to a study done on the high fat content of the food. Then someone else could come along and submit a link to a blog post that shows someone who lost weight on an all Taco Bell diet (my brother maybe). There could be a counter to show how many links are supporting or opposing any given argument, but this wouldn't mean much. But the big indicator would be votes.

Instead of voting on the topic, people would have to vote on the relevance of the supporting evidence. There would need to be checks in place that prevented me from voting up everything on one side and voting down everything on the other side. Perhaps a single vote can be placed for each topic. You would have to pick the best piece of evidence. Then the real counter for the topic could display how many votes the evidence on each side received.

The user profiles could show what people voted on, and even eventually suggest friends based on similar points of view. This same data would eventually be used in advertising, as hopefully you will have segmented people off into distinct categories. Certainly some basic demographics (a/s/l) could be captured in the signup.

In the long run I could see widgets that were embeddable on blog posts for people to vote on them in support of a side of an issue. You could send your readers over to vote on your POV in order to help prove that it is correct and "right". There would be lots of efforts to game the site, but that might be part of the fun. I imagine there are both religious and non-religious hackers out there.

The basic point is simple: the web is used quite often as a place where semi-anonymous people argue, so you might as well take advantage of that and give them a specific place to do so. Like Hamsterdam in The Wire, you push the bad stuff all into it's own place.

I wish I had the skills to develop such a site, but I really do not. So this is an idea I'm just putting out there. If you do build it, I'd love to hear about it. The license is just attribution on this guy.

Update (12/18/09): Ed Schipul pointed me to Slashdot's moderation, which is community-driven with a great set of checks and balances. Moderators get so many points to vote things up or down. After they use them, they are done moderating until their next turn to moderate. A very cool feature is that you can't moderate on a post that you commented on. The site editors have unlimited moderation, and the stats show they are just as fair as the masses. Thanks for the tip Ed.