More and more online I see character assassinations instead of productive discussions

submitted by magnora7 from self.whatever

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[–]oldaccount29 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (2 children)

Ive thought a lot about alternatives to current social media.

I think a major issue on reddit is the upvote system. Its used too often as a disagree button, and it also has a side affect of people conforming their comments with what will be upvoted.

I made a series of posts (on reddit) discussing alternatives.

in general basically every option that is included or not included on a forum, every feature, algorithm etc helps to shape the type of discussion that is had. Knowing this, you can help to shape the conversation. This can be abused of course, but there are many possible positives.

Look at how this site works: https://www.kialo.com/explore it allows for an ongoing conversation, not one that will be buried in 24 hours. It allows for vast complexity in discussion that is organized and (kind of ) easy to sort through. It is very different from the reddit format, and it shapes the conversation differently.

In terms of voting, I would like to see a site similar to reddit but with a much more robust voting system:

Maybe instead of voting, you have a series of tags you can give a post, like "thoughtful", "credible", "funny", etc.

Maybe you can vote similar to what i just said, you can vote something as funny, thoughtful, interesting, amazing, etc. Then you can sort the posts in these different ways.

Lets say I wanted to make a forum, and I had a vision of a place where people talked about political issues, philosophy, etc - deep issues. I want them to be able tofilter out bad comments reliably, and to find good comments. i want to tone to be very respectful and mature. One thing I could do is make it so the types of upvotes that can be given match what I want. So:

Lets say I dont care about peoples specific opinions, but I want: respectful, effort, mature, thought-provoking comments. That could be my upvote system. you can upvote based on one of those, and nothing else. Now the influence of the voting system will be far better than reddit's system, at least for my goals.

Furthermore, once there is a voting system, what if I could weight votes various ways? For example, I could make it so all comments and posts that get a "thought-provoking" upvote will be treated as if they received 5 votes instead of one. This is one reason why I like the tag system instead of voting. People could tag posts whateve, and then weight each tag whatever they want.

So, say a post is tagged "NFL". Im not a fan of sports so I weight "NFL" to be worth -100 votes. You like sports so to you it is worth +10 votes. So each time it is tagged by someone, that is another vote.

You could use the system similarly to weight a single user. Maybe I find someone who is always very respectful, and challenges my beliefs in a good way. I could make is so that whatever he votes on will be weighted a certain amount. Magnora7, I recognize and enjoy your posts and comments on reddit, so I could weight you vote on threads as +1000. now whatever you vote on with be shot to the top, except in the major subs. This is problematic, because the effect is not equal across all subs. There are solutions though. the Weighting could scale based on the number of user in a sub. so in a smaller sub your vote would be worth ten and in a larger sub your vote would be worth 10,000. This is a little better, but not great. Another option is to make your vote worth "a percentage of the total votes for that thread". the percentage could be over 100%, and I could make it so if you voted a thread up and someone voted it down, and I both had you equally weighted, it would cancel out.

thoughts?

[–]magnora7[S] 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

Kailo is interesting, thanks for showing it to me. I have always wanted a site where the conversation can build on itself without being gone in 24 hours, like you say.

Your voting idea sounds like slashdot, which I think is a good system.

I think being able to "spend" your upvotes for the day however you want (by upvoting one person 10 times or whatever) would be nice. Say each person is allotted 100 upvotes every day. It could be like a currency of sorts. You're gone for 7 days, you have 700 points sitting around to spend on upvoting whatever you like.

Some interesting ideas, I'll have to think over them.

What if we started a legitimate cryptocurrency and used that for the website's points? And each user gets 100 a day, like a basic income experiment. But it's just to upvote things on the site, but you could theoretically then transfer them between users and do other neat stuff. What do you think about that?

[–]oldaccount29 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I wanted to add, I mentioned:

https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ModerationTheory/

Theory of redit I believe is a fairly thriving community, and I bet they would have some interested stuff to add to a wiki like that. Im specifically interested in forums that have a counter culture goal in mind, but even so.