3 ms·

Perhaps unrelated, but are there any groups (deliberately non-specific) working to address this?

npunt 11y ago
Very good question, I don't know! I'm unfamiliar with the structures of working groups but I imagine it'd have to be pretty heavily social sciences weighted (ethnography, sociology/psychology, media studies, education, etc). Personally, I'd like to see a mix of rapid prototyping, science fiction (engaging in hypotheticals on systems and cultural impact), and solid research. Evaluation is going to be challenging due to the uniqueness of experiences in social systems (e.g. in social networks every feed is different, so less unified starting point). I think surfacing the problems-behind-the-problem like understanding / capturing the different starting points of each readers knowledge would play prominently in any truly transformative solution. On the business end, right now I can't imagine there's much of a business vehicle for driving this forward, as the market would favor general solutions applied to pre-existing properties (e.g. bolt-ons like Disqus) or incremental changes (e.g. better mod tools on reddit or something), whereas my strong suspicion is that deeper innovations probably need to be developed alongside wholly new online properties - you know, the medium is the message and all that. Evaluating success would be difficult given the need to create and verify new metrics of success, and I'm not sure many startups have the patience, knowhow, or desire to dig deep into research required for this. I guess its worth mentioning I started an online news company so I've had more than a passing chance to think about / be frustrated with this problem space. In the challenging environment of growing a journalism startup (not exactly a high $$ biz), I wasn't able to sink my teeth enough into creating new designs for media publishing and community tools, and was so unsatisfied with the present offerings that we just avoided going down the discussion board route altogether. It remains my belief that a 'news' is a sense-making and ultimately educational problem being solved (poorly) by publishing systems, and the field of 'journalism' lacks imagination in what ways they can create said news, assuming everything just becomes an article written by a journalist because thats how newspapers did it.
- hitekker 11y ago
  A lot of good points you brought up! At least on the business side: right now the only noteworthy product that seems to be innovating in the general discussion space is http://try.discourse.org/ http://try.discourse.org/. I'm not following this field closely, so I'm probably missing out on at least 10 interesting possibilities.

npunt 11y ago

Very good question, I don't know! I'm unfamiliar with the structures of working groups but I imagine it'd have to be pretty heavily social sciences weighted (ethnography, sociology/psychology, media studies, education, etc). Personally, I'd like to see a mix of rapid prototyping, science fiction (engaging in hypotheticals on systems and cultural impact), and solid research. Evaluation is going to be challenging due to the uniqueness of experiences in social systems (e.g. in social networks every feed is different, so less unified starting point). I think surfacing the problems-behind-the-problem like understanding / capturing the different starting points of each readers knowledge would play prominently in any truly transformative solution. On the business end, right now I can't imagine there's much of a business vehicle for driving this forward, as the market would favor general solutions applied to pre-existing properties (e.g. bolt-ons like Disqus) or incremental changes (e.g. better mod tools on reddit or something), whereas my strong suspicion is that deeper innovations probably need to be developed alongside wholly new online properties - you know, the medium is the message and all that. Evaluating success would be difficult given the need to create and verify new metrics of success, and I'm not sure many startups have the patience, knowhow, or desire to dig deep into research required for this. I guess its worth mentioning I started an online news company so I've had more than a passing chance to think about / be frustrated with this problem space. In the challenging environment of growing a journalism startup (not exactly a high $$ biz), I wasn't able to sink my teeth enough into creating new designs for media publishing and community tools, and was so unsatisfied with the present offerings that we just avoided going down the discussion board route altogether. It remains my belief that a 'news' is a sense-making and ultimately educational problem being solved (poorly) by publishing systems, and the field of 'journalism' lacks imagination in what ways they can create said news, assuming everything just becomes an article written by a journalist because thats how newspapers did it.

hitekker 11y ago
A lot of good points you brought up! At least on the business side: right now the only noteworthy product that seems to be innovating in the general discussion space is http://try.discourse.org/ http://try.discourse.org/. I'm not following this field closely, so I'm probably missing out on at least 10 interesting possibilities.