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I appreciate the idea, but it needs some reworking. In particular, I see two big flaws. (1) The essence of the use of this site would be that one chooses a po

I appreciate the idea, but it needs some reworking. In particular, I see two big flaws. (1) The essence of the use of this site would be that one chooses a position, and then finds arguments to support it. In other words, "I've made up my mind; now show me why I'm right." Now suppose I'm the person discussing an issue with you. Why should I pay any attention to some page chosen based largely on the assumption that I'm wrong? (2) You say "... I'm not looking for a democracy that rewards majoritarian thought and punishes less popular ...." And then you apparently want to use something along the lines of up/down voting to judge arguments. That's not the way to get what you say you want. In short, the idea, as stated, strikes me mostly as a tool for increasing polarization. More beneficial would be a site that simply provides information to help make decisions on whatever issues are of interest. To go with the gun-control example, you could have links to -- or summaries of -- studies on the effect of gun control. You could have comparative data on rates of various crimes in locations with different gun laws. Etc. How do deal with (2) is a harder problem. The plague of voting-based-on-agreement that makes sites like HN & Reddit so much worse than they could be, is something I wish more people were trying to address.

fragmede 13y ago
I have some ideas for improving the efficacy of online voting systems, but starting a new online community is hard. Even just starting a subreddits is hard, and I imagine that to be lower-friction than creating a stand-alone site, given Reddit's large existing user base. If you have an online-community that you run and would like some ideas to combat vote-based-on-agreement, here are a few that I've thought up or come across: (Not claiming that these strategies are ungameable). * Limit the number of upvotes a user can give per day, thus making votes more valuable. * Force users to space-out voting, allowing only 1 upvote every 5 minutes. * Vote value: Votes are valued more the less you do it over a certain period - so if you only upvote once per-day, that post gets more points than if you upvoted everything in /new. Choice: Do it hidden on the backend, or could be interesting; do it in a user-configurable format. Give users, say, 100 points per-day and are allowed to upvote transparently - you can give one thing 100 points or four things 25 points. * Time-delayed voting: votes are only allowed after a certain amount of time has passed since you clicked on a link. A well thought-out and reasoned article should take at least a couple of minutes to read, so I can upvote that after I read; I'm not likely to wait around to upvote an image-macro with fewer than a dozen words unless it's really special. * Karma cap, both negative and positive: Limit max positive karma to something low, say 50. That's high enough to see that a user isn't brand new but isn't trivially attainable. That way, it's fine to get to the cap, but posting inane one-liners attempting to reap thousands of points for a single comment isn't so tempting. Limit negative karma to something lower, like -100 to dissuade trolls, while still showing that a user is disagreed with. Hopefully that encourages discussion for the sake of discussion. * Meta-voting: You vote on how many points a post got, so if a pithy but well-timed comment that says "lol butts" gets a lot of points, you can vote to say that the post didn't deserve those points. Make this a limited power granted to a select (but changing) group. * Make downvoting cost karma: If it cost karma to downvote, that could be a higher bar to drive-by-disagreeing. * Not sure if it's a good idea, but turn the script around. Instead of trying to avoiding the Pepsi-Blue Advertising syndrome, charge money for votes transparently adding points to a post or comment. As users can still downvote items, it becomes expensive to elevate a bad piece of advertising. Maybe extend this to users by allowing users to receive money for lots of highly-rated comments. Or perhaps use Dogecoin as your currency of choice as the real-world value of 1 Doge is so low that it's effectively free in small quantities, but not actually free. I don't think allowing the masses to vote on things is a bad idea, but it's an idea that needs some refinements for best effect.
meric 13y ago
Perhaps an implementation of the idea could reduce arguments of a political thought into an axiom, e.g. (this is probably wrong) abortion should be legal....<insert a tree of arguments here>..., assuming individual liberty is the most important quality of a society, vs abortion should be illegal....<insert a tree of arguments here>..., assuming maximising human life being the most important quality of society. In that case you could see where you fundamentally disagree with a political idea, and accept the difference quickly without rehashing past arguments.
crusso 13y ago
1) I'm sure some will approach it that way. Some of those will continue with it that way. Other people will learn from the ongoing debate and incorporate new learning in their positions. They will learn logical argumentation and some facts because thought leaders will emerge who leverage logic and facts. Those thought leaders can be incorporated into webs of trust as preferenced by individual users. 2) I'm not looking to decrease polarization, necessarily. If anything, different echo chambers would necessarily form as like-minded sets of users would agree with and upvote similar arguments. If user sammy upvotes weak creationist arguments made by weak creationist supporters, fine. Within the region of the web of trust of weak creationist arguers, sammy may be king. The site should allow him his due, but when sammy goes to upvote a new argument that crusso is following, it should affect the ranking/view of that argument little if at all -- since crusso tends to not upvote weak creationist arguments and creationist argument supporters. Although mechanics that allow for increasing polarization sounds bad (I hear it), the conventional approach of decreasing polarization is to beat the crap out of outliers with monolithic, single-dimension voting systems that reward populism and emotional rhetoric. I'd rather let some polarization thrive because different people have different value systems... but what I would envision as being a "good" for a site like this is to allow people to both have their polarization AND to allow them to transcend their echo chambers by viewing the arguments of other thought leaders in other echo chambers using similar tools and metrics for evaluating arguments.

fragmede 13y ago

I have some ideas for improving the efficacy of online voting systems, but starting a new online community is hard. Even just starting a subreddits is hard, and I imagine that to be lower-friction than creating a stand-alone site, given Reddit's large existing user base. If you have an online-community that you run and would like some ideas to combat vote-based-on-agreement, here are a few that I've thought up or come across: (Not claiming that these strategies are ungameable). * Limit the number of upvotes a user can give per day, thus making votes more valuable. * Force users to space-out voting, allowing only 1 upvote every 5 minutes. * Vote value: Votes are valued more the less you do it over a certain period - so if you only upvote once per-day, that post gets more points than if you upvoted everything in /new. Choice: Do it hidden on the backend, or could be interesting; do it in a user-configurable format. Give users, say, 100 points per-day and are allowed to upvote transparently - you can give one thing 100 points or four things 25 points. * Time-delayed voting: votes are only allowed after a certain amount of time has passed since you clicked on a link. A well thought-out and reasoned article should take at least a couple of minutes to read, so I can upvote that after I read; I'm not likely to wait around to upvote an image-macro with fewer than a dozen words unless it's really special. * Karma cap, both negative and positive: Limit max positive karma to something low, say 50. That's high enough to see that a user isn't brand new but isn't trivially attainable. That way, it's fine to get to the cap, but posting inane one-liners attempting to reap thousands of points for a single comment isn't so tempting. Limit negative karma to something lower, like -100 to dissuade trolls, while still showing that a user is disagreed with. Hopefully that encourages discussion for the sake of discussion. * Meta-voting: You vote on how many points a post got, so if a pithy but well-timed comment that says "lol butts" gets a lot of points, you can vote to say that the post didn't deserve those points. Make this a limited power granted to a select (but changing) group. * Make downvoting cost karma: If it cost karma to downvote, that could be a higher bar to drive-by-disagreeing. * Not sure if it's a good idea, but turn the script around. Instead of trying to avoiding the Pepsi-Blue Advertising syndrome, charge money for votes transparently adding points to a post or comment. As users can still downvote items, it becomes expensive to elevate a bad piece of advertising. Maybe extend this to users by allowing users to receive money for lots of highly-rated comments. Or perhaps use Dogecoin as your currency of choice as the real-world value of 1 Doge is so low that it's effectively free in small quantities, but not actually free. I don't think allowing the masses to vote on things is a bad idea, but it's an idea that needs some refinements for best effect.

meric 13y ago

Perhaps an implementation of the idea could reduce arguments of a political thought into an axiom, e.g. (this is probably wrong) abortion should be legal....<insert a tree of arguments here>..., assuming individual liberty is the most important quality of a society, vs abortion should be illegal....<insert a tree of arguments here>..., assuming maximising human life being the most important quality of society. In that case you could see where you fundamentally disagree with a political idea, and accept the difference quickly without rehashing past arguments.

crusso 13y ago

1) I'm sure some will approach it that way. Some of those will continue with it that way. Other people will learn from the ongoing debate and incorporate new learning in their positions. They will learn logical argumentation and some facts because thought leaders will emerge who leverage logic and facts. Those thought leaders can be incorporated into webs of trust as preferenced by individual users. 2) I'm not looking to decrease polarization, necessarily. If anything, different echo chambers would necessarily form as like-minded sets of users would agree with and upvote similar arguments. If user sammy upvotes weak creationist arguments made by weak creationist supporters, fine. Within the region of the web of trust of weak creationist arguers, sammy may be king. The site should allow him his due, but when sammy goes to upvote a new argument that crusso is following, it should affect the ranking/view of that argument little if at all -- since crusso tends to not upvote weak creationist arguments and creationist argument supporters. Although mechanics that allow for increasing polarization sounds bad (I hear it), the conventional approach of decreasing polarization is to beat the crap out of outliers with monolithic, single-dimension voting systems that reward populism and emotional rhetoric. I'd rather let some polarization thrive because different people have different value systems... but what I would envision as being a "good" for a site like this is to allow people to both have their polarization AND to allow them to transcend their echo chambers by viewing the arguments of other thought leaders in other echo chambers using similar tools and metrics for evaluating arguments.