The Nexus of 2024

Beyond comment threads: any ideas about “game-changers”?

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by

jon
in

One of the best things about the web is that it enables many voices to be heard. Blogs, comment threads, forums, and social networks empower people to take part in new kinds of discussion, dialogue, and debate….

With all that activity happening across the web, how do we enable more coherent, elevated discussion?

— Beyond Comment Threads.

The latest Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership (aka MoJo) “Innovation Challenge” is intriguing. The deadline is this Sunday, May 22, and they encourage different kinds of entries: a concept brief or blog post explaining your idea (500 words or less), an embedded video or link to a slidecast (“extra points for explaining your idea this way!”), an early software demo, proof of concept, prototype, wireframes, mock-ups … “anything, really—be bold!”  For that matter, “the challenge brief, resources, and stimuli are all suggestions. Be bold! Color outside the lines.”  Cool!

My summary on Storify has a lot more info, including links to Wendy Norris’ notes from an in-person brainstorming session in the Bay Area and online discussions on Mozilla’s site, Hacker News, and Slashdot.  The challenge brief has some pointers to emerging technologies, and highlights a few questions.  Where do you see the next radical improvement in user commentary? How do we go beyond end-of-story comment threads? How do we make commenting more social?

It also describes the criteria the reviewers will use:

  • If implemented, would you expect this proposal to be widely adopted by the news industry?
  • Is the proposal feasible within the Knight-Mozilla timeline and resources. Program runs through 2013 and will engage 15 full-time fellows.
  • Is this a unique solution to the challenge statement? Is there another open source project that would be replicated if we support this solution?
  • Is it a “game changer?” Not every entry we support will be, but we should all be looking for ones that may be.

Did somebody say game-changer?   Hmmm … any ideas?

Comments

5 responses to “Beyond comment threads: any ideas about “game-changers”?”

  1. jon Avatar
    jon

    The ideas have continued to trickle in on Mozilla’s drumbeat.org site, with input from James, Dan, Michael, Steve, Steven, Harry … hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here. Here’s drumbeat.org’s audience, as reported by Alexa:

    Based on internet averages, drumbeat.org is visited more frequently by males who are in the age range 18-24, have no children and are graduate school educated.

    Sigh. Crowdsourcing gives much better results when the “crowd” is diverse (see Scott Page’s book The Difference for more). If almost all of the proposals are from guys, then it’s likely that most of the prizes will go to guys (recreating existing dimensions of bias), and that whatever gets built while be more responsive to guys’ needs then to women. So the end result is unlikely to be transformative.

    Hey! I’ve got a game-changing idea! Let’s start by involving a truly diverse crowd, including the readers of all the sponsoring news organizations. And by diverse I mean gender, race, class, language, age and all the other dimensions. Let’s work together to create a diverse team that builds open-source software that’s designed from the beginning to be accessible for everybody, and a diverse community to be the early adopters and give feedback on it. Let’s build a system that equalizes access by working well on the phone and tablet as well as in libraries, classrooms, and community technology centers — and has great support for assistive technology and multiple languages.

    Now, that’d be game-changing.

    Reply
  2. jon Avatar
    jon

    Rhiannon Coppin’s My2Cents makes a great suggestion:

    Owning your own comments across all properties; your comments are YOUR content that YOU produce. This gives the commenter more stake and more rewards (in terms of social capital and web traffic); and makes the comment section more like a small village….

    The comment on the original article is automatically linked back to my “comment roll” page, where I have a short profile, link to my blog or web site, etc. and other social media tie-ins according to my preference (Twitter feed, links to comments I up-voted or rated highly, etc.)

    This page would show anyone that lands on it that I comment on articles in The Vancouver Sun, The New York Times, Gawker, some blogs, etc. You’d also see quickly that I’m interested in health, science, technology and journalism, because those are the types of articles I comment on the most.

    Yeah really. tribe.net is an example of a site that did this very well back in the day. You could even imagine going farther and making it easy to ‘import’ a comment you’ve left elsewhere (getting the link and perhaps an automatically-extracted summary). And at a deeper level, Rhiannon’s thinking is a great example of starting from a social science perspective and asking the basic questions like, okay, just why should somebody want to participate in these discussions?

    Reply
  3. jon Avatar
    jon

    Here’s what I’m thinking of proposing:

    – A modern open-source implementation of Slashdot-style voting, meta-moderation, and with a comment-oriented experience (as described by Rhiannon Coppin in My2Cents), “flagging and favorites” (described by Matt Haughey), and tagging to allow creating of issue-based and geographical communities

    – With accessibility and multi-lingual support designed in from the beginning, and (as proposed by RadioRaheem) allowing for audio as well as textual input

    – Well-integrated with Twitter and status.net

    – Designed and implemented by a diverse team, and with a goal of prioritizing diversity [as described in http://www.quora.com/How-would-Quora-be-different-if-it-prioritized-diversity/answer/Jon-Pincus ]

    Reply
  4. jon Avatar
    jon

    It’s astonishing to me that in a world of Arab Spring and Wikileaks, so many of the submissions propose a “real name only” policy. In large parts of the world, this policy excludes political activists, dissidents, whistleblowers or anybody expressing an unpopular opinion from the discussion. Many other people need pseudonymity as well: domestic violence survivors, closeted lgbtq’s, employees exploring other job opportunities, women in cultures where they are not allowed access to technology … the list goes on. So I see pseudonymous and anonymous participation as vital to the next generation system.

    Some people argue that allow pseudonymous participation increases trolling and the risk of “internet mob” behavior, but I think that’s way too simplistic. Requiring real names doesn’t eliminate the trolling problem: back in 2008 I did a definitive-at-the-time bibliography on trolls, and many of the ugliest cases involved people whose identities were no secret. And for that matter a real-name policy doesn’t prevent a really determined troll from creating accounts under fake names. It just creates a situation where activists have less rights than dogs.

    Reply
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