Why User Moderation sucks (for debate)

If you want to see why user moderation sucks for debate you need look no further than the Ron Paul echo chamber that Digg.com was for the period of Fall 2007 to the Iowa caucus. Take this article for example where the submission is some footage of Ron Paul that was apparently (I can’t say if it was) cut from the re-air of the Live debate.

Here’s the third most dugg comment from the article:

“If words could penetrate ass, Ron Paul just sodomized all of them.” — Plasmatica

And here’s what got dugg down:

“This clip was not cut from re-air.” — clarionhaze

“yep, I saw it on re-air as well. – innit great how people dugg you down for calling bullshit on the headline?

/not voting for him but I agree w/ everything RP said”  — JimSwarthow

And the most dugg down comment on the whole page:

“The problem with this digg submission is an example of Ron Paul’s problem. . or I should say his followers. This was NOT cut from the debate. I and EVERYONE else who watched saw this part. This could have been a good submission, by blatantly lying is not gonna help Paul.” — Cyberdactyl

The unfortunate thing about Digg’s style of user moderation is that it inevitably ends up being used as a tool to shout down dissent. This does more then just discourage the unpopular side from participating further. It creates an illusion of consensus that breeds complacency in proponents of the locally popular idea.

Debatepedia

Debatepedia is an attempt to apply the wiki philosophy to debate. The site is less of a debate forum and more of a collaboration point for academic debate teams. That is probably the reason why the site hasn’t turned in to an enormous edit war.

The site has some interesting characteristics. It uses the same two-column design that Helium.com does for its debate pages. The content is good but compares neither to Wikipedia nor The Index of Creationist Claims.

I’d be interesting in seeing how far this site can go over time and with more users.

Why Search Sucks (for Opinion Content)

A little homework assignment for you: Pick a hot button topic (Global Warming, Intelligent Design, Stem Cell Research) and try to convince your favorite search engine that you want arguments pertaining to said topic. I think you’ll find the results disappointing.

It’s incredibly hard to get relevant opinion texts to rank high on a search engine. This is the case despite of the wealth of opinion texts on the web in blogs, newspapers, forums and elsewhere. Texts from a neutral point of view always seem to trump opinion texts in a search engine ranking. This is certainly a feature and not a bug. However, it makes a large part of human discorse invisible to what one could argue is our primary means of finding information on a daily basis.

It’s interesting to consider the history of Google’s citation-based ranking algorithm in this context. The model content that the creators considered for the algorithm during early development was scientific papers, where citations effectively increased the prestige of the cited paper. However, the purpose of a citation in the scientific world is to pull in data, not the conclusion, from antother researcher. That data became what search engines valued, not the arguments or conclusions.

Philosophy and the Humanities don’t have a culture of citation. One does not cite an argument someone else has made, one simply restates and maybe gives credit. Unlike citing someone else’s data it is a fallacy to cite the authority of someone esle in a debate. For these reasons opinion texts are unable to build the web of citations that search engines depend on to assign relevance.

Debate is something quite different from peer reviewed science process and Search becomes less usefull as we stray away from that model. The hard data relevant to a debate is typicically unambiguous. The conclusions that one can draw from those data is where debate begins.

It is unlikely and probably undesirable for the current generation search engines to change their algorithms to value relevant opinion texts. However, if someone sets out to create something that does then I think they’ll find that the current ways of doing things don’t work in the context of opinion. 

Why Forums Suck (for debate) Part Three: Signal to Noise Ratio

Let’s say you have a forum thread with a small group of participants who are having an intelligent debate on a hot button topic of the day. The parties disagree but are polite and cordial and do not engage in ad hominem attacks of any sort. This goes on for awhile and a short time later other forum participants begin to take notice.

Among these observers are some real partisans who are offended by the very notion of a debate on the subject. Not content to sit on the sidelines they feel they must admonish the participant on the wrong side of the argument. These new participants soon start bickering  amongst themselves in all the ways we’ve come to expect… occasionally punctuated by some thoughtful posts by the original participants. Godwin’s law manifests its inevitable result and the thread dies.
The previous scenario is an all too common occurrence. Debate threads have a really hard time scaling past a few people. In an unmoderated forum there are no means to block out posts or participants that decrease the value of the thread. This makes threads virtually unreadable to lurkers, participants and even search engines.

A low Signal to Noise ratio is not a problem that is unique to debate forums. We know from other disciplines that solving signal to noise ratio problems requires a comprehensive description of what signal means in a given context. Human discourse represents the toughest medium for coming up with such a description but I don’t think the problem is hopeless, just unsolved.