Temporal vs Spatial Moderation

Rules systems for moderating debate have been around since antiquity. In live debate this has always meant moderating time. One team gets to speak for a period of time and then the other gets to speak for a set period of time. There are many variations on this theme but generally speaking each party gets an equal amount of time. The only variation is in the length of the time segments and who gets the almighty last word.

Time is scarce commodity in live debate so moderating live debate is almost entirely the business of regulating time. The web is different. There are no time constraints and the storage capacity when it comes to text might as well be infinite. The only scarce resource on the web is human attention. Dividing the resources of human attention is the single goal of online debate moderation. Dividing this resource comes down to answering questions like who gets to have their argument highest on the page? Who gets to be left most. Where to rebuttals go? Where to arguments that back of premises go?