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?

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Things get more interesting with their debate topics (example). On these topics the page is split down the middle with articles arguing for the proposition on one side and articles against the proposition on the other. Each side is moderated independently. The result of this design is as one would expect. The separated user moderation helps with the signal to noise ratio without resulting in noticeable shouting down. The immutable postings prevent the sort of edit warfare that we see on Wikipedia.

Yet despite all the potential I see here I must say that I am not impressed with the quality of the arguments made on this site. Many of the top arguments make outrageous or at least unproven claims as premises to their arguments. I can’t help but think that the absence of a rebuttal feature makes it possible for such claims to stand. Also, the moderation system seems to favor arguments that simply summarize many arguments in sort of a kitchen sink school of debate. These mini-arguments almost never back up their premises.

I also can’t help but think that the financial incentives (writers of top articles get a share of the ad revenue) put into the site has a corrupting effect on the moderation system. This is simply a sinking feeling that I cannot prove. However, credibility is hard to come by on the Internet and I can’t imagine nobody else will get the same impression.

What struck me was not that I was meeting congressmen who had a different view from mine. It was I was meeting congressmen who never even imagined there was another side to the story. So I would appear and make an argument and they were just befuddled because…Well, maybe because I wasn’t clear enough but maybe because they actually hadn’t ever contemplated the kind of points that were being made because never had the people making those points had the opportunity to appear in their office to talk to them about it….

You can find the line at 42:20 but I recommend the whole video, if only for context.

Congressmen deal in arguments. It’s their job. The information required to do their job comes in the form of arguments. Us working folk can just run a search to get half the information we need to do our jobs. Congressmen, however, have to read op-eds, listen to lobbyists and *shutter* watch talk shows to get the information they need to do their jobs. I actually kind of feel sorry for them.

Most interesting is the section under the heading “debunked” for theories that have been disproved in some way. The mechanism to flagging something “debunked” appears to be from receiving a certain amount of “debunked” flags from readers. I’d be interested to know if there were theories the have been marked “debunked” yet a group of users continued to argue for it.

Will pop culture forums will lead us into the promised land of auto-moderated debate? If the ancient Kirk vs. Picard debate is ever resolved then stem cell research and global warming certainly can’t be far behind. Probably best not to hold our breaths though.

Thanks to Jeremiah Hansen making this odd connection.

Along comes Carol. Carol agrees that if Y and Z were true that X would also be true. The problem is that Carol does not think that Y is true at all and therefore calls into question the validity of X. Alice and Carol start politely posting back and forth about the validity of Y.

At about the same time comes Dave. Dave also agrees that if Y and Z were true that X would also be true. However, unlike Carol, Dave has doubts about Z rather than Y. Dave writes a very polite post challenging Z and once again calls into question the validity of X.

Shortly after Dave puts up his post comes Bob. Bob agrees with Alice in every way and notices that Alice seems to have her hands full with defending Y with Carol. Bob also notices that nobody has responded to Dave’s challenge to Z so he posts a polite response defending the validity of Z. Bob and Dave go back and forth arguing about Z. At the very same time and on the very same thread Alice and Carol are posting back and forth about Y.

After all this has been going for a while comes you. You find the topic of X interesting and decide to check in on the debate. What do you find? You find a forum thread that is practically unreadable! The thread topic keeps bouncing back and forth between Z and Y. The topic has come to a fork and now we have two groups of people wrestling to control the topic.

Forum threads fork. Debate forum threads doubly so. In this example the participants are lucky that the debate has only forked once. Real life examples can have a fork every other post. Yet the thread models in (most) forums do not have mechanisms to accommodate a forked topic.

This comes back to one of my major premises: the structure of argument is a tree and not a list. Unfortunately forums organize all posts into a list, just one post after another in the order in which they came. This mapping makes it tough on readers and posters to make any sense of what is going on.

Online debaters would be much better served by a medium that handles a forking topic gracefully. Wikis do this quite well when topics are uncontroversial. However, Wikis have their own problems…. I’ll save that for another post.

Monica Guzman of the Seattle PI talked about the impact you can have commenting on newspaper articles. She also mentioned the depressing effect of trolls and other forum critters that ruin it for everyone. In fact we both had nearly identical slides containing the Fremont Troll. 

Ramez Naam presented a manifesto for bottom up organization. He had some mindblowing and revolutionary ideas on how companies should be organized that I wouldn’t dare to try to summarize. His killer line (paraphrased): “Why are our capitalist corporations run like communist regimes?” He’s apparantly preparing a book on the topic that I can’t wait to read.

Ryan McMinn and Vj Vijai won the prize for hilarity. They spoke on psuedoscientific dating techniques and using NLP techniques in interviews respectively. I’m really jealous of people of people who can be as funny as these guys while talking about (relatively) serious things. They got more laughs in their first slide then I got in my whole presentation. Expect to see the videos of their talks make the front page of your favorite user moderated forums soon.

I’ll revisit all these once the videos are up. Until then you can console yourself with videos from previous Ignite Seattle events .