You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

0
1

[–] thethreefive 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

I'd love to see a system that really educates users to use their voats in a manner that's conducive of a beneficial and diverse community. How many large, and still aggressive1, subs on that-other-website have we seen that go as far as to hide the down arrow or inject a tooltip containing the rules for voting into the page to prevent brigading against opposing thoughts. It seems that no matter how often you reiterate guidelines on not downvoating dissenting opinions, users never seem to listen in large enough volumes to make a difference.

That being said: I don't think this is an impossible war against groupthink, just that I haven't seen an effective tool to diffuse it.

So how does a large community encourage sincere and diverse discourse while inhibiting aggression and dismissal of dissenting viewpoints? Or is such a community unfeasible given the restrictions of this text medium and human tendencies to create and defend ad hoc tribes?

This is an important area of online social systems I think the entire internet (and the companies utilizing it) would benefit from getting some solid scientific research on.

1 Aggression in this case being defined as uncritical evaluation and dismissal of rhetoric presented by an opposing viewpoint.