Summary
The paper examines how communication on the internet can be improved. It begins the paper by stating that communication on the internet has the reputation for being obscene. It continues by stating that a driver for this perception is that communication tends to be entirely one-sided. The speaker does not get any feedback from other users that are “listening” to a conversation.
Reflection
I thought the need to improve communication on the internet is greatly important. From my own experience, I have noticed that communication on the internet tends to be quite aggressive and tends to create animosity between groups of people instead of bringing them together; what the internet was meant to do. I think the main driver for such obscenity on the internet is mostly anonymity. People are willingly to say things online that they wouldn’t say normally since they can easily hide behind the veil of anonymity on the internet. This encourages these users to be as vile as need be. Additionally, banning such people has limited effect since they can come back using a different screen name.
The outcomes of the research demonstrate that it is worthwhile to build discussion systems that are much more cohesive and reward active participation that goes beyond just speaking. It demonstrate that a reward system is beneficial and that people who do the listening should also be rewarded. Such a platform to my knowledge does not exist yet. There are a few forums that have strict moderation that do not allow abusive language. Such an approach is good but may not be feasible on large websites such as Youtube.
My research paper is not very similar to this research paper. My paper allows the usage of an online tool to test the knowledge of students. There is little to no collaboration or communication involved. It can be argued that lessons around the benefits of allowing open communication could improve learning rates in a classroom. Regardless, that would be a separate research project and still unrelated to my final project for this class.
I think the examples used by the authors were fairly simplistic and may not work for larger websites or websites that are structured differently. For instance, websites like Facebook also have an issue with abuse and the influence of third-party organisations. I’m not sure if such issues can be mitigated using the approach mentioned by the authors of this paper.