Dr. Stroud’s talk on her research on partisanship and its effects in the comments was an enlightening look at how news organizations need to consider their incentives and the design for their comment system. One thing that Dr. Stroud talked about during the NY Times study was considering the business incentives of the news organizations themselves, something we as a class have not discussed in detail (besides a few mentions here and there). We have been focused mainly on the user side of things and I think it is important to consider how one could incentivize the organization to take part to solve the problems because right now they see the partisanship in their comment section as good for business. More engagement means that you can serve more ads to more people and bring in more money. You could make conspiracies that engagement and the revenue generated is why Reddit doesn’t ban controversial subreddits unless they attract a lot of negative media attention, but that is a rabbit hole we don’t want to dive into.
I would agree with Dr. Stroud that severe partisanship is an obviously bad thing, but I don’t think that enforcing civility in every comment conversation is the right way to go. Humans are passionate, emotional creatures, prone to wild gesticulation to try and get their point across. People will blow their tops when talking about a topic they feel strongly about, especially when arguing with someone who has an opposing view. And like Dr. Stroud said, the idea of civility is subjective. What is stopping an organization from morphing this idea of civility over time into something that means “anything that opposes the organization’s views”? Remember that no great change has ever been brought about by people being civil. Even Gandhi, the icon of peace, wasn’t civil. His movements were peaceful, yes. But they were disruptive (i.e. most certainly not civil) which is why they were so effective and popular. The goal should be to incentivize people to listen to each other and help them find common ground, not to try and enforce civility which will at best create a facade of good vibes while not actually producing any understanding between the two groups.
Let’s try and speculate what a discussion system that provides the ability for users to listen and understand the opposing side (while allowing for passionate discussions. First thing we would like is for users to declare their alliances by setting where they stand politically (on the left or the right) on a sliding scale that would be visible when they comment. This allows other users know where this user stands and keep that in mind while engaging them. For now, let us assume that we don’t have to deal with trolls and that everyone set their position on the scale honestly. Now, when a comment (or reply) is posted, other users could vote on how well articulated and well argued the post is (we are not using ‘like’ and ‘recommend’ here because, as Dr. Stroud said, the choice of wording is important and lead to different results). If someone on the right made a well written reply that refutes a comment written by someone on the left, and this is acknowledged by other people by leaving votes on how well written and articulated the reply is (giving more weight to votes from the people on the other side of the scale); it could serve as a point for people on the left to think about, even if they are ideologically opposed to it.
If the comments just devolve into name calling and general rudeness, then nobody is getting votes on how well written and articulated it is. But this system could allow passionate discussions that do not necessarily fall into the bucket of “civility” but are still found to be valuable to be voted up and brought to notice of the people who oppose it. Seeing votes from people on their side will provide a strong incentive to try and understand a point that they might otherwise be opposed to and not think too deeply about.
