I had lunch today with Kevin Reynen, who is going to be leaving Bradley University to take a job with the University of Nevada, Reno. He’s going to be “working with the graduate students and faculty at UNR’s [Journalism] School to create a next generation news ‘portal’ for the Lake Tahoe area. The idea of the project is to convert the ‘people formally known as the audience’ into content contributors.”
In other words, he’s trying to create a blog-like site where citizen journalists and professional journalists would be treated as equals, each posting stories (either “letter to the editor”-type or researched reports) and having an on-line conversation about those stories. Sounds like a fun job — and a beautiful place to live!
Kevin and I don’t always agree on things (like the Kellar Branch issue or Muni Wi-Fi), but we can still be friends and discuss things without insulting each other. Unfortunately, on blogs and especially with anonymity, you can easily end up with verbal slug fests like, say, this argument on Bill’s site. Thus, one of Kevin’s biggest hurdles in his project at UNR is going to be figuring out a way to promote civil discourse without any heavy-handed moderating/censoring. People aren’t going to want to blog and have any meaningful conversations if there’s always someone in there doing nothing but making fun of their points of view, or insinuating they’re on drugs.
The problem is magnified in Kevin’s case because what he’s promoting is not just people being able to comment on posts like they do here on the Chronicle, but to write the posts themselves. So, for instance, imagine my site being open to Bill, Polly, Eyebrows, Vonster, Tony, Anon E. Mouse, et al., to write any post they want and have it show up on my front page. I think you can see the potential for that to turn into a cyberspace version of “Lord of the Flies” pretty quickly.
Kevin suggested some form of collaborative filtering, like Reddit’s “karma” system. There, each user gets to vote on each post by either promoting or demoting it (moving it closer to the top or further to the bottom of the page). “When a particular item is promoted or demoted, the user who posted it is either rewarded or punished — a system of editorial karma. In the same way that popular submissions are voted to the top, the individuals who post them get increases in karma.” Those with more karma have a better reputation and thus, presumably, will be read more, while those without karma will be ignored and hopefully go away.
The karma system sounds good, but it might be over the heads of less tech-savvy users. Yet that’s the only technological solution I can envision. So I’m afraid I wasn’t much help to Kevin. I really don’t know a way to make people be polite or understand where “the line” is that they’re not supposed to cross. It seems to me that there would have to be a moderator, no matter how you look at it.
But then I thought maybe some of you, dear readers, would be able to offer Kevin some better insights. Any ideas on how to promote civil discourse and meaningful conversations without making people feel overly-moderated or censored?
