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5 Comments

Fighting the echo chamber

Hi people,

Here's the idea: building a dead-simple platform where the only "objects" are:

  • a topic that has more than one side (ex.: is peanut butter is good or bad?)
  • arguments that support one of the sides of the topic
    (against: I hate peanut butter because X study shows that it's bad for your stomach;
    for: I love peanut butter because it has some nutrients that no other food has, as shown in Y study)
  • arguments can be backed by some sources or can just be opinions
  • both topics and arguments have points as in reddit, to see which arguments are popular.
  • to give the opportunity for all arguments to be read, the topic overview page shows 6 arguments on each side, being 4 ordered by popularity, and the last 2 are randomly fetched from the arguments' set.

The idea behind this is to promote the exploration of both sides of the discussion, and whoever visits the page can see those clearly exposed.

Of course, since the nature of this project would be to promote the finding of "the truth", I don't intend to make a profit out of it.
It's intended as a tool that helps altruistically, as in, non-profit.

What do you think about this?

  1. 3

    Sounds like a great idea in theory but the reason echo chambers are such a problem is because they’re what people want. Most people don’t want their ideals challenged. They want them reinforced.

    There’s a few people out there trying this already. Some other links were provided but here’s a few others:

    https://www.theperspective.com/
    https://www.procon.org/

    1. 1

      Wow, never heard of these websites, thanks for sharing.
      Well, if we analyze the traffic these websites had in June 2021 (data from similarweb), it seems to me that there's quite some interest:
      theperspective.com - ~3M
      procon.org - ~600k
      kialo.com - ~130k

      I don't even know what to extract out of here.

  2. 1

    I feel I've heard a version of this idea a lot of times over the years and the fact it never caught on is not a good sign. Don't let that stop you if you're passionate about it!

    One version I dabbled in was ordering tweets for and against issues to easily see both arguments. I had an ugly static mvp I made in a day but never pursued it lol: https://twitpivot.netlify.app/

  3. 1

    This comment was deleted 3 years ago.

    1. 1

      oh nice. thanks @anilkilic, will check that out.

      1. 2

        seems like there's also a for-profit already doing something on this area: https://www.kialo.com/

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