Notes Toward a Better Open Disputation Forum

This post by David Brin on his Wired essay has me thinking about how to encourage rational discussion on an open thread.

First, let's note the obvious: Some blogs have really interesting comments associated with them, while other blogs have useless comments. Seems to me that there are several key determinants to successful substantive comments:

The the number of commenters is fairly small, say, under 50.

The commenters have diverse points of view and don't self-select. That is, people with oddball opinions don't get shouted down, even if they're excoriated for something that most consider dumb.

Ad hominem argument is fairly infrequent. This goes for arguments about material inside and outside the discussion.

The commenters respond to each other as well as to the original post.

Commenters are not afraid to express complex arguments at some length.

The number of comments in a thread is short enough to be read completely by any prospective commenter.

Commenters expect responses and attempt to address those responses.

Threads are long-lived. Commenters have enough time to read a thread, think about it, and compose a response.

Given these attributes, the most obvious impediment to good threads is the size or popularity of the forum. Blogs with the best reputations are almost guaranteed to have the worst comments because their threads are endless. When there are too many people commenting, you can't read the whole thread. You're then much more likely to flame or just say something flippant as a one-off. Once that pattern begins, the thread is pretty much ruined.

Note that many of the attributes listed above help to prevent self-selection. Because popular blogs have few of these attributes, they tend to self-select. The extreme uniformity of opinion caused by self-selection is a major contributor to the dumbing-down of discourse on the web.

Now, some bloggers spend a lot of time moderating their blogs, but this simply can't be done with huge comment threads if you actually have a life outside your blog. (Note that this blog does not currently suffer from this problem!!) Seems to me that there ought to be a way of engineering comment threads so that you can encourage these good attributes but still have the ability to have a wildly popular blog. Here are some possibilities:

Segregate groups of commenters into smaller groups.

Hierarchically structure the smaller groups, with your best commenters further up the hierarchy.

Leaven the groups lower in the hierarchy with the comments from the groups higher up. This will allow the folks on the bottom to read and respond to the best comments, which in turn can allow them to promote themselves in the forum by being smart and interesting.

Allow commenters to score their own comments by attaching a set of moderator-provided tags. This may provide a way to move commenters from group to group to ensure diversity of opinion while still providing the individual commenter with material that he finds interesting.

I have no idea whether anybody's doing something like this yet. I'll close by pointing out that Brin is right that the web currently has no mechanism for valuing truth and rationality and devaluing content that is wrong, harmful, or deceptive. There's going to have to be a technological fix to how discourse is conducted before the web becomes a tool for disseminating wisdom.