Social media tends to amplify the controversial, while hiding the consensus. Controversy engages more participation, and thus generates more noise, making it more noticeable. Maybe the controversial bits really are more important to talk about, but because of the availability heuristic, this gives everyone a distorted view.
I’m not entirely sure what to do about it, but more fluid feedback might be useful. Karma helps a lot, by giving consensus a way to get noticed, but it’s not perfect.
Something like Arbital’s probability distributions that could be aggregated from multiple users might be more informative than a simple “agree/disagree” reaction. You could then say how confidently you agree/disagree. But a post may have multiple claims, so we’d need some way to separate them out. Maybe you could excerpt a quote and use that as a “reply”, but one that others can add to with their own estimates. With a good interface, this would be only slightly more effort than clicking agree/disagree, much less than a full reply.
Some way to express what degree of surprise (maybe as deciban odds compared to your priors) might be more informative than an “updated” reaction. These could probably also be aggregated.
Social media tends to amplify the controversial, while hiding the consensus. Controversy engages more participation, and thus generates more noise, making it more noticeable. Maybe the controversial bits really are more important to talk about, but because of the availability heuristic, this gives everyone a distorted view.
I’m not entirely sure what to do about it, but more fluid feedback might be useful. Karma helps a lot, by giving consensus a way to get noticed, but it’s not perfect.
Something like Arbital’s probability distributions that could be aggregated from multiple users might be more informative than a simple “agree/disagree” reaction. You could then say how confidently you agree/disagree. But a post may have multiple claims, so we’d need some way to separate them out. Maybe you could excerpt a quote and use that as a “reply”, but one that others can add to with their own estimates. With a good interface, this would be only slightly more effort than clicking agree/disagree, much less than a full reply.
Some way to express what degree of surprise (maybe as deciban odds compared to your priors) might be more informative than an “updated” reaction. These could probably also be aggregated.