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Comment by simmons | Hacker News Reader

I'm about as close to a free-speech absolutist as there is, and it's very frustrating that the market for these platforms seems to be settling into ruts where we have to choose between the hyper-conformity of highly managed platforms and the dumpster fires of the unmanaged platforms. I think the feedback loop you describe is a big part of it. I also wonder if we're experiencing a decline in education and critical thinking skills that could be fueling these ruts.

This greatly saddens me. Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate? Discussions of ideas based on their merits instead of personal attacks and tribal allegiances? Some way to provide free speech without providing free amplification? Has society devolved to a point where this is no longer possible?

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> Can't there be some way to build a platform that encourages intelligent, reasonable, polite debate?

Yes. They are called journals and academic conferences.

Most people aren't interested in these things and if you build forums for everybody, it definitely will not turn into scholarly debate.

There can, I’m surprised no one has implemented this:

Start everyone off with a maximum influence credit of say 10 people, like in your local neighborhood.

As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows, your maximum influence credit grows as a function of your geography.

Taking this idea further, maybe part of the problem is that platforms reduce the quality metric for posts down to effectively a single dimension: upvotes / likes / thumbs up.

What if there were separate dimensions for: Factually accurate, Morally agreeable, and Polite?

A machine learning algorithm could quickly work out which groups of users have different ideological positions, and which topics are likely to devolve into flame wars, so it could require that users have a minimum politeness score to be able to participate in a debate.

It could also, as you say, check for echo chambers forming and incentivise people with differing opinions to enter a discussion to balance it out.

> There can, I’m surprised no one has implemented this:

The reason is you're inappropriately applying an technical solution to a social problem.

You also make at least one critical error:

> As you contribute to thoughtful discussion, as determined by the diversity and ratio of up/down arrows

Upvotes/downvotes pretty much never measure "thoughtfulness," because for them to do so would require a level of social cohesion that would probably make upvotes/downvote unnecessary.

This might be the most HN thing I've ever read.

Yes, I believe HN does a pretty good job with this. The only way to provide what you are asking is active moderation, or the opposite of absolute free speech. There will always be people for whom the only solution is to ban them off your platform to create a good environment.

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