On closer examination of centrality algos and what information they require to function I realized that what I'm suggesting would probably only be useful to me. That means I'm the only person that should be putting it in there, haha. This is another reason I'm reluctant to contribute - I tend to go off on half-baked tangents that may or may not pay off. Sorry guys.
Are you kidding?!
You almost just described how research is done! Heck, It happens all the time that people are solving a problem that's already been solved only because it's termed differently. I didn't know about this notion of graph centrality, and but a quick look at the Wikipedia page tells me it'd be a great way to display an argument graph. One of many, perhaps, but absolutely relevant! These could simply be visualisation options: one based on time, another on importance/centrality, perhaps another based on how credible arguments end up being, etc etc.
I will say that speaking over the forum can get totally confusing, and I've been having a hard time figuring out exactly what you mean. It seems I've been similarly confusing, judging by Antsan's post, so we should definitely try to be clearer about what we mean.
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Regarding the dangers of verbosity in the system we've been talking about: there's always a set of assumptions whenever you start any project. Ours has definitely been that there's an unfulfilled need for more serious, structured debate somewhere on the Internet. People are getting tired of meaningless interactions. I don't care what you ate for breakfast, or what it looks like. I would, however, like to engage in a lively debate about beliefs or whatever technical issues I happen to know. If there's an easy system that allows me to make my points, and at the end tells me whether what I'm saying makes social sense (within the context in which I have spoken/written), then I'd feel that's pretty great. Yes, even if I end up being totally wrong.
Hell, we could be deciding the system we should be building with the system we should be building! Which I guess is part of why it's important that it exists!
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Big explanation alertRegarding structure, what I mean is this. As a first step, imagine the Bay12 forums, EXACTLY as they are now. Now, add in another BBCode tag, like:
[argument attacks="argument1, argument5, argument115"]I think the existence of a debating system at Bay12 would be really cool[/argument]So you could explicitly define, in your text, what you think is an important point for the discussion, or an argument. You also tell it what other arguments people have previously proposed it attacks. Every point made, like every post, gets its own ID, that people can reference - just like using quoting for posts!
Every time someone posts a new argument, the "outcome" of a debate is calculated. All points are highlighted, or marked, with a colour, anywhere in the spectrum from green to red. Green means fully accepted, i.e., acceptability 1, and red means totally refuted, i.e. acceptability 0. There's the entire spectrum of colour in between, or acceptability in [0, 1], for each argument to take. So at the end of this thread, we've have a fairly obvious clue of what Bay12 prefers in general, and we'd get a pretty clear picture of the kind of system that would work best for Bay12.
You keep the forum-like structure, with subforums and subsubforums and threads and everything. For the algorithm and system that reasons about arguments and tells you whether they end up being acceptable or not, that does not matter. That's why I mean it's a form of "meta-data", if you're thinking in terms of the argumentation system only.
Now get rid of the very strict forum situation. You could still have the forum and subforums, indicating the types of subjects debated. But each thread would be a graph instead of a list of posts. For instance, instead of making a post this long, I'd maybe cut it up, and make each paragraph of so an argument. Since each argument is supposed to be made to counter arguments other people have made, I'd probably declare a bunch of attacks as well. Instead of each argument within a thread being shown one after the other, like here, you'd be able to visualise a thread with a number of different "views", like some of the stuff Eagleon has been suggesting. If you want to see newer arguments, perhaps try to find a way to display the graph where the higher the argument is, the earlier it was posted. Perhaps you're interested in getting the gist of a discussion: then you'd use centrality, like Eagleon said. Or perhaps you're full of yourself and want to see your impact on the debate, and you'd get a view of your arguments in the middle, and the arguments they affect the most around, and so forth. There's many options!
One of the important bits of all this, is that underneath all of this stuff that's got to do with "how do I find a debate I want to engage in" (I usually only visit Other Games and Creative Projects, and avoid certain topics), or "how can I see/visually organise a debate", is a graph. And that graph does not need to be independent from thread to thread, which means one of our arguments could be attacked by something someone said in another thread. Heck, it could be attacked by a point made by someone in a NY Times online article, if they adopted the system!
I don't think we should visualise the entire Bay12 forum as a plain graph. It'd be IMPOSSIBLE to figure anything out. But forums, subforums and threads can become meta-data helping you get to where you want to be, and they can be visual cues for the graph visualisation. Like a nice box around all the arguments proposed in this particular thread. You might get some incoming and outgoing arrows, which is fine. They tell you there's another topic talking about similar issues! You might want to follow that arrow into another box and participate there too!
What you don't want to do is make any arrows disappear because then you can't really make sense of why the debate outcome turned out that way. The only reason you'd want to make arrows/attacks disappear is if they were super duper downvoted and they don't really have an impact, or if they are removed by a moderator.
Sorry for the long forum post, but I hope this gives you a better, more concrete idea of the kind of system we've been thinking about.
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