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Ask HN: A Platform for Public Debate?

2 points by spiffworks ↗ HN
Most debates these days are carried out on Twitter, but the platform is ill-suited to the task, and its character limit encourages brevity rather than rigor. Is there a platform for public debate that offers the immediacy of Twitter without any limits on content? Buzz comes to mind, but it is saddled by its connection to GMail. If not, is this an opportunity to build a dedicated platform for public debate?

3 comments

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tokenadult
Thoughtful content moderation is the key to a successful platform for public debate, and very difficult to achieve.
spiffworks
I was thinking more along the lines of Buzz. Something that could be used to post the contents of your bowel movements, if you so choose, but also something that is conducive to debate with the kind of immediacy that blogs don't offer. A public conversation between two people, for example, debating about the goodness of payday loans, in a format that was specifically built for that.
Detrus
There has been very little progress on forums since twitter and facebook grabbed the spotlight. Forums with moderation, up/down voting, usage limits (suspends you if you post too much too fast), reputations etc.. would be a start.

Most importantly you'd want to start off with top notch members and the tech gimmicks would help you keep them.

I only know of one "modern" forum, http://vanillaforums.org/ where there are some add ons which let you do some of these things. Reddit source may also suit the task, but voting on "threads" would have to be de-emphasized and it's probably harder to add/remove voting, usage limits etc.. Same for HN source.

There is this debate forum http://www.volconvo.com/forums/ that covers political, religious topics. It's old vBulletin so it's nothing you haven't seen if you've seen internet arguments. Everything depends on the quality of members and moderators.

Not much you can do with that which hasn't been done since usenet.

As far as update streams, like twitter but with more characters, more activity than old school forum format, I'm not sure it would improve the debate. Quora's approach of sending updates about activity around your answers could increase activity without making a mess.