Online Forum Airs Out Debates, Tosses Dirty Laundry
Political debate on the Internet has never won high points for civility. Nastiness and vulgarity, it seems, are the bacteria of cyberspace: They grow wherever a message board or comments page exists to host them.
A new online forum that launched Tuesday morning at a site called Helium.com is taking a stab at weeding out the foulmouthed–known as "flamers" in webspeak–as well as agenda pushers who are increasingly capable of drowning out a forum with enough persistent clicking.
Helium, which launched last October, belongs to the phylum of websites that collect and aggregate content from their users and rely on them to do all the work sorting it out. Like Wikipedia, the user-edited encyclopedia, the site posts content that is written and submitted by users. Unlike Wikipedia, for which readers collectively write and edit an entry on any given subject, Helium pits competing articles on the same subject against one another and invites other contributors to vote on the superior entry.
Thus far, the model appears to work–at least for subjects that do not evoke too much partisanship. Helium currently has 100,000 registrants, 30,000 of whom actively contribute, and 300,000 articles submitted for the community to rank, according to statistics that the company provided. It also boasts 8 million page views per month, no pittance for a site that is still an embryo in Web years.
Helium was the brainchild of Mark Ranalli, a veteran of the Internet's Jurassic Period who sold his Web strategy business in 2005 to pursue this project.
"The Internet has always held out this promise that it is able to connect people around the world, but it ends up playing out in practice in flame wars," Ranalli said late last week. "Helium was designed to improve upon the mess of user-generated content."
Because Helium relies on votes from other writers to rank content, it's tempting to group it in the same taxon as popular sites like Digg.com, in which readers submit links from elsewhere on the Web, adorn them with a few words of explanation, and vote on which items should reach the top of the site. But unlike Digg, voting is restricted to those who have taken the time to write on a related subject, parsing down the voting population to a much smaller–and, the thinking goes, more civil and knowledgeable–group of people.
"If you look at threads that might be intellectually stimulating but not emotionally charged, people seem to be capable of ranking articles fairly," Ranalli says.
But the system can break down when one wanders into political territory, Ranalli says, because people start voting for agenda instead of clarity and quality.
"When asked to evaluate a well-written article on prochoice versus a poorly written prolife article, [abortion opponents] will vote for the prolife article," and vice versa, Ranalli says.
The debate section of Helium that launches this morning will attempt to circumvent that problem by distilling emotionally charged subjects into "pro" and "con" strains, so that arguments for both sides of a debate can compete separately for votes. For now, administrators will choose which topics will be broken out on the site, though Ranalli hasn't ruled out the possibility of allowing users to determine that in the future.
Helium's debate page presents an interesting test as to whether the site's organization and philosophy can withstand the partisan hordes. In response to organized efforts to vote for–or "Digg"–articles of a certain stripe on Digg.com, administrators for that site have resorted to writing algorithms that detect certain voting patterns to combat too much gaming of the system, Digg CEO Jay Adelson said last week in an interview that did not specifically concern Helium. But he defended his site's populism, even though it sometimes skews content toward the most motivated of online constituencies.
"We know that it's possible, with extreme volume, that Digg can be controlled by the users," Adelson said. "You have to anticipate that sometimes users will drive a particular point one way or another. I'm not sure that's dangerous."