reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

I have an obvious incentive to get claps: pretty decent money. ... I can write more polarized headlines... on polarizing topics. I can piggy back on the hot news of the day... write things I don’t actually believe using incendiary language ... Medium has safeguards ... a team of curators ... a policy against abuse that it actually enforces... a t…

Civil Comments, a commenting platform ... aims to produce respectful dialogue in comment sections through a system that crowdsources comment moderation... Commenters are shown two random comments from elsewhere on the site, and must rate the comments’ quality and civility and determine whether they include harassment, abuse, or personal attacks. T…

if all content is ranked together and swift approval is the primary metric (whether that be views, reads, or recommends), the platform will become dominated by generic bullshit. Aspirational pap is just Medium’s version of the cat meme... Publications aren’t communities. Tags aren’t communities. They are content ownership vehicles and search tools…