Comment on !debatebro@ponder.cat - Debate me bro

• PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Do, or do not. There is no try.

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  • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    I mean, why would I bother doing that for a community I don’t have influence over?

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    • PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Well, but you do though. Making comments and getting the respect and agreement of the people in the community is how you get influence.

      I really don’t like this Lemmy thing where certain people are empowered by the software to control the communications of other people (beyond just removing spam or abuse or something). I feel like you don’t need that. I really don’t feel like you or me or anybody being put in a position where they can “influence” someone else’s communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community. Often it is counterproductive. Maybe that’s the issue, you just activated one of my pet peeves in a way that has nothing to do with what you want to do.

      Can you tell me more about what you want to do, how you would want to apply Oxford scoring and such? Maybe that could be a whole separate community / idea, I was envisioning this one as being a lot more basic, just can people talk with each other without blatantly mischaracterizing the other person’s points or ignoring questions or etc. But IDK, maybe I just don’t understand the basic concept even yet.

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      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Yeah so I’m a huge fan of the Intelligence Squared series. I think they do debate, excellently.

        I highly recommend reviewing this old gem: www.youtube.com/watch?v=FiEI8CtuSKs, which I think is highly relevant today, which addresses the premise “Has Obama overstepped his congressional mandate?”

        The way that this debate program works, is that an audience is polled, prior to observing the debate, with regards to the impression or conclusion of the thesis. So some audience members say “I agree, Obama has overstepped.” some say “I disagree, Obama has not overstepped.”. These data are recorded on a per audience member basis.

        Once these data are recorded, the debate proceeds. Now I’m not so hung up on the Oxford debate structure (two teams, prime and secondary, minute based timed sections, etc).

        Once the debate is concluded, the audience is polled again. The “winners” of the debate are not the team which has the highest raw score at the end of the debate, but whichever team has changed more minds.

        Now I’m not interested in the structure of the debate as being important here, so much as, the registering of a prior opinion, and then the registering of a posterior opinion, as a part of the debate structure.

        I’m imagining this as either a secondary web page where a debate can be “registered” and then a bot proceeds to become involved in that thread. Users can maybe use the spoiler tag to register their initial opinions (or maybe they need to go off site; clumsy, but simpler). I dont quite know how it would all connect together, but the way I’m imagining it is that its a separate server with, where a question gets “registered”, which spawns a bot (which manages and monitors that specific thread and maintains polls from within the thread).

        “influence” someone else’s communications unilaterally is really necessary to a good community

        I completely agree. I think that some elements of Lemmy are extremely destructive and toxic because of this. I think communities should be self governing, and that these little fiefdoms are deeply problematic. However, if I was going to develop a fediverse bot app for managing and scoring debates, I would most definitely need mod access to the community.

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