Ceasefire – Where cooler heads prevail. App launched today
ceasefire.net
ceasefire.net
I signed up with a fake email, and it appears this is a forum, with the goal of having polite discussions about controversial topics. I think this is a worthy goal, perhaps one of the most important goals one could possibly have right now, but there are two unanswered and very important questions:
1. What do you consider "polite"?
2. How does that translate into action, i.e. what are you doing differently from other social media?
At its core, this problem is tied to financing: conversation on existing social media is broken because they make money off ads. To serve ads successfully, you need to get engagement (which is best done by creating outrage) and you need to personalize (which is best done by violating privacy, and as a side effect, creates echo chambers). Since social media doesn't want to kill their ad profits, they're investing in censorship instead of addressing the core issue. Admittedly, the core issue is a very hard problem, but it won't be solved by ending free speech--that just creates a second wave of problems. Now the bigots that caused the outrage feel persecuted, so they run off and radicalize in their own echo chambers, and the rest of us are left with an echo chamber where authoritarians can throw the cancel hammer at innocent bystanders with impunity.
The solution, if one exists, isn't going to come from the same amoral just-following-incentives swamp that created the problem in the first place. Starting with the trying to collect my email address for no reason sure makes it look like this is just another attempt to get a slice of the selling-ads-with-outrage pie.
I hope I'm wrong!
It made it easy to spot this part, which I guess is normally tucked away. Respect for drawing my attention to it but I have a question - is this a standard thing that you would find in such a document? It feels like a pretty serious liability for a user to take on.
> SUMMARY: If we get sued by a third party, you will defend us and pay for all losses, damages, etc, if the lawsuit relates to your Content or use of the Service, your breach of the Terms, your violation of a third party’s rights, violation of your rights by a third party, or an action by you that is overtly harmful to another User.
Home to a spirited exchange of ideas without insults, Ceasefire helps you cut through the noise in a world of diverse views and insights.
Polarization is increasing. The result is pointless bitter arguments, personal attacks, and tribal point-scoring instead of the productive conversations we could be having. It’s clear we need better tools to change this.
Ceasefire is our solution. Every feature is designed for the best experience possible, whether you’re participating or just reading. This includes:
- A focus placed on the issues at hand, preventing the usual popularity contest and its toxic incentives.
- Discussion formats and moderated guidelines that ensure your time is well spent, e.g. rudeness/hostility is prohibited.
- The option to subscribe to topics that matter to you and block those that don’t.
- 'Deltas', which are awarded/received when new insight is gained.I wonder how much it relies on having good human moderators. I also wonder how users are incentivized to give deltas only to opponents who have persuaded them, instead of to people they already agreed with. I think in the changemyview subreddit, you give deltas in comment replies, and there I guess it would look obviously silly if you gave deltas to those who agreed with you; that may be a simple resolution for that particular issue.
Have the users fill out these answers on profile creation (the ones you don't answer you can't participate in) - and if you contribute on a specific topic and assign a delta to somebody with the opposite viewpoint, the answer you put on your profile gets swapped? You could track how often someone changes a topic on their profile to see if they're "flippy floppy" or if they're fairly hard-stanced on the issue.
You'd still have to have moderation to make sure you don't have people with profile-marked anti-topics making posts supporting the viewpoints.
I feel like I ask this question for a lot of sites that launch on HN and have to work really hard to find a satisfactory answer. It's like marketing thinks that if I know what I'm dealing with, I'll walk away.
Any one have an insight on why this happens so frequently?
This also occurs a lot on posts for wider consumption that treats the audience like they're intimately familiar with the product.
I like the idea of discussing topics that are controversial. Its actually annoying when someone tosses out a viewpoint that I disagree with but they are unwilling to discuss further. I have actually shifted my views over time by talking it out with people I disagree with. In some cases it strengthened my conviction or made me more prepared to defend my viewpoint but in some cases I do change my mind.
The issue is that online it does usually devolve into a flame war where nothing productive happens. Or the thread is flagged. I am interested to see if this is really going to be different. I installed it just to see how this works.
When you debate rich people paying higher taxes or giving up control of companies vs the laborers that work for them that want more healthcare or whatnot, they'll each make their separate claim on resources -- money or labor. It's an irreconcilable conflict.
Debate only works when both sides have an interest in finding some mutual agreement that works for them, not when resources are in conflict.
I'm aware of two main reasons for engaging in debate:
(1) So the participants can come to an agreement, or at least truly understand each other's reasons.
(2) If an audience can observe the debate, use the debate as a kind of form of theater, to present each side's most compelling arguments in an engaging manner.
IMHO a site like Ceasefire could be useful for either of those goals, assuming other issues don't bog it down.
Really all you need to do is convince the working class on this app to seize the ol' means, since it's so much larger.
Of course, the existence of the petit bourgeois (and the fact that that group would be the main audience for this app) complicates all this.
Humans like debating(arguing) think it’s part of our nature, I’m not sure a platform can solve this problem. It seems like these problems originate at the gathering information stage and our prejudices impact how we interpret the data, so no matter how much data you show someone they will interpret it based on their current belief system.
Everything has to be binary, it’s either X or Y. See it commonly in topics like ‘what’s the best application architecture’, as soon as someone says “it depends” you see people rolling their eyes, I think we’re lazy and don’t want to do the necessary research and just want the answers straight away, once we get an answer we’re happy with it and see no need to update our knowledge, that would require us to rethink our beliefs. It’s probably that way for a reason, imagine you had to research again all the beliefs that you consider true, it would take a lot of energy.
Even for myself I try to be as open minded as possible, we all have prejudices built into us, they keep us alive, I’m not sure how I can actually change them, I see someone who my brain perceives as being dodgy and I change my behaviour instantly, I react in a way that’s socially acceptable to the context, it’s really uncomfortable to fight these urges.
I think news media has caused a lot of the prejudices I have, we assume that some news outlet is honest and is only reporting facts, we just assume everything they say is a fact. If I see someone from Afghanistan my brain is telling me act cautiously around them. I’ve never been to Afghanistan, I don’t know anyone from there yet my brain is sending me signals to be cautious around this person, logically it makes no sense. Probably the years of watching the news when the Afghanistan war was going on has imprinted these beliefs within me.
They say travel broadens the mind, think it’s probably the most effective way to get people to change their beliefs. You see first hand that maybe you have inconstancies between your beliefs and reality.
Wish these guys all the best but I don’t think people will charge the beliefs through online debate, I hope I’m proved wrong though . Could be cool to keep track on the website so people could acknowledge that they have changed their position on a topic, the data would be interesting.
I think hosting any online forum, no matter how well-meant, raises some sticky issues. I'd love to hear their thoughts about certain aspects of their terms of service [0] and Rules [1]:
> As a User of the Service, you agree not to: ... 1. Use the Service to create, publish, copy, share, or distribute any Content, whether in whole or in part, which may be libelous, defamatory, or otherwise unlawful to any third party.
The legal standards for these concepts vary greatly from country to country. I'm probably mistaken, but is this saying that a person in the U.S. cannot post a comment that would be illegal to post from certain authoritarian / monarchist / theocratic countries. I doubt Chinese courts care about Delaware law.
> This rule prohibits any submission, comment, or ongoing discussion that could endanger an individual, which includes but is not limited to: ... Promoting/advocating abuse.
Even in debates regarding what constitutes "abuse"? If the goal is to have meaningful discussion of touchy topics, debates on these topics couldn't really happen.
> You have the written consent, release, and/or permission of each and every identifiable individual person in your Content to use the name or likeness of each and every such identifiable individual person to enable inclusion and use of your Content in any manner contemplated by the Site and these Terms of Use.
Wouldn't this mean nobody could even mention, e.g., Bill Gates, without his explicit permission?
> Your Content is not false or misleading.
Is "false" content never allowed? A good debate typically requires explicitly stating premises, which are subject to being challenged as the debate progresses. Should this be tweaked to account for false statements that seem to have been made in good faith?
> Your Content is not obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, violent, harassing, libelous, slanderous, or otherwise objectionable (as determined by us).
Are there plans to clarify these at some point? People hold such varied views of what falls into these categories that it seems impossible to guess what you'd find acceptable.
And what about debates which focus on whether or not particular views, practices, etc. are obscene / lewd / filthy?
> Your Content does not violate the privacy or publicity rights of any third party.
According to what country's laws? Again, I doubt the U.K. courts care about Delaware law.
Maybe you can explain what the basic idea is, because I have no idea.
Imagine someone sneaks a big slug of LSD into @dang's mouthwash, and while he's high on a bad trip, force him to be a prison guard in a reenactment of the Stanford Prison Experiment. At the end of that, create 100 clones of whatever remains of him. Put a blindfold over each clone, spin them to the right for 2*PI revolutions, and smack them with a 4-6 lb. herring. Now make each of them work as a Ceasefire forum moderator.
At least, that's the picture in my mind. I could be mistaken.
I have a hard time seeing how you could say what you've just said, and expect anyone to see it as positive.
I don't see any technical way to enforce good faith in online discussion. At this point you can lose your job for saying something that was perfectly mainstream a year ago.
"It is impossible to design a system so perfect that no one needs to be good."
Unfortunately, all I see is a page that wants me to sign up, so I can't yet say whether this site has an interesting approach towards making the above happen.
Hey wow, making strawmen is fun! They're so easy to demolish!
If only it was a straw man. Rejection of liberalism and its adjacent Enlightenment values/ideals is at the very core of the modern critical theories. It's written everywhere in the literature. Liberalism, debates and so on perpetuate inequities. I assume you are just not very familiar with this stuff.
Critical theorists just want to shut down any kind of debate whose conversation does not fit their worldview. I don't think we need examples here.
On the other hand, there are many opponents of critical theory that are genuinely interested in debate, and in comparing their worldview with different ideas.