Show HN: Pairagraph – our attempt to build a new high-quality discussion forum
pairagraph.com
pairagraph.com
Pairagraph is a platform for written dialogue between pairs of notable individuals—politicians, CEOs, philosophers, novelists, technologists, religious leaders, and more.
We love Twitter, but it can be annoying. It’s loud and noisy, it’s replete with echo chambers, and 280 characters is not enough to make a real argument. Pairagraph is our attempt to push back on these trends and build a proper town square for the digital age.
We’re still fairly new but already have hosted 60+ dialogues, with contributors like Niall Ferguson, Joe Lonsdale, Balaji Srinivasan, Francis Fukuyama, Martin Gurri, and Om Malik.
In the short run we’ve decided to keep our community closed—only certain people are able to participate in dialogues. The idea here is not to exclude anyone but to establish a track record of quality discussion before opening it up. We think that if we start with quality and move gradually to quantity, we’ll have a better shot in the long run of preserving both.
The good news is that we are discussing opening it up, so there is some chance we will do so soon. We're also contemplating allowing dialogues with >2 participants.
To recap: For now, Pairagraph is gated, but we’re wary of elitism and committed to including as many people (and perspectives) as possible. This is also why we have a ‘Suggest’ page on the website for readers who are interested in recommending future authors/topics.
If you’ve read this far, here are a few of our favorite exchanges:
https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/354c72095d2f42dab92bf427...
https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/77d7e5451ea3467eaed19686...
https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/5e569e6fbc944e998c795028...
Along with adding more content, we’re focused on three things:
(1) Improving retention and expanding reach
(2) Polishing the site’s design/UI. Neither Carter (my co-founder) nor I are expert designers, we’ve done almost all of it ourselves, recognize that it needs help, and are working every day to add polish and professionalism
(3) Eventually turning enough of a profit to make Pairagraph sustainable
That’s our grand vision, but ultimately we’re just two friends from college working on a project that we think matters. What do you think?
Here is a nitpick - I tried to find a way to send it to you privately, since it is trivial, but I couldn't find a link or your email anywhere. 1) Remove your photos - this feels like a serious site and your photos are so young that to me, and perhaps others, it detracts from the seriousness. And adds nothing. 2) Have a feedback link!
But more importantly - great idea.
Also, my email is jonathan@pairagraph.com. You're right... we should probably add contact info to the site.
but without heavy moderation, it'd result in something like a Presidential debate - candidates only paying lip service to the prompt while going off-topic to bash their opponents.
I think you could highlight categories better on the homepage.
Don't add user votes to the dialogues. We know what happens to politics category after you do that.
But, add some user interactions like following a dialogue to receive updates about it. And also following a contributor to receive update about his/her dialogues.
Comment sections are another idea we've had; however, we've noticed that most comment sections tend to degrade quickly. Substack is doing better with a pay-to-comment model, but still, I think we're going to stay away for the time being.
My biggest issue with this site is that it presents these arguments as two-sided. Depending on which two sides you pick, this usually limits the window of possibility.
The most galling example I found was in the “Medicare for all just isn’t going to happen” discussion. Both sides agree that true M4A is a ridiculous fantasy that needn’t be pursued. This felt no different from typical mainstream media framing of M4A, manufactured consent and all.
I guess my point is if your goal is to reiterate WaPo/NYT talking points in a more conversational medium, you’ve done it. But if you want to actually move the conversation forward you’ll need to change the format, or at the very least bring in some new voices.
Part of the issue could be the reliance on traditional symbols of prestige to determine who’s an expert. I would think about how you could broaden this a bit, maybe pull in specific people for certain discussions they have relevant experience in?
For example: a pro vs anti union debate with a corporate executive on one side and an organizer on the other would be informative and entertaining, and is uniquely suited to your medium.
Edited to fix a typo
We're proud of what we've built with Pairagraph v1, but the conversations are definitely limited by two things: (1) who is involved, and (2) the format: 2 authors, 4 installments, each 500 words, A-B-A-B.
I floated this idea in response to a different comment, but what if we allowed readers to vote on who they'd like to hear from in the future? Or what if we tweaked the format to allow more than 2 authors to participate in a conversation?
About the audience voting thing, personally I think a curated list of speakers is okay, and isn’t necessarily going to be any more biased than audience voting. I would just prefer that list is curated in a way that is 1) transparent in it’s biases and 2) represents my side a little better (selfish preference).
I know I already mentioned this, but be sure to widen your criteria for what makes someone an expert. I haven’t done an exhaustive search, but I don’t see many artists, teachers, union members, organizers, members of the working class, local politicians, etc. in your list, even though they often have more direct expertise related to these topics than an opinion columnist does.
IMHO, those are the last people that I want to read. Both sides would present the same talking points we see every where. There'd be a lack of meaningful engagement as these people hold little nuance in their positions. Or, at least, the positions they're willing to present in public. It's just each side hitting the notes to fire up their base.
[EDIT]
This article about Israel/Palestine is an even better example:
https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/8c47026d6af148588f3ad8f4...
There's little to be gianed by reading that unless you want to know the two extremes to the point of view.
[/EDIT]
As an example, take this one about breaking up big tech:
https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/ff5d6b5332124e59b081c5a5...
One side wrote "Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money (2020)". The other side is wrote "Antitrust Law, which is the most-cited antitrust authority in the country". Predictably, the first is pretty bombastic and mostly preaching to their choir. The second is more nuanced and less definitive.
You’d have the boss on one side, who would lose money and productivity with a union, and an organizer on the other, who stands to gain benefits and stability. That is an interesting pairing _because_ it is directly about what each side wants.
It’s exactly what you don’t get in traditional media, where it’s mostly disingenuous hemming and hawing by opinion columnists. I’m showing my biases here, but I think the reason you don’t hear politics talked about in “who gets what” terms is because those in power benefit from obscuring material realities.
(1) (2) (3) (4)
and being anchor jumps to the relevant content is in line with the current horizontal flow. Part of my feeling toward this might also be from these two other factors:
1. A lot of text consumption is done on mobile platforms and, while I didn't check your site on mobile I am leaning more toward vertical infinite scrolling on desktop due to how many mobile things go that way today.
2. I tend to associate sites that page content and require horizontal movement with cheap advertisement exploitation - most times when something is delivering a big block-o-text as several pages it's either purpose built for or leverage to make sure they can cram as many ads as possible in the content.
So I guess my lean toward verticality is also a general usage expectation coupled with abuse of the horizontal flow.
I might point out fivethirtyeight's live blog as an example of how this can go wrong[1] - there is an unpredictability to discussion here which is partially covered by the fact that they are responding to live updates but suffers from the fact that discussion threads will suddenly die off.
1. One random example: https://fivethirtyeight.com/live-blog/biden-inauguration/
Thanks for the link for an example of how not to do it!
I am skeptical as to the degree to which new platforms can help with the fundamental problems with the "sense-making apparatus" in our societies. Very few folks seem to be aware of the extent to which the news media, and by extension, their own assumptions about the world are broken or skewed.
It is common for even intelligent folks to dish out quips like the "bullshit asymmetry principle", without accounting for the possibility that their own framing of the world around them may be akin to Plato's allegory of the cave.
So even if we create new platforms, if some hypothetical person like Mr. Cucumber on the new platform makes a compelling, well-reasoned, well-researched case in favor of, for example, restricting immigration, the formula for discrediting this person is to cherry pick the profiles of some people who are sharing their content. If you find any references to some fringe topic like Q in a cherry picked sample of 100 people who shared the content, you can associate this person with those people and discredit the entire thing without having to attack their arguments. Those followers need not even exist, they can be made up. Before you know it the next trending topic will be "Who is Mr. Cucumber, the new darling of the alt-right?". That's the end of anyone ever listening to them again.
This is just one example - there are many such strategies employed online contemporarily and they are very effective. Inoculating against this kind of bad faith tactic is necessary to see any kind of progress in many spheres. Our societies all around the world stagnated for decades, even centuries, under these tactics employed by the prevailing orthodoxies. The current state of the Internet has allowed a technologically leveraged version of these tactics to prevail today.
I don't expect platforms like Pairagraph and Letter to change the world over night. But I really do believe that they could have a profound impact. As Carter and I have said in the past, our dream is to live in a society where it is commonplace for people who disagree to make genuine efforts to have conversations with one another. Our goal with Pairagraph is to create a place on the web that facilitates this.
If we get there, it will be inch by inch.
We recognize we're fighting an uphill battle.
Here's why I'm hopeful: All across the web, I see people trying to have conversations. Really trying to engage. I think we just need better platforms. Twitter is good for some things, but it tends to lack nuance and amplify outrage. Reddit is good for other things, but it's noisy.
I may be delusional but I think there's room for another Internet community to emerge. One where nuance, civility, and substance are incentivized and rewarded.
Minor UI suggestion: When I opened it up to check it out, I clicked on a random dialogue (https://pairagraph.com/dialogue/b88167fd706941e8ac468283b51a...) to see what the deal was. I was very confused because it looked like just a short article - clicking around didn't reveal any kind of discussion anywhere. It wasn't for a few more minutes that I realized this was a multi-part debate where only one side had spoken. Something like "This dialogue will continue when Jason Calacanis responds" at the bottom of the article would have helped a lot. Heck, some kind of "notify me when he does" option would be super cool. :)
You're exactly right: It's not obvious at all that Jason's response is coming soon. And it needs to be. Thanks for the great suggestion.
Along a similar vein for people interested in getting different viewpoints, please also take a look at http://improvethenews.org and the work of Jonathan Haidt.
There are so many fledgling companies out there trying to improve the news, the quality of social media, etc. I really hope at least one of them succeeds!
Any discussion system that wants to grow large and doesn't have a plan to deal with trolls is doomed to fail. It would be like building an airplane but not taking wind resistance into account.
It might be interesting to allow readers to vote on who they'd like to hear from in the future... Maybe that's a way to maintain a high level of dialogue quality while still allowing users to have a say about who and what is discussed on the site. What do you think about that?
Perhaps users should have to opt-in to seeing comments from the "crowd", and there should be a minimum amount of time the user has spent on the site (and discussions read) before they can comment. Also they'd have to receive a minimum number of upvotes for their comments before they were allowed to vote, etc. which would gamify it a bit.
Rather than fighting the echo chambers, you could use them to your advantage, by requiring users to pick a side they support in each topic and splitting the discussions into two camps. That way expert A could see popular comments in support of their position, and expert B could see comments which support them instead. They could even opt to see what the other camp was discussing, to make sure they weren't misapprehending the other side's position.
My other request is that you make the site work without JavaScript. People don't want your annoying pop-ups, and it should be possible to present text in a browser without running scripts. (Also it might be nice to have meaningful URLs, like Reddit has).
I only viewed on mobile, but it looked good. Best of luck!
I am thinking there could be scheduled, similar to the reddit AMA, where 2 top persons in a field with opposite opinions can be coaxed to debate about the topic?
Both of them get a few hours to get back, and the back and forth rules can be set, and we would all be better off hearing the pros and cons from both sides.
Right now, everything is asynchronous. (Authors post at their own convenience.) But I wonder what would happen if we tried to host an event once a week. Something, say, for an hour or two one evening. It could be the top two people in a field, but it'd probably be interesting to bring in a few different types of folks as well.
Right now, the format on Pairagraph is 4 entries, each 500 words, created by alternating authors. But we've recently thought about what it would look like to facilitate dialogues with more than 2 participants.
Do you have any ideas for how contributors might get paid? Could crypto facilitate something like that?
Either way, great idea. best of luck!
This is the counterpoint? They share the same assumptions.
On the one hand, I am glad that the company de-platformed President Trump, because there was an active threat to the US government that he was abetting in real time.
Okay, that's false. One of the many reasons why that is false is because Trump was in fact telling people to go home from the protest. Let's take a look at the counter-point.
...by all accounts a dangerous leader who goaded his white supremacist followers into violent actions
Umm, that's even more false. For even more obvious reasons.
So, what is the point of your new left-wing echo chamber again? There are plenty already--you do realize that, yes?
"Were President Trump's words and actions part of the reason why the Capitol was stormed?"
Presumably you think the answer to that is "No", in which case you should put yourself forward as one of the experts. If I'm misrepresenting your position or asking the wrong question then hopefully you can find a more neutral way to phrase it.