Activity Scores and Related Debates


The idea here is that, since debate topics themselves are necessarily inflexible, there will have to be a mechanism to create new debates that are related to other debates. People may legitimately disagree on the wording of a debate topic because, for instance, they may disagree on what the problem is that we are trying to solve -- the essence of the debate may not be agreed upon. Thus people need to be able to create new debates even if the new debates are closely related to one another.

The drawback to this is that this provides room for dishonest forum shifting and debate framing. One may create a new debate topic because a semantic difference may give one side the edge over another. For instance, instead of a debate topic on "abortion rights" one partisan or another may choose to create a debate topic involving such biased language as "pro-choice" and "anti-choice", and "pro-life" and "anti-life".

I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to (1) distinguish between a debate topic created with honest intentions, and those created with ill, unsportsmanlike intentions, and (2) police such debate topic creation even if it were possible to tell the difference between good and bad.

One way to ameliorate the problem would be to create a system of related debates. The current debate topic would thus be put in a hierarchy of sorts between itself and other debates. Rank in the hierarchy would be determined by a given debate's activity ranking. The idea here is that people will naturally gravitate to those debates which receive the most attention. It is there that they themselves will have most influence at the margin. Given two related debates, the first having a very active debate and the second wallowing in obscurity, an individual will likely want to participate in the first debate even if the second debate is worded more according to his preference. No one wants to participate in a forum that is ignored.

The details about how one assigns an activity ranking is a difficult problem. Should ranking be based on a number or registered users of the debate or the number of edits being made? One kind of time frame should we use? Should it be activity in the past week or the past year?

Despite these technical problems, the principal should work: people should be attracted to debates that achieve a high ranking because these are the debates that will be credible.