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Providing Context and Sanity To The Anonymity

Yesterday I was listening to the Adam Ruins Everything podcast, specifically this episode here, and it somewhat reminded me of this post I'd seen on reddit from the University of Indiana here. The podcast referred to the "backfire effect", which I believe really does happen when people's views are challenged. In addition to discussing the phenomenon, both Adam and his guest talk about ways online to try and combat the effect and to provide context to ideas shared online - basically to lessen the effect of trolls and such.

For example, one method pointed out by the guest on the podcast was that a Norwegian news site will ask people to take a short quiz over the article that they just read before allowing them to comment. In a way, it's sort of a short test of reading comprehension. It limits people from just randomly seeing a headline and then commenting/reacting to the headline rather than reading the article. I thought it was kind of brilliant, but may not always work. For example, if I'm on mobile, trying to take a "quiz" after every article can get tedious and in the way.

I then thought about the article from the University of Indiana referenced above. More specifically, I thought about how useful the charts were at showing how related certain tweets are to each other and providing context to our discourse on twitter. Which then got me thinking...

Why isn't there statistics and analytics "baked-in" to Twitter and other social networking sites that users can see? And could we build a "Wikipedia" check-and-balance system on top of our commentary on social media?

For example, simple things - if I share a link on twitter, there should be some stats on that link. If I share a link to an article, why couldn't there be a way if someone replies to that link if the UI could show if the person replying at least scrolled down to the end of article (denoted by, I don't know, a bronze star) and then someone who took the short quiz about the article (stealing the idea mentioned before about quizzing people on articles that they just read) could get some other tag showing that they passed the quiz (or even took it) and had it denoted (by I don't know, a silver or gold star next to their reply?)

If a link is re-tweeted by others, why can't I get a chart showing analytics of those that are re-tweeting it? For example, if I tweet a link to somewhere, I would like to be able to click a link that says "stats" and that would show:

  • Common keywords from people's repost of my tweet (i.e if it's a political post, see how many people are re-posting my link with the keywords "liberal","conservative","GOP", etc.)
  • Common tags of people who are reposting my tweet (i.e. if people are reposting my tweet to provide some context about my tweets. "This person has used the word "liberal" in their tweets X times" or others to help me try to get some context about the kind of person re-tweeting my link)
  • Top 10 other sites that have referenced this link that I'm sharing
In addition, is it possible to get another link in addition to "stats" that showed "user reference" on an item? More specifically a way to bake into our social media a "cite sources" tool? (i.e. a list of links to other articles or sites that people find useful to provide context to my tweet? [for example, snopes.com or others?]) If a tweet or post has this section filled out and more people like it, the tweet or post that I make could get an additional "gold star" or something.

In addition, is it possible to get some idea of where my posts are coming from? I realize this is unreliable as people can just use VPNs to mask their sources from where they're commenting from; but it would still be nice. The idea here, of course, is to try and account for astro-turfing from specific groups.

Overall, the idea here is that at a glance the more "gold stars" or such next to a tweet or post that I make, the more "reliable" or "verifiable" it is. The other half of the idea is to try and incentivize people into producing more quality posts, the whole "gameification" (think Xbox Achievements) of trying to produce quality content.


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