I consider Hacker News (news.ycombinator.com) to be a high-quality digital public sphere. Run by the prestigious seed-stage incubator Y Combinator, Hacker News surfaces user-submitted links and posts using an upvote and downvote system and allows users to comment on submitted content. Here is a screenshot of part of the front page:

In general, the content focuses on matters relating to the software engineering community, including news of startup funding and acquisitions, hot technical topics such as machine learning, and occasionally relevant political issues like net neutrality.

In terms of impact, I think Hacker News has done incredibly well. In general, with at least 200,000 unique visitors each day, including successful and well-connected individuals from across the tech community, it provides high visibility to important causes in the community. Many web startups report that they need to beef up their server infrastructure to prepare for launches on Hacker News, which can drive tens of thousands of people to their websites if they reach the Hacker News front page. A front-page appearance can put a startup on the radar of important venture capitalists and set the stage for a round of funding. Hacker News’ impact isn’t limited to putting startups in the limelight. It has also been used to publicize campaigns to raise money for prominent software developers struggling with illnesses and raise awareness of (supposed) injustices like the prosecution of hacktivist Aaron Swartz. A search for “Thank you HN” on the site yields posts by individuals thanking the community for helping them find jobs, and even one post from a father who said that Hacker News’ popularization of an article about his son’s undiagnosed medical issues led him to parents of other children with similar problems and eventually to a diagnosis.

In terms of productive discussion, Hacker News has been successful as well. The comment sections of front-page links are always filled with lively and informed discussion. When users launch their side projects or startups with “Show Hacker News” posts, other users provide useful feedback in the comments. If a project has already been done before, you can be sure that at least a few people who see the post will know and point that out. In general, people with a wide variety of experience across the technical stack frequent Hacker News, so new products will get critiqued from a number of angles, including front-end design, technical sophistication, product-market fit, and more. On expository articles about technical topics, users from industry, academia, and other communities will post their own experiences with those topics, adding further color to the articles and providing additional data to either support or refute their claims and generalizations.

This is not to say that Hacker News cannot be improved or has gone without criticism. Some have claimed that community members are too harsh in criticizing posted projects that are not very polished or clearly lacking in some areas. The authors of such projects, who are likely new to software development, may be so discouraged by the negative feedback that they become reluctant to work on software again. The maintainers of Hacker News have acknowledged this issue and implemented changes to the algorithm that surfaces comments to mitigate the problem. Another issue is that community members are generally of a similar political and ideological bent, so posts that espouse conservative values are unlikely to reach the front page. So, while the upvote and downvote system brings many benefits – likely the filtering of disrespectful or technically inaccurate content – it can also shelter users from opposing views.

In all, despite some minor shortcomings, Hacker News is a strong community and certainly the premier forum for topics related to software engineering and technology.

The Centro de Integración Ciudadana CIC (Center for Citizen Integration) is a citizen network in Monterrey that aims to reconnect the citizens between each other and with the municipal authorities. One of their goals is to awake the citizens to work for a better society. The CIC takes advantage of mobile technologies to enable the citizens to generate reports about the city and send them to the authorities.

The CIC is an NGO with a core group of employees who run the site and develop new services, their work is supported by citizens contributions and some donations, making it non related to the government.

One of the main features that the CIC have is called Tehuan (Us in Nahuatl). Tehuan is a platform to recibe and share citizen reports that are made via twitter, SMS, web or by a Mobile App. All the reports are stored in a public data base where anyone can access and see what’s happening in the city. At the same time the authorities have access to the data base, so they could interact with the citizens reports and take action. With this tool the interaction between citizens and authorities leaves a digital trail, meaning there could be statistics about the authorities responses. All the data from Tehuan is public and they have an API so more people could build up on them.

Tehuan reports heat map. Source: CIC (2014)

Tehuan is working since 2011 and they have processed more than 100,000 reports, just in March 2015 they already have 295. The most interesting part, at least for me, is the follow up to the authorities, the platform process the data from the citizens and the government so they could know when the authorities take action, and they deliver insights about that, making the process more transparent, and kind of a competition between the municipalities.

Efficiency by area and municipality. Source: CIC (2014)

The platform has been really successful with the Monterrey citizens and the municipalities, one of their main success has been to get the citizens to participate again and to inform the government, building up the link between citizens and government officials is something that could seem difficult, in Monterrey they experienced a high wave of violence during the last years, and the use of this tools combined with social media channels like twitter and facebook had enabled a new way of public participation.

The other success of the CIC is the follow up to the government actions, get to know in how many days does the reports are closed, who is responding better and when the people are reporting are key points to evaluate the government and call them into accounts if something is not working.

At last but not least the building of trust between the citizens is one of their main assets, in a country plagued with violence and corruption get to trust an institution is not an easy task and they are doing it.

Sometimes digital public spheres are built with the intention of democratizing what information gets prioritized by creating upvote/downvote systems that drive what information appears on the front page of a website. Such systems are generally viewed as fostering equality (everyone gets to vote on each piece of information if they want to) and openness or transparency (vote totals are usually displayed next to the items). It’s tempting to think of these platforms as a way to constantly poll the public about what is most important, and in turn to assume that the content on the front page is an accurate representation of what the entire community of users thinks is most important.

What might not often considered by users of these sites is the impact bad actors can have on these digital public spheres. From 2006-2010 Digg.com was a hugely popular social news site where users could vote links to news stories and other content up or down. It had over 30 million monthly visitors at its peak, before management and software problems led to its downfall. Most readers probably assumed that Digg’s voting system meant that the front page was an accurate representation of what millions of people thought were the most important links to follow for the day. Unfortunately that was not always the case. CMS alum Chris Peterson wrote his master’s thesis on the Digg Patriots, “a group of Digg users who coordinated to make the social news site more politically conservative than it would have been without their intervention,” which he describes as user-generated censorship.

Peterson explains their tactics: “By coordinating their activities they were able to quickly vote down left-leaning stories soon after they were posted, which caused the Digg algorithm to determine that the story was not worthy of the front page, even if it was voted up afterward They also ‘deduced that the Digg algorithm treated comment activity as an indicator of interest, pushing more active posts higher and sinking less active posts lower, so they developed a strong norm of not commenting on liberal posts while creating purposefully outrageous comments on conservative posts to bait liberal users into a frenzied discussion.’”

One of the problems this reveals is the possibly naive trust we place in the fairness of digital mediators. We know that the public sphere is a place where people vie for influence over one another. We assume that people use upvotes and downvotes to represent their own set of interests and to engage in influencing content. But we may also assume that because an “unbiased” computer program tallies the votes, the result is accurate, fair, and transparent. We don’t often consider whether a group or individual might be able to find ways to influence the digital mediators. Because it all happens in a black box, the typical end user only sees the content the users and algorithms push to the top. Auditing the algorithm or otherwise checking to see if it has been compromised by bad actors is basically impossible.

This is not to argue that such systems are bad, or even that they are inferior to other methods of establishing equality in a digital public sphere. But it does raise questions about how we negotiate trust with systems that are opaque to us, and what it means to create an expectation of equal representativeness in a digital public sphere.

I am left with several questions about these systems: how can we know how open, equal and representative any algorithmic system is (and any digital public sphere using algorithms to drive content ranking), and whether groups are succeeding in over-representing their interests? Does exposing an algorithm to public scrutiny simply make it easier to compromise, or is there a level of open source refinement that could actually make it less susceptible to the kinds of manipulations the Digg Patriots used for ideological ends? What does a set of best practices look like for people that have a genuine desire to create digital public spheres that are open, equal and representative?

The idea is simple. The ramifications are not.

Twitch Plays Pokemon (http://www.twitch.tv/twitchplayspokemon) is, by some rough measure, a digital public sphere. The essential idea is that we hook up a Gameboy emulator up to the game streaming service Twitch, and allow the comments entered to control the buttons. In the parlance, it was super-effective.

Only 90’s kids will remember this.

Almost overnight, thousands of people were playing. It was madness. But it worked.

You must watch (at least) watch this particular moment (1:28) to even begin to understand. Reading http://www.joystiq.com/2014/02/22/twitch-plays-pokemon-its-history-highlights-and-bird-jesus/ is probably a good idea too.

Why do I think this is so amazing and note worthy?

• It was an online system where anyone is welcome to participate
  • anyone could join twitch and send commands
  • twitch is free to join
• There was a common good (winning the game) which the moderates, or average player, wanted to produce
  • Of course, there were trolls too
• There was a main forum for discussion in the chat stream where commands were put
  • There were also many private or alternative forums, such as reddit
• If someone wanted to try to affect the public good, then they had to participate
  • but they could not do it alone
  • they needed cooperation from others
• There was rational discussion on how to strategize best.
• At times the discussion was not civil, but that did not dominate. Good strategies were favored. Tough situations were overcome (there were certain areas which were notoriously hard to navigate)
• There were disasters and unfavorable outcomes, such as the release of certain pokemon by accident or use of an incorrect evolution stone, to which the community responded with unity.
• There were debates & protests on Democracy and Anarchy, and governments were tried and toppled
  • The game, as they Joystiq article mentions, was originally just an anarchy mode where every command entered in the chat is executed
  • Eventually, after much discussion and requesting, a democracy mode was added where players voted in elections for the next move
  • The mode was rather unpopular with some people, who chose to obstruct progress by voting for the equivalent of a ‘no-op’
• Complex culture emerged
  • A religion http://helixpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Church_of_Helix, or two http://helixpedia.wikia.com/wiki/Disciples_of_Dome. ( http://vignette4.wikia.nocookie.net/helixpedia/images/c/c0/19gx2claqgb7bpng.png/revision/latest?cb=20140317034921 )

Twitch Plays Pokemon is, of course, of almost zero real consequence. But what is amazing is that Twitch Plays Pokemon did it. The game was beaten. It took much longer than it would take a single player, but just as in real society, one person can’t call the shots. So in that regard, it is a pure success. To date, several other pokemon versions have also been beaten.

What are we to take from all this? Should we mirror real democracy after this? Perhaps we can let laws be written and passed in such a manner, ships launched, troops deployed, emergency services dispatched, and tax cuts granted?

Probably not. That sounds like a horrible fucking idea. Twitch did some really horrible things, whose real world equivalents would be irreparable.

But to the credit of Twitch Plays Pokemon, what I do think it illustrates is that an online public sphere, when it’s interests are aligned can actually get shit done. And maybe, with more close analysis on how certain subgoals were accomplished in Twitch Plays Pokemon, we can learn something about how to create a functioning internet democracy.

In The Purge (2013), James DeMonaco attempts to show a world where, for one night a year, people are allowed to do whatever they want with no formal consequences.

It is a horror film.

But does the lack of consequences for one’s actions really have the power to turn ordinary people into savages?

Enter 4chan.

4chan is a website composed of 63 anonymous image boards, where anyone can make or contribute to threads on any conceivable topic. Many of the boards are interest-driven. /a/, for example, is devoted to anime and manga, /v/ is for video games, and /fa/ is for fashion. There are also NSFW boards, like /hc/ (hardcore) or /h/ (hentai). Perhaps 4chan’s most famous board is /b/, “Random.” /b/ is NSFW, and nearly anything goes. Exceptions to this rule are few and far between: advertising, doxing, violating US law, and My Little Pony.

But of particular interest is /pol/, 4chan’s politics board.

Officially dubbed “Politically Incorrect,” /pol/ is a political discussion board with nearly perfect anonymity and next to no moderation. As you might expect, this leads to some unfortunate trends—Nazism, racism (particularly anti-Semitism), and every –phobia you could imagine and probably a few that you can’t. But that’s not what makes /pol/ an interesting case study.

To see what does, let me take a quick step back. Stormfront.org is perhaps the most infamous neo-Nazi website on the English-speaking internet. Seems unfortunate, no? Do me a favor: try going to Stormfront to tell them how wrong they are, and let me know if you are successful.

Here we discover an interesting fact—all of the “worst” websites on the internet (by prevalence of “hate”) are heavily moderated. They have to be, because if they weren’t those dratted progressives might weasel their way in and bother everyone. It turns out you actually can’t create a racist utopia (how’s that for an oxymoron?) without controls on access. The same kind of controls that most websites use to keep the racists out, I might add.

What makes /pol/ so interesting is that it does not have these controls. This means that /pol/ has, with varying frequency, posters from every possible political bent. It is not uncommon to see a thread about social security next to a thread about gay rights next to a thread about the ZOG next to a thread about how awful feminists are. Sometimes threads on opposite sides of the same issue appear in close proximity.

There is also a massive volume of amateur political commentary/meme creation in response to major events. (It’s a bit like reddit in that way I suppose, but I don’t see why anyone would want to spend time on that horrible excuse for a website.)

Everyone is equally welcome (or more accurately, equally unwelcome) to post, no registration required. Everyone is anonymous, so there’s no cashing in on reputation to bolster one’s arguments. Everyone can say practically anything they want. It is, for lack of a better metaphor, a 24/7 free speech Purge. The only direct consequence that you might face is a flurry of angry replies (which might have been your goal in the first place, come to think of it).

What would Habermas say? I haven’t the faintest idea. But the part of me that sympathizes with his work thinks it’s really cool that a place like this exists.

/pol/ is a beautiful demonstration that the absolute worst human nature and the online disinhibition effect have to offer is still miles better than what errant moderators can create. It’s also wonderful proof that civility and rationality are not synonyms.

My homework to you, dear reader: go, tap into your inner troll, and start a flamewar on /pol/, no account required.

Sina Weibo is often referred as the “Chinese Twitter”. However, when compared to twitter, Sina Weibo has more attributes of a public sphere, here’s some reason why:

1. the tweet limit is 140 Chinese characters. That could express a lot of meaning in Chinese. Besides, lots of people stuff a long article as an image. Longer content makes deliberation possible.

(Screenshot: a Sina Weibo post and its translated form)

(Screenshot: “Long Weibo Tweet” image)

2. Comments and Retweets are separated. Long comments encourage discussions, and showing all comments of a thread in the same place makes discussions discoverable. Users can choose to “leave a comment while retweeting”, and “retweet while leaving this comment”, thus deciding whether to forward the discussion to their own social sphere.

3. The “hashtag” function is richer and more neutral. There can be a moderator to facilitate discussion, and people don’t need to know how to use hashtags: when you debate in the hashtag (named “topic”) pages, you automatically tweet with the specified hashtag. Trending hashtags are both hand picked and populated by popularity. In this way, Hashtags in Weibo are mostly (neutral) discussions topics, not advertisements or political agendas. In a time, there is a debate page for some hashtag topics, listing all the opposite ideas and reasons for people agree or disagree.

(Screenshot: the hashtag page for the National Congress meeting)

4. Wechat has taken most personal matters away. People start to post their selfies and food pictures in Wechat, leaving Weibo a discussion place for public affairs.

5. Equality. There are public intellectuals, news media, government agencies in Weibo, but they have no privileges and they are not immune to attacks. They could swing between opinions and it is often that media companies has a different face in Weibo (for example people’s daily), for the runner of social media accounts in these organizations tend to be young and they are often allowed to take a different strategy than its ordinary PR section. In fact, Sina (the company running Weibo) has a trainer team and training materials for government agencies of how to interact with people in Weibo.

6. Reachability. This is not a part in public sphere theory. But Sina Weibo managed to have a large user base including working class, school kids and elderly population. It’s mobile app allows groups like migrant workers handily join an online discussion.

7. Interaction with traditional media. Local TV stations in China start to read or show content from Weibo. They have TV programs with anchormen/anchorwomen just browsing Weibo content (with a large touchscreen) with his/her audience, which increase the influence of discussions happening in Weibo.

8. Social impact. Several campaigns, such as “Weibo finds lost children”, “free lunch for pupils in remote regions”, and several anti-corruption cases are done in Weibo, making its users somewhat feel empowered.

However, as a web platform, there are other characteristics discredits it as a open public sphere. Here’s some:

1. Inequality. Everybody follows figure with the most followers. Nobody listens to the unknown. What’s worse, the system recommends every new comers to follow those news agencies or ones with the most followers. What’s worse, discussions seem to form around those who are the most welcomed. What’s the worst is, the ones who have the most followers are the ones who know best on how to raise a debate.

2. Social marketing and big data guys. Weibo is one of the most heavily data-mined online space. Those people could spend their entirely life in drawing attention, manipulating opinion, and killing discussions. And usually they cares monetization more than public good.

3. Partisanship. Users in Weibo are often categorized into one or more parties, such as the supporter or objector of some person, Wumao (communist supporters) or Meifen (United States lovers). Sometimes they join a party by them by their will or they are just being labeled. In either way, this makes it costly to shift opinions and it discourage deliberation in specific public affairs.

4. Censorship. Weibo is run by a private corporation, which means they censor more content than needed in name of keeping their business running. You don’t need to speak against the central government to get yourself censored – just appear in the wrong topic or attack the wrong person. Censorship happens when it says “sorry for the internet traffic jam, your comment will appear after xxx hours” but you know that it will never get passed. This could be quite discouraging, if not more than big data guys. The situation could be better in smaller or more distributed websites such as Baidu Tieba or other websites such as Anime sites, but it is a different problem.

After all, Sina Weibo is designed to harvest attention, not to foster public discussion. But it is still a good example to see how design decisions decides what kind of discussion space (and its disappointments) technology could form; and Sina Weibo surely takes some functions we anticipate in public sphere.

When the public approaches Wikipedia it is with a caution usually reserved for miracles: two parts amazement, one part suspicion. It seems unbelievable that such a comprehensive and remarkably well-written collection of encyclopedia entries could have originated from the frenzied throes of anarchic crowd-editing. Yet as much as we are beseeched to not rely on Wikipedia as an authoritative source of information, it is unquestionably the default go-to for almost all non-critical fact-searching. This is because the face it presents is one of pedantic, certainly inoffensive neutrality. We are assured by its prominent signs signaling the potential bias of certain articles and the often-encountered “citation needed” that Wikipedia is humble, well-intentioned, and self-qualifying. Its trustworthiness is engendered due to this seeming transparency; we are told frankly what might be wrong, what needs to be fixed, and assured through the virtue of its open-editing policy that everything will be done in a fair and egalitarian way.

Unfortunately, this pretense is charming but ultimately untrue. In theory, Wikipedia is open for anyone to edit. In practice, the aspiring contributor is likely to find their first article or even edits swiftly removed by much more seasoned veterans. Sometimes this is because of mistakes made due to inexperience. Other times the reasons are less tenable – the edits may have gone against the oldtimer’s vision for that particular article or drawn ire through any number of other ways. Both the result and the cause of this intense scrutiny of newcomers is an exclusive and self-regulating class of elite editors who are too prolific to ban but are often irascible, heavily opinionated, and wildly uncivil. Combined with Wikipedia’s emphasis on the “consensus,” which amounts essentially to a staring contest where the last person to make an edit or argument that is not reversed or countered wins, this has led to a great number of passionate and heated debates over trivia and minutiae. While such battles provide fine entertainment for the onlooker, they can prove to be frustrating for those involved, and a source of disenchantment for those who find themselves being attacked with technicalities by the more experienced, who then go on to ignore the very same rules themselves.

Even more distressing is the wide gender gap that exists within the editor community. The precise estimates vary; however, the general consensus is that the ratio of males to females hovers somewhere close to 9:1. This manifests itself passively as a systemic neglect of women of historical and cultural importance and more actively as cases where the biographies of female artists and authors are written with undue emphasis on their relationships with famous male icons. More damning evidence of a gender bias occasionally pops up. The gradual relocation of women novelists from a page entitled “American novelists” to one called “American women novelists” sparked controversy in 2013. Just recently, five feminist editors who had been embroiled in arguments concerning the bias of the Gamergate controversy page were banned from editing any gender-related articles by ArbComm, the highest judiciary committee of the Wikipedia system. The creation of a Gender Gap Task Force to counter the extant power imbalance and to encourage the participation of more women editors has not stopped the occurrence of events such as the ones detailed above.

Consider that Wikipedia is one of the most accessible and reasonably thorough repositories of human knowledge and you will see why this is a cause for great concern. The community of authors of this compendium would fit snugly into Habermas’ description of the bourgeois public sphere, shortcomings and all. At the cost of a truly invaluable resource and reference open to public contribution comes an atmosphere of exclusion and the marginalization of a substantial segment of the population. Entry into the ranks of editors requires the willingness to face rejection and undergo extensive training, as well as running the risk that your voice might still then be drowned out by the majority or by those more persistent. With the community supported and encompassed by the platform itself, the possibility of subaltern counterpublics existing to represent views not expressed by the majority is doubtful. Pressure for change might then only come from two sources: the gradual inclusion of women within the ranks of editors and public outcry against the administrators of the organization itself. Wikipedia as it currently exists undoubtedly enriches the world – but does so in a way far from what it professes to be.

Exposure to a variety of viewpoints is seen as valuable to “foster individuals’ knowledge, ability to consider the perspectives of others, consideration of the rationales put forward by others, and tolerance for those with differing views” [1], and the Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action report “did not find that those who engage in participatory online activities are limiting their exposure to those with whom they agree.”

The 2013 “Report on the Commission of Youth Voting and Civic Knowledge” [2] recommends we: “Encourage parents to participate in civic activities within schools, e.g., by judging students’ portfolios or by joining discussions of current events.” however this does not leverage the more significant diversity that exists across school districts, state lines, and regional boundaries where perspectives and concerns may be significantly different than the ones students are exposed to via their teachers or parents, regardless of how well informed and well intentioned those may be.

Enabling these types of cross-cutting connections is exactly what the internet is good at, technically speaking, despite not always being leveraged for such goals. [3] Given the existing free tools for text, audio, and video interaction, the internet could be used to connect geographically disparate students and help them engage in challenging, yet considered, healthy debate that benefits both participants.

Imagining such a tool, one can anticipate that the logistics of creating valuable discourse will be more challenging than the technical aspects of creating such a system. It would be of no use, or potentially even damaging or further polarizing if the conversations across political lines were not staged carefully, and expectations clearly established. Here are a number of ways a system/platform might be set up to accomplish mutually beneficial political conversations:

1.) Allow The Students To Propose Topics They Are Interested In and Engaged With

Assigning issues to students that they feel no personal investment in (regardless of whether it actually impacts them) is not going to further their engagement with civic issues. A system that allows students to draft descriptions of issues they care about would allow a space for educators to learn from students about the topics they’re concerned with, and also to start a dialog around how these issues might be discussed in a broader context. Every recommendation may not be ideal for wider discussion, but it could lead to a greater mutual understanding between teacher and student about what the definition of a civic issue is, and what kinds of issues students feel they could have agency in. Given that the submission would be done in an online, participatory environment, the experience for students could be modeled after other online civic engagement platforms, preparing students for more significant, non-educational actions in the future. There is also potential for wider (perhaps state-wide) data-based analytics to understand what issues are of most concern to local students.

3.) Set Expectations About Respect and Debate

Online communities and platforms tend to have norms of behavior that can be reinforced by media available on the site itself. Providing examples of successful conversational etiquette, and also of disrespectful behavior could prime the conversations to be more productive, or at least provide a framework for later classroom critique where fellow students can point out ways in which the conversation could have been managed more respectfully. Students could also contribute to the database of “dark conversational patterns” that they feel are counterproductive.

4.) Archive Conversations For Future Analysis and Class Consideration

Allowing for storage (in whatever format the system allows debate in) and providing tools for annotation, issue categorization, and future engagement via comments or other communication, the site could serve as a valuable archive of teaching material, and a low-barrier point of entry for students to continue conversations in a participatory platform that would remain current and be made up of their peers, allowing for political engagement without the trappings of agenda-setting by political parties or others who might portray political and civic engagement as not relevant to the students’ every day life.

There is no doubt that building a system like this would have to be done delicately, and school (as well as student) buy-in would also be a challenge. If these hurdles were overcome however, more conversational hurdles may await. School newspapers have controversial debates about what is published and also what is affiliated with their school. Organizational issues aside, if a system such as this were build thoughtfully, it could provide a way for students to engage in civic issues they see value in before ever having to set foot in potentially more toxic, confusing, or high-stakes arenas, allowing them to acclimate and learn from one another, before moving on to more official platforms, and taking part in public civic communities.

—

1. “Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action”, http://ypp.dmlcentral.net/sites/default/files/publications/Participatory_Politics_New_Media_and_Youth_Political_Action.2012.pdf.

2. CIRCLE, All Together Now: Collaboration and Innovation for Youth Engagement, http://www.civicyouth.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/CIRCLE-youthvoting-individualPages.pdf.

3. Zuckerman, Ethan. Rewire. W. W. Norton & Company, 2013. Print.