Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson

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      It’s an addictive habit, apparently. Academic research into question-answering sites has found that answering begets answering:³⁹ people who respond to questions are likely to stick around for months and answer even more. Many question-answering sites have a psychological architecture of rewards, such as the ability of members to give positive votes (or award “points”) for good answers. But these incentives may be secondary to people’s altruism and the sheer joy of helping people out, as one interview survey of Naver users discovered. The Naver users said that once they stumbled across a question that catalyzed their expertise, they were hooked; they couldn’t help responding. “Since I was a doctor, I was browsing the medical directories. I found a lot of wrong answers and information and was afraid they would cause problems,” as one Naver contributor said. “So I thought I’d contribute in fixing it, hoping that it’d be good for the society.” Others found that the act of writing answers helped organize their own thoughts—the generation effect in a nutshell. “My first intention [in answering] was to organize and review my knowledge and practice it by explaining it to others,” one explained.

      These sites have formalized question answering as a vehicle for public thinking, but they didn’t invent it. In almost any online community, answering questions frequently forms the backbone of conversation, evolving on a grassroots level. Several years ago while reading YouBeMom, an anonymous forum for mothers, I noticed that users had created a clever inversion of the question-answering format: a user would post a description of their job and ask if anyone had questions. The ploy worked in both directions, encouraging people to ask questions they might never have had the opportunity to ask. The post “ER nurse here—questions?” turned into a sprawling discussion, hundreds of postings long, about the nurse’s bloodiest accidents, why gunshot attacks were decreasing, and how ballooning ER costs are destroying hospital budgets. (An even more spellbinding conversation emerged the night a former prostitute opened up the floor for questions.) Though it’s hard to say where it emerged, the “I am a …” format has become, like the FAQ, another literary genre the Internet has ushered into being; on the massive discussion board Reddit, there are dozens of “IAmA” threads started each day by everyone from the famous (the comedian Louis C.K., Barack Obama) to people with intriguing experiences (“IAmA Female Vietnam Veteran”; “IAmA former meth lab operator”; “IAmA close friend of Charlie Sheen since 1985”).

      I’m focusing on question answering, but what’s really at work here is what publisher and technology thinker Tim O’Reilly calls the “architecture of participation.”⁴⁰ The future of public thinking hinges on our ability to create tools that bring out our best: that encourage us to organize our thoughts, create audiences, make connections. Different forms encourage different styles of talk.

      Microblogging created a torrent of public thinking by making a virtue of its limits. By allowing people to write only 140 characters at a time, Twitter neatly routed around the “blank page” problem: everybody can think of at least that many words to say. Facebook provoked a flood of writing by giving users audiences composed of people they already knew well from the offline world, people they knew cared about what they had to say. Texting offered a style of conversation that was more convenient than voice calls (and cheaper, in developing countries), and the asynchronicity created pauses useful for gathering your thoughts (or waiting until your boss’s back was turned so you could sneak in a conversation). One size doesn’t fit all, cognitively speaking. I know people who engage in arguments about music or politics with friends on Facebook because it’s an extension of offline contact, while others find the presence of friends claustrophobic; they find it more freeing and stimulating to talk with comparative strangers on open-ended discussion boards.

      Clearly, public speech can be enormously valuable. But what about the stuff that isn’t? What about the repellent public speech? When you give everyday people the ability to communicate, you release not just brilliant bons mots and incisive conversations, but also ad hominem attacks, fury, and “trolls”—people who jump into discussion threads solely to destabilize them. The combination of distance and pseudonymity (or sometimes total anonymity) can unlock people’s worst behavior, giving them license to say brutal things they’d never say to someone’s face.

      This abuse isn’t evenly distributed. It’s much less often directed at men, particularly white men like me. In contrast, many women I know—probably most—find that being public online inevitably attracts a wave of comments, ranging from dismissal to assessments of their appearance to flat-out rape threats. This is particularly true if they’re talking about anything controversial or political. Or even intellectual: “An opinion, it seems, is the short skirt of the Internet,” as Laurie Penny, a British political writer, puts it. This abuse is also heaped on blacks and other minorities in the United States, or any subordinated group. Even across lines of party politics, discussion threads quickly turn toxic in highly personal ways.

      How do we end this type of abuse? Alas, we probably can’t, at least not completely—after all, this venom is rooted in real-world biases that go back centuries. The Internet didn’t create these prejudices; it gave them a new stage.

      But there are, it turns out, techniques to curtail online abuse, sometimes dramatically. In fact, some innovators are divining, through long experience and experimentation, key ways of managing conversation online—not only keeping it from going septic, but improving it.

      Consider the example of Ta-Nahesi Coates. Coates is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine of politics and culture; he ran a personal blog for years and moved it over to the Atlantic five years ago. Coates posts daily on a dizzying array of subjects: movies, politics, economic disparities, the Civil War, TV shows, favorite snippets of poetry, or whether pro football is too dangerous to play. Coates, who is African American, is also well known as an eloquent and incisive writer on race, and he posts about that frequently. Yet his forum is amazingly abuse-free: comments spill into the hundreds without going off the rails. “This is the most hot-button issue in America, and folks have managed to keep a fairly level head,” he tells me.

      The secret is the work Coates puts into his discussion board. Before he was a blogger himself, he’d noticed the terrible comments at his favorite political blogs, like that of Matt Yglesias. “Matt could be talking about parking and urban issues, and he’d have ten comments, and somebody would invariably say something racist.” Coates realized that negative comments create a loop: they poison the atmosphere, chasing off productive posters.

      So when he started his own personal blog, he decided to break that loop. The instant he saw something abusive, he’d delete it, banning repeat offenders. Meanwhile, he went out of his way to encourage the smart folks, responding to them personally and publicly, so they’d be encouraged to stay and talk. And Coates was unfailingly polite and civil himself, to help set community standards. Soon several dozen regular commenters emerged, and they got to know each other, talking as much to each other as to Coates. (They’ve even formed their own Facebook group and have held “meet-ups.”) Their cohesion helped cement the culture of civility even more; any troll today who looks at the threads can quickly tell this community isn’t going to tolerate nastiness. The Atlantic also deploys software that lets users give an “up” vote to the best comments, which further helps reinforce quality. Given that the community has good standards, the first comment thread you’ll see at the bottom of a Coates post is likely to be the cleverest—and not, as at sites that don’t manage their comments and run things chronologically, the first or last troll to have stopped by.

      This is not to say it’s a love fest or devoid of conflict. The crowd argues heatedly and often takes Coates to task for his thinking; he cites their feedback in his own posts. “Being a writer does not mean you are smarter than everyone else. I learn things from these people,” he notes. But the debate transpires civilly and without name-calling. These days, Coates still tends the comments and monitors them but rarely needs to ban anyone. “It’s much easier,” he adds.

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