Fostering Collective Discourse: A Distributed Role-Based Approach to Online News Commenting
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866917268703674368 |
|---|---|
| author | Hong, Yoojin Doszhan, Yersultan Seering, Joseph |
| author_facet | Hong, Yoojin Doszhan, Yersultan Seering, Joseph |
| contents | Current news commenting systems are designed based on implicitly individualistic assumptions, where discussion is the result of a series of disconnected opinions. This often results in fragmented and polarized conversations that fail to represent the spectrum of public discourse. In this work, we develop a news commenting system where users take on distributed roles to collaboratively structure the comments to encourage a connected, balanced discussion space. Through a within-subject, mixed-methods evaluation (N=38), we find that the system supported three stages of participation: understanding issues, collaboratively structuring comments, and building a discussion. With our system, users' comments displayed more balanced perspectives and a more emotionally neutral argumentation. Simultaneously, we observed reduced argument strength compared to a traditional commenting system, indicating a trade-off between inclusivity and depth. We conclude with design considerations and trade-offs for introducing distributed roles in news commenting system design. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_02766 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Fostering Collective Discourse: A Distributed Role-Based Approach to Online News Commenting Hong, Yoojin Doszhan, Yersultan Seering, Joseph Human-Computer Interaction Current news commenting systems are designed based on implicitly individualistic assumptions, where discussion is the result of a series of disconnected opinions. This often results in fragmented and polarized conversations that fail to represent the spectrum of public discourse. In this work, we develop a news commenting system where users take on distributed roles to collaboratively structure the comments to encourage a connected, balanced discussion space. Through a within-subject, mixed-methods evaluation (N=38), we find that the system supported three stages of participation: understanding issues, collaboratively structuring comments, and building a discussion. With our system, users' comments displayed more balanced perspectives and a more emotionally neutral argumentation. Simultaneously, we observed reduced argument strength compared to a traditional commenting system, indicating a trade-off between inclusivity and depth. We conclude with design considerations and trade-offs for introducing distributed roles in news commenting system design. |
| title | Fostering Collective Discourse: A Distributed Role-Based Approach to Online News Commenting |
| topic | Human-Computer Interaction |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02766 |