Kialo

A debate is divided into Pro (supporting) and Con (refuting or devaluing) columns where registered users can add arguments and rate the impact on the weight or validity of the parent claim.

[2][11][17] The design presets a structure on debates "that allows participants to easily see, process, and ultimately assess the many facets of competing claims".

[5] Mere comments that do not make a constructive point (a self-contained argument backed by reasoning) are not allowed and are picked up by other users and moderators.

It was founded by German-born entrepreneur and London School of Economics and Political Science graduate Errikos Pitsos in August 2017 and is based in Brooklyn and Berlin.

[3] The for-profit company was founded in 2011,[40][additional citation(s) needed] Pitsos began to develop the concept in 2012[23] and described various specifics of the system in 2014.

[20][65] The contents can also be analyzed to e.g. show the most common Con rationale-types and factors in general,[39] or reveal the most contested arguments where ratings diverge the most for a given topic.

[2] One study suggests arguers seem to change their viewpoints more readily when a fact they believe has evidence and is undermined when compared to prior beliefs without any specified supporting data.

A preprint study makes suggestions regarding "interface design as a scalable solution to conflict management" to prevent adversarial beliefs and values of moderators to have negative impacts on the site.

[3] The site's founder stated that he noticed early on that the Web became "ideal for bad conversations, with prominence given to the most outrageous conversations" and that he "wondered if there wasn't a better method of online discourse", claiming the site's mission is to "empower reason and to make the world more thoughtful",[3][4][69][46] describing it as a "platform where people with opposing views can meet and understand each other's thinking".

[70] As of 2023, there are major concerns about online irrational or misinformation-fueled debate – for example, a researcher affirmed[21] that "Twitter was not designed or intended to be a digital town square" as part of a "functioning democracy", addressing Elon Musk's comments about the site in 2022.

[73] Kialo may be more appropriate especially for discussions that are relatively complex and hard to visualize or oversee otherwise and allows for public ideation and structured interaction among different types of stakeholders.

[39] Chains of reasoning can be followed "from beginning to end" with relatively little text to read, nearly no repetition or unexplained statements and without having it derailed by for example "name-calling and directionless ranting".

[11][2] One preprint study stated that "[t]hough kialo is designed for scale, and therefore has to be not only robust but also both easy and appealing to use, it has simplified its notion of argument structure so much that there is very little flexibility left.

As a commercial entity, its data [not reusable] and platform [not open source] are also closed, making wide-scale application at the science-policy interface more challenging.

[52] One study suggests the platform is structured in a way that gives insufficient capacity for users to do anything else other than to either agree or disagree with a side,[75] with there e.g. only being options to rate the veracity of the main thesis but not for proposing concrete alternatives and middle-grounds such as more nuanced policies or specifying conditional critical considerations (e.g. exceptions, applicable scopes and limitations) of one's veracity rating of the main thesis, which tend to be very brief and rarely revised.

One study points out that without 'Writer' permissions in a debate, the arguments have "to get past the gatekeepers" of it, which can in some cases be problematic as moderators' beliefs and values may play a role.

[33] For instance, such can lead to some users feeling like certain perspectives (or arguments) are being excluded from a debate[33] or getting positioned inappropriately (such as not being visible at the level most relevant).

Kialo debate tree schema with an example path through it . [ 6 ]
Example partial argument tree with claims and corresponding impact votes for arguments within the given line of reasoning, one form of collective determination of argument weights that is used on the platform [ 7 ]
Diagram roughly showing the shares of site content per top debate category; each argument can be revised and the diagram shows the numbers of revisions in each category which roughly reflect which categories are most actively and/or extensively debated . [ 10 ]
Structured debates from the site could be used for intelligent assistants and similar AI software [ 28 ] such as in computational reasoning; such bots have been called "artificial deliberative agents" (ADAs). [ 51 ]
Example of an ADA contributing missing information to a debate via crawled Kialo data and selected based on the prior conversation and crawled argument weight ratings . [ 51 ]
Claims can continuously be revised collaboratively; such changes are categorized by the user via a set of edit-types. [ 54 ] [ 55 ] [ 10 ]