Thursday, December 16, 2010

Idea: CrowdChat

Two groups have a text chat using a web interface, arguing about a certain topic. For Group B to reply to what Group A says, each member of Group B proposes a sentence. Then, each member of Group B quickly votes on which sentence of another member of their group they like best. (You don’t have to propose a sentence, and you don’t have to vote on one; both proposing a sentence as well as voting on one are time-limited to just a certain amount of seconds, though.) Then, the highest-voted sentence will be shown to Crowd A as answer. Crowd A now goes through the same process to formulate a reply directed at Crowd B, and so on.

To join, you can pick any of the two crowds based on reading the chat log, provided this group hasn’t reach its limit of X members (beyond just group size that limit may also depend on how active current members are in writing sentences). If you don’t like what “your” crowd is saying, you can switch groups at any time and then start argue for the other side. (This helps against keeping on defending your previous point of view just to keep face, in other words, you may more easily allow counter-arguments to your old view convince you to change your view.) The lowest number for a group on each side is just one person, upon which the voting process and the time limits will be skipped, and you can just text-chat normally, until another person arrives and joins either group. (If a group consists of just two people, they too skip voting.)

If during a vote two sentences have the same amount of upvotes, a random sentence will be picked. During voting and when the picked sentence is shown, the person who said it will remain anonymous.

Idea: CrowdChat by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

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