Type of business | Inc |
---|---|
Available in | Multilingual |
Headquarters | Brooklyn, Berlin |
Country of origin | United States |
Founder(s) | Errikos Pitsos |
URL | www |
Commercial | Yes |
Launched | August 2017 |
Current status | Active |
Content license | - [1] |
Written in | JavaScript |
Kialo is an online structured debate platform with argument maps in the form of debate trees. It is a collaborative reasoning tool for thoughtful discussion, understanding different points of view, and collaborative decision-making, showing arguments for and against claims underneath user-submitted theses or questions. [2] [3] [4] [5]
The deliberative discourse platform is designed to present hundreds of supporting or opposing arguments in a dynamic argument tree [8] and is streamlined for rational civil debate on topics such as philosophical questions, policy deliberations, entertainment, ethics, science questions, and unsolved problems or subjects of disagreement in general. [3] [2] [9] [10]
Argument-boxes are structured into hierarchical branches where the root is the main thesis (or theses) of the debate, enabling deliberation and navigable debates between opposing perspectives. 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. The arguments are sorted according to the rating average. [15]
Its argument tree structure enables detailed scrutiny of claims at all levels of the tree [16] and allows users to for example quickly understand why a decision was made or which of the aggregated arguments swayed it this way. [3] Newcomers can join a debate at any time and look back at the structured discussion history, and then weigh in at the right place with their new argument or their comment on a specific argument. [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". [16]
The word Kialo is Esperanto for "reason". [3] [2] The platform is the world's largest argument mapping and structured debate site. [18] [19]
Users can comment on every Pro or Con, for example for requesting sources or expansions. [9] Recent activities of a debate are shown in a panel on the right side of the respective debate. [9] Debates can be found through the search or on the Explore page through their descriptions and topic-tags. [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. [3] [5] [20] "Civil language and sensible observations from opposing perspectives" can be seen also in debates about controversial topics. [21] The site by-design incentivizes fair, rigorous, open-minded dialogue. [22] Contributors making claims often also write counterpoints to their own contribution. [3] Claims need to be shorter than 500 characters and can link to external sources. [23]
Debate trees can also start off with multiple theses – such as different policy options or hypotheses. Claims can link to related debates or include segments of them. [24] In the discussion tab of each claim, users can make edit proposals (e.g. for accuracy, improving sources, or changing scope), decide if the argument should be moved or copied to another branch, call for archiving a claim, and ask for extra evidence or clarification. [25]
Debates can grow large and complex for which a sunburst diagram visualization of the topology of the debate [5] [26] [16] [27] [28] [29] and the search functionality can be useful. Each debate also has a chat-box. [30] [31] In cases where e.g. a "Con" is a point against multiple in the "Pros", users – through moderators – can link these arguments at the respective places to avoid duplication of content and allowing a clean chain for people to understand which points are arguments against each other. [9] Contributions of users are tracked, enabling a board of thought-leaders for every debate. [27] Other gamification elements include a feature to thank users for their contributions. [32] [23]
The "Perspectives" feature allows users to see 'Impact' ratings of supporters and opposers of a thesis as well as of the debate's moderators and individual contributors. [33] It thereby enables participants to see a debate from other participants' perspectives and to sort by them. [33] In Kialo Edu, this feature lets teachers view votes for a whole class, individuals, or supporters/opponents of a specific thesis. [34] Users in both versions of Kialo can vote on the overall debate topic as well as on individual claims to express their perspectives or conclusions, with the rationale (i.e. the main causal arguments) why they voted on the veracity of the thesis as they did not being captured. [35] Voting can be done by any registered user while navigating through any debate that has voting enabled or via using the Guided Voting wizard user interface that automatically walks through branches. [36]
As of 2021, Kialo doesn't have a mobile app. [37]
A 2018 report stated the collaborative argument platform hosts more than 10,000 debates in various languages. [23] It also hosts private debates. The website claims that it has over 18,000 public debates as of July 2023, as well as over 1 million votes and over 720,000 claims. [38] Debates can be found via the site's internal search and up to six tags per debate.
Preprint studies have scraped public debates on over 1.4K issues with over 130K statements as of October 2019 [39] and 1628 debates, related to over 1120 categories, with 124,312 unique claims as of June 26, 2020. [10]
The site is run by Kialo Inc. 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] [2] According to a 2018 report, the site does not show advertisements and does not sell user's data. [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. [41] In 2018, he stated that they intend to make money by selling the platform to companies as a deliberation and decision-making tool. [23] The site is free to use for the public and in education. [11] According to the site, as of 2023 Kialo.com is a non-revenue generating site with no ads and no reselling of user data. [1]
Applications of its content or the platform in society include:
Potential, theoretical, prototypical or little-used applications include:
Kialo is a subject of research studies and its data has been used in research as there are datasets of its contents [5] [13] [54] [10] [7] and the site allows exporting CSV files [16] as well as crawling and filtering debates. [6] [51]
The platform has gained attention in computational research on argumentation because of its high-quality arguments and elaborate argument trees. [14] [56] Its data has been used to train and to evaluate natural language processing AI systems such as, most commonly, BERT and its variants. [61] This includes argument extraction, conclusion generation, [58] [ additional citation(s) needed ] argument form quality assessment, [10] machine argumentative debate generation or participation, [6] [7] [56] surfacing most relevant previously overlooked viewpoints or arguments, [6] [7] argumentative writing support [54] (incl. sentence attackability scores), [39] automatic real-time evaluation of how truthful or convincing a sentence is (similar to fact-checking), [39] language model fine tuning [62] [56] (incl. chatbots), [63] [64] argument impact prediction, argument classification and polarity prediction. [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.
The site's founder proposed the types of arguments and ways people reason could be investigated as well as the "performance of Kialo versus long-form text in making people change their minds". [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. [39]
A study showed that when evaluating policies via Kialo debates, "reading comments from most to least liked, on average, displays more [winning arguments] than reading comments earliest first". [66] [67] Kialo has a set of different permissions that participants can have in a given debate. 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. [33]
In 2022, MakeUseOf named the site as one of the five best "debate sites to civilly and logically argue online about opinions" [9] and in 2019 as one of the "100+ best websites on the Internet". [68]
The site aims to be a hub for civilized debate where shouting, rudeness or irrationality aren't allowed. [3] [23] This has been described as remarkable in an "age of Trumpian tweeting". [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 [ broken anchor ]", [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. Instead, she claims it to be a "space for millions of town criers, but not a town square for people to come together and debate". [71] Reports suggest the site may present a more complete and complex view of reality than some other sites where "it's easy to get trapped in echo-chambers of like-minded people where your beliefs are never [meaningfully] challenged" as it shows you "the best arguments on both sides of a debate". [72] [24]
Standard digital formats e.g. "tend to only allow a linear progression of arguments in a stream-of-discussion format". [16] On many websites, "circuitous comment threads [often] render meaningful discussion impossible" and "formats that we use to communicate shape the way we communicate". [2] On the site, users contribute to a debate tree rather than engaging in argumentative back-and-forth commenting. [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. [24] Linking to supporting evidence is encouraged, [21] but not as strictly required as for example on Wikipedia. Kialo has advantages over structured knowledge bases and Wikipedia in "that it includes many debatable statements; many attacked sentences are subjective judgments, so fact-based knowledge sources may have limited utility". [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". [21] Online debates "have grown so large and acrimonious that no one realistically has the time to read everything and hence get a sense of the actually winning arguments (winners) after all points have been considered" and there is research into how to efficiently calculate the winning arguments or arguments weights and the overall conclusions. [67] Moreover, argumentations on the site are less fleeting and repetitive than debates on social media sites – they are commonly read and actively contributed to over the span of years. [11] [2]
This section needs additional citations for verification .(July 2023) |
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." [74]
One study found that "Kialo's simplicity does pose some weaknesses and limitations" and found the functionality of current systems including Kialo for "synthesis of arguments" to be insufficient. [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). There may be issues relating to framing and argument positioning, whereby for example a false claim (with or without a source) can be added as supporting a thesis which is then only addressed by a later countering claim stating the opposite beneath it – which may reduce the former's 'Impact' rating but is not shown directly at the tree level above as an 'countering' argument. Instead, only the false or weak supporting argument can be seen at the level above in such a case. Impact rating votes do not require reading the arguments beneath but voting can be turned off until the argument map has had time to sufficiently develop. [76]
The founder clarified key distinctions and complementarity of the site saying "We're going to just be an added place. We're not competing with anybody out there with regards to thoughtful discourse. There are a couple of sites that are question-and-answer sites, or commenting sites, or sharing sites, but there's not a single [major] site for collaborative reasoning — a repository of the why". [2] He states that Wikipedia – another peer production site to which Kialo is sometimes compared with due to argumentative discussions on Talk pages [14] and its public collaborative knowledge integration [33] [35] – "tells you the what and we tell you the why". [2]
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(help)Kialo, where students make "claims" about a thesis, contributing to a visual debate tree that empowers reason rather than argumentative commenting