This is the 2nd part of launch post on "Constructive Discourse Threads", a new way to engage with your Odyssey community.
What inspires us to get involved? What stories on Odyssey provoke great debate ... or do they just provoke? What makes for a good constructive dialogue experience and how should we provide feedback in a helpful way that builds people up instead of tearing them down.
These are all questions we have been exploring at the Odyssey HQ - and we have jotted down a few ones to start with. No doubt that our understanding, strategies and actions will evolve over time to make this a usable and valuable experience for everybody.
So here are some implementation safeguards.
- Content moderation: Your responses to any piece of content will be evaluated by HQ according to our community principles and rules. They need to align with our vision and goals of constructive dialogue
- Response Request: If you are not in the list of active responders, please use the form below to request to be added. In order to remove boring spambots, this feature will be available to dedicated users only at launch.
- Response Recommendation: HQ will recommend certain articles, which are ripe for feedback or multiple perspectives to become prime candidates where constructive dialogue is preferred. Consider responding to these.
- Rich Conversation: Being vague helps no one in the threads. Be on point. Our goal is to never slide into anti-free-speech zone, but a CDT response needs to focus wholeheartedly on the original topic.
- Find an article that stirs you. Draft up a response article to reference the original post by acknowledging it. Your opinions are your own, but be civil in responding.
- If you are already a regular contributor of quality content, your responder status should soon be almost automatic. This means you will see the “Write a Response Post Here” button below your article render automatically.
- If you are not a regular contributor in our records, please request in this form to be added to the list of active responders. To encourage and maintain trust between users on the platform, this is needed.
Finally, play nice and try to be intellectually humble. Please refrain from shallow comments and being unnecessarily hostile, in which case we are likely to remove your contribution to the CDT project.
For your first 5 qualifying response articles, if judged to be of encouraging quality, you could be compensated by HQ at about $10/response.
We are super excited about the potential and opportunities ahead! We've been longing to see constructive dialogue on Odyssey and the rest of the Internet. Keep us posted about ideas to improve it via creators@theodysseyonline.com