Well the most obvious benefit of installing and using rbutr is the simplicity of finally being able to get ‘more information’ whenever you are unsure about a piece of information. Not only will it save you time when you really do want to see an alternative perspective, but it could also save you from being duped through apathy – I mean, there are some articles which present really strong arguments and which are somewhat compelling, but you don’t care enough about the subject matter to spend 30 min trying to Google the subject matter or asking people who do know for more information. But if there was a single button solution to fill you in on all of the flaws of the article you are reading, then you are far more likely to educate yourself than you otherwise would be.

Another angle, and what I consider to be the biggest benefit for everyone using rbutr is the destruction of the filter bubble. Whether we mean to do it or not, we are all locked up in cages of our own belief systems. We watch, read and listen to the news sources that we like (ridiculing the ones we don’t), we choose our friends based on common interests, and now the online world continues this trend by automatically giving us more of what we already have – Google changes its search results based on what it thinks you want. Facebook filters out friends posts if it thinks you won’t like them. How are you supposed to have a well rounded world view when you only encounter confirmation bias everywhere you look?

Oh and finally – you never know when rbutr might save you (or a friend of yours) from a scam, ripoff or liar. There is nothing stopping people from writing rebuttals to ‘business propositions’…

TL;DR: What is in it for you, is knowledge. Genuine, broad knowledge, rather than one sided ‘facts’ designed to make you think one way or another.

Bloggers, Vloggers and Other Content Creators

Don’t you wish you could get everyone who reads the articles you spend all your time debunking to come and read your rebuttals? Well? Don’t you? If you aren’t connecting your rebuttals to the articles they are rbuting via rbutr, then it will never happen, because the only people who read your articles are the people who already agree with you! You need to get in front of the people who don’t know about you!

If you blog about one of the mainstream contentious subjects, then rbutr levels the playing fields with all of the other huge websites out there by making each individual article need to stand on its own two legs. Rebuttals in rbutr compete against each other regardless of their page ranks in Google and regardless of how popular the rebuttal page already is – if your article is well written and compelling, it will be voted up! And unlike other social link sharing services, your niche opinion doesn’t have to compete with LOLCats, laughing babies and sneezing pandas. You are just competing with other articles rebutting the exact page(s) your article rebuts. If the page you are rebutting happens to be an article read by a million people, and your rebuttal is the best one out there to it – wouldn’t you want all of those people to be able to use rbutr to click through to your rebuttal?

Spreading the Word….

Dear bloggers, vloggers and other content creators,

If you like the idea of rbutr, then consider telling other bloggers that you know about it. The more bloggers who use and talk about rbutr, the more people there will be using it, and the more chance there will be of your non-readers using it. Particularly if you can get the idea in front of people who have no interest or knowledge of your own niche topic – since they are the people who are most likely to need the full perspective which rbutr can provide.

So please, if you like rbutr – talk about it. Tell your readers, and tell other bloggers. When we do take rbutr to critical mass, the change is going to be significant, and one step further towards reaching the full potential of the internet…

Rebuttals are added to rbutr by our users. Anyone is free to connect any webpage to any other webpage at any time and indicate that one is a rebuttal of the other. The rebuttals in the system are then free to be voted on by other members so that the rubbish connections will be pushed down or removed entirely, while the quality rebuttals will be pushed up to the top where they will receive the most attention.

First of all, we need to note that there are two type of rebuttals that can be entered in to rbutr, Direct Rebuttals, and General Rebuttals. The distinction is very important and needs to be selected carefully when adding rebuttals.

Direct Rebuttals and General Rebuttals

General Rebuttals are written to rebutt a topic area or subject matter. Direct Rebuttals are written to rebutt a specific article.

General rebuttals may therefore be entered in to the system as rebuttals to many different articles because all of those different articles may make the same fundamental claims, and the general rebuttal is a valid rebuttal to all of them.

Direct Rebuttals however should only ever by entered when the rebutting page is linked to the specific source page that it was written for.

However, do not think that a Direct Rebuttal page cannot still be linked to many other articles – it can be, but every article other than the one it was specifically written to rebut should be marked as ‘General Rebuttal’ since the rebuttal being provided is on the correct topic, but not direct/specific for each of the other articles.

Quality Rebuttals…

Quality direct rebuttals are the easiest to identify when you find them – they are pretty explicit that they are arguing against some specific article, so all you need to do is connect it to that specific article in rbutr. As long as direct rebuttals are expressing disagreement with one or more points of the original article, then that is a good rebuttal.

The quality of general rebuttals on the other hand is much more based on the quality of the evidence presented in it, the quality of the arguments, and of course, the fact that the evidence and arguments counter the arguments and evidence presented in the original article that is being rebutted.

In both instances – Direct and General – what we want to see are rebuttals which are not only expressing an opposing position, but do so eloquently with valid arguments and compelling evidence.

Bad Rebuttals

First of all, lets clear out the rubbish: Spam and Troll posts will be marked as such and quickly removed from the system. Posts which aren’t actually rebuttals (ie: they agree with the source article or present no real argument), and Offtopic posts (posts which miss the key point of the argument) will be downvoted rapidly.

Otherwise, any rebuttal which is posted which is simply poorly argued, or presents invalid arguments, falsified evidence etc can either be ignored or marked as bad.

So basically, the rubbish will be pushed down, the quality will be pushed up, and the best rebuttals will be presented to all users.

I have been contacting people about rbutr over the past few weeks in an attempt to gauge community interest in the app and to see if anyone will actually use it (probably just about the most important thing when building a new application…) and one particular concern has already been brought to my attention at least once, and I saw it again in the comments to a New Scientist article on one of our predecessors – Dispute Finder (Think Link): http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn17339-dispute-finder-web-tool-gives-two-sides-of-a-story.html

Reader ‘Jon’ commented:

This is potentially a dangerous tool. All the climate change deniers will flag all the scientific pages, and point to their blogs. Then an unknowing citizen searches climate change and thinks there is a real debate. That’s just frightening.

So it is worth addressing these concerns before I hear them much more. First of all, if a citizen is looking at Scientific journals in the first place, it is unlikely that they will be fooled in to thinking that some opinion in a blog has any equivalence to the peer reviewed article they presumably just read. And those who click through from the pro-climate change blogs to the anti-climate change blogs, are just as able to click back to the counter rebuttals as they did in the first instance. That is, they can with rbutr – I don’t know for sure if that was the same with Dispute Finder.

In any case though, anyone who is so uncertain about their own position on a subject that they are afraid of people hearing an alternative perspective, really ought to be looking in to their own beliefs a lot more. Or to put it another way, let me quote one of my favourite quotes of all time:

“John Stuart Mill… argued that silencing an opinion is ‘a peculiar evil.’ If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the ‘opportunity of exchanging error for truth’; and if it’s wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in ‘it’s collision with error.’ If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly even know that; it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.”
-Carl Sagan, Demon Haunted World

I believe this quote captures a philosophical sentiment which is so important, that the fear of ‘abuse’ at the hands of “the enemy” is made completely irrelevent. Particularly when that fear is raised in relation to an app like Dispute Finder, or rbutr. Remember, rbutr is not Fox News – it won’t pretend to be Fair and Balanced while constantly spinning each story a particular way. rbutr is just a tool – it has no bias, only it’s users do. And if you see someone exhibiting a bias, you have just as much power to counteract it as they have to enact it.

Websites with bias already exist. Social media and search engines already allow people to share and search for these biased websites. What rbutr is going to change about this equation, is that your ‘filter bubble‘ will have a permanent hole in it – a nice little rbutr sized hole, where you can choose to step out in to the big wide world of ‘someone else’s opinion’ any time you want.

And that is pretty cool.

So there is this really strong visual in my head about what rbutr could achieve, and I want to render it in to some sort of beautiful 3d flying websites animation – only I can’t animate. So I have used what tools are available to me and created a mock-up version of it so that it is easier to communicate the vision to others….

Thoughts?

Not sure what rbutr is? Watch this video…

The ultimate objective of rbutr, is to help bring online discussions to the best possible conclusion available with the known information.

The method used to achieve this could be called “Forced Principle of Charity” whereby the Principle of Charity is manufactured by finding and presenting the best possible rebuttal to a claim rather than needing to ‘assume it’ or ‘fill in the blanks’ on behalf of the claim.

Through iteration of this action, the discussion is necessarily forced towards some sort of a conclusion.

I see it working this way: There are thousands of different entry points to an argument, but most of the time when having one of these discussions, you inevitably wind your way through all of these random peripheral claims and positions and inevitably find yourself at one of the (or several of the) core principles/claims/beliefs which underlie the main difference of opinion.  Ideally, how rbutr will work, is that through a combination of direct rebuttals, and general rebuttals, all of these peripheral arguments will eventually be step-wise redirected towards ‘the best rebuttal possible for the core tenants of disagreement’. Once this mythical article is written and voted up by the community to take its place as the hub point of all of the online discussions on this particular subject, then the real discussion can continue.

With ‘the best possible rebuttal to the core points of disagreement’ in place then there should be an active ongoing competition between people who disagree with that rebuttal to write ‘the best possible rebuttal’ to it. The community will vote, filter and select their way through the rebuttals until they find it, and then we have rebuttal number 2 of the conversation. And so on, down a path of direct rebuttals until the most reasonable conclusion is reached.

I need to find an animator to work with on this, because I think we could make an incredibly effective visual representation of this process.

Problems (obviously)

So yeah, obviously the description above is set in an ideal world, with sufficient users all motivated by the search for the truth – which is rarely representative of the human population. Although, that being said, we don’t need to worry about ‘the human population’ too much. We just need to worry about the culture of our users, and do our best to make sure all of our users are motivated by the quest for the truth. That will go a long way towards ensuring our results are as close as possible to this ideal world view.

If only everyone could be forced to obey this poster…

Found at Critical Thinkers

Less than three weeks ago Craig got to work on building the first version of rbutr, and just this morning Craig informed me that he was basically ready to go. The app has grown substantially from my original simple conception of it, because we have had to address some of the seeding and engagement issues within the app itself, and we still have a few more stages to get through before we package it and upload it to eh Chrome marketplace – but we are getting there.

From here we are looking for some more feedback from our Alpha testers so as to ensure we have not messed anything up within the code and functionality. While that is happening we are working on applying some visual elements to it: some CSS coding to its output so that it all looks better and easier to use.

When we have our designs done, the testing done a bit more, and we have moved it all to the correct server arrangement, we will be ready to launch to the Chrome Marketplace in a closed beta format. Our plan for this is to basically give members a number of invites each which they can send to friends (like Gmail did) and let it roll out like that. And then the larger testing phase will begin….

That should all happen within the next two weeks…

So we have hit a serious problem with rbutr which we need to overcome in order for it to be effective as it needs to be for it to deliver rebuttals reliably for arguments which have been rebutted, and it has to do with link normalisation, and coverage of all links used for a single page.

An example is the best way to clarify this:

• This page:

  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html

• Is the same page as this one:

  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments

• which is the same page as this one:

  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html?mod=WSJ_article_comments#articleTabs%3Dcomments

Lets call these links: Shorty, Comments and Tabs, respectively.

Currently, rbutr is set up to make rebuttal links between URL’s, so when someone goes to URL ‘Comments’ and submits a rebuttal to the article they find there, that rebuttal will be logged against Comments and only Comments. Anyone who visits Comments in the future will see that there is a rebuttal, but anyone who visits Shorty or Tabs will see zero rebuttals listed.

So how to we solve this problem? How do we cover all possible versions of URL’s which might be used to link to a single article?

Straight Forward Normalisation and Reduction

The first answer that came to mind was to attempts to find the simplest URL that can be used for the page. This involves accessing the page content, and then destructing or reconstructing the URL a bit at a time until we get the smallest version of the URL which has the same page content as the submitted link. And that would work fine, for submitting …but doesn’t solve the exact same problem – what about all the people who land at Comments and Tab? The system took Comments, and turned it in to Shorty, and even if the system stored Comments as well as Shorty, then when people land on Tab, they still get no indication of a rebuttal…. And in some cases, there can be tens or hundreds of real URL’s to a single article. In reality, there are infinite possible URL’s to any page, and if you simply stick a ? at the end, it will still give you the same page, but the different URL will stop rbutr from recognising the page…

So that doesn’t actually solve our problem at all

Breakthrough!

After writing the first half of this post – all prior to this heading – I went to bed for the night. While I was sleeping, Craig managed to find what we were looking for. Turns out it is Canonical URL’s – something which I had seen for years in WordPress, but never really understood the significance of. I’m not sure it is 100% our solution, but it is definitely built to provide the solution we are looking for. The only problem is how many websites actually use – because it relies on the website owners to use it in order for us to take advantage of it…

Anyway, Craig found a heap of information on it, have a look at some if you want:

• http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/11/redundant-urls/
  this one repeats the problem outlined above which we are trying to avoid, as experienced on another website
• http://www.redirectchecker.com/canonical.htm
  A short explanation of what Canonical URL’s are
• http://www2007.org/papers/paper194.pdf
  An academic paper about “DUST” – Different Url’s with Similar Text.

So we have a way forward now, and will be exploring canonical URL’s and keeping an eye out for how to apply the concept effectively so that our user experience is kept at the highest possible level (delivering rebuttals whenever we have them!)

Craig just needs to do some work on the database, which will interfere with the performance of rbutr, so we have taken the app offline for a few hours while he completes the upgrades.

Everything should be back to normal in just a few hours.

See how easy it is to use the list of resources to add whole discussions to rbutr!

See the list of lists here: http://rbutr.com/2012/02/rebuttal-resources-for-contentious-subjects-seed-rbutr/