Parameters of Interaction

Number of Connections or "Friends"

• Do people behave differently if they don't have a previous connection or history with the person they're interacting with?
• How do people behave if they have a limited number of set connections?
• Does anything change if connection count isn't visible to others?

Listening Period or Reflection Space

• The Listening Period was presented by Gordon Mangum at Center for Civic Media, and can be perused in further detail here
• A Reflection Space was posited as an IntrospectionBot which might prompt a mental stretch similar to desktop reminders to get up and move around.

Threading Model

• What is in the conversation?
• Who can participate?
• Who can view?
• How many nesting levels are there?

Privacy Control

• Who can see and interact with the discussion?

Scope Control

Set by the poster via the platform: who and how many people is the post advertised to?

Prioritization

Set by listener, as allowed by the platform

Randomization/Serendipity/Enforced Bubble Popping

How do we prevent people from complete homophily?

Latency Tolerance / Persistance

How long to messages last, and do you have to be present in order to see them?

Notifications

Knowing that something has happened on a network can either help you re-engage or be so annoying you rage quit.

Integration

Is it possible to cross-post from other platforms? What about email? Does it work on mobile? Etc.

Indexed / Unindexed

Is it searchable?

Sharing

• Easy: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr. Arguably also what adds to phases of outrage -- all passing on, no synthesis.
• Difficult: Instagram, LiveJournal. Require reference to the original, rather than passing on.
• Aggregate: RSS, occasionally with commenting function.

Message Size

• character limit
• image size or shape

Velocity of Content

• Possible to inject unicorns in order to appease system 1
• Possible to provide reframing for system 2

Synchronicity / Asynchronicity

• Harder to perform harassment in synchronous space, also more difficult to get away.
• Easier to harass in asynchronous space, also easier to escape.
• Synchronous spaces include AFK, twitter, and IRC
• Asynchronous spaces include XMPP with offline delivery, email
• Bridging function is with bots

Connection model

• one-to-one
• one-to-many (short blasts)
• many-to-many
• many-to-one

Communication method

See also: Online Non-Verbal Communication from 2015 February New York City

• audio (1-1 conversation, or under 10)
• text (1-1 conversation, or group conversation)
• tone of voice
• body language
• images

Privacy control / scope control

• public (observable)
• filtered (observable to some)
• private (unobservable)

Guaranteed Delivery vs Lossy

you cannot tell that you're being ignored, you can only guess. If one sort of message is dropped, a similar sort of message will also be dropped. Facebook's algorithm is now lossy.

Astroturfing

isn't something we can create a technical solution for.

Ephemerality / indexed / unindexed

• Anything which can't be searched or known about by a 3rd party is ephemeral. Ello was unsearchable, and with a private account it's unindexed by Google.
• Ephemeral, indexed system would be 4chan. Continuously updated. Something Aweful counts as the same -- after 6 months, gets kicked to archive, so you can't read unless you'vepaid $10 for upgrade.
• Ephemerality will only have probabilistic privacy benefits. In SnapChat, we figured out that if there is interesting content, it will be saved.
• Ephemerality effects how people use something. Twitter, after a certain number of following, means you "cannot step in the same TweetStream twice".
• Flickr is indexed by tags. YouTube indexes by tags, but not by the way something moves.
• Unindexed - OTR, SnapChat. Gives a sense of closed community -- not visible to spiders nor to folk wandering around.
• updates / changelogs / edits
• Should metadata of an interaction be logged?

Sharing increases laziness

Different human semantics/connotation. ShoutOut vs thoughtfully inviting people.

Scope insensitivity

not realizing you're a part of the masses.

• "47 other people have said somethign like this" on Amazon
• "Factually false" or "agree/disagree" etc. Can agree but say it's overly adversarial.

Moderation

• Top-down moderation doesn't scale, full stop
• Bottom-up moderation might be having enough karma to just be able to edit posts. Stack overflow, for instance, because it's about being clear and useful, you might be moderated for language and syntax.
• Moderation as a mechanism for curation. Of posts, of individuals.
• Unmoderated space is also an option

Commenting

• Sharing in parameters of interaction

Velocity

• If content shows up too quickly, might bias towards fluffy nonthinking.

rapid inbound goes for system1 responses. off-the-cuff becaus ethere's too much going on

• "You cannot comment unless you've actually read the whole thing" -- can we do this technically? CSS fingerprinting on if people have actually opened the link. iFrame at bottom of next page that pings back, query the cookie from an iFrame or pingback. Callback on scrolling to see if someone has scrolled all the way to the bottom, like a EULA that won't let you sign unless you've seen the whole thing.
  • Could put a bunch of little trackers in a page, to make sure they proceed a normal reading pace.
  • Could also make a Quiz to comment that people have to answer.
• Scarcity of attention
• Interruption and Derailment methods go here
• Prioritization of visibility -- should people you interact with more be easier or harder to find/comment on? Should quiet people be "seen" more?

Velocity of Discussion

• rate limiting
• token models
• making rare commenter's comments larger
• See more of the people you comment on. See more of people you engage in meaningful debate with, see more of people you comment negatively on. Automatic but overridable.

Velocity of content

• If velocity is speading up, here are fuzzy things.
• Automated unicorns to disrupt carrying forward anger
• Break into system2 by showing an image or narrative of some kind.
• System1 mood shift, not disrupting system2 -- showing kittens

Identity

Duration

Temporary / Static