Kialo

Users can comment on every Pro or Con, for example for requesting sources or expansions. Contributors making claims often also write counterpoints to their own contribution. and the search functionality can be useful. Each debate also has a chat-box. 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. Other gamification elements include a feature to thank users for their contributions. 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. As of 2021, Kialo doesn't have a mobile app. == Contents ==

and the diagram shows the numbers of revisions in each category which . 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 and 1628 debates, related to over 1120 categories, with 124,312 unique claims as of June 26, 2020. == Kialo Inc. ==

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. Pitsos began to develop the concept in 2012 and described various specifics of the system in 2014. In 2018, he stated that they intend to make money by selling the platform to companies as a deliberation and decision-making tool. == Applications and adoption ==

Adopted applications Applications of its content or the platform in society include: • Teachers and professors, especially in high schools – including the universities Harvard and Princeton, are using Kialo for class discussions and exercises in critical thinking and reasoning, for clearing up misconceptions, teaching media literacy, and for teaching to sufficiently reflect or research before posting online. Like for debaters of the main site, access for schools and universities is free. '''''' is the custom version of Kialo specifically designed for classroom use where debates are private and locked to invited students. • Kialo allows teachers to provide feedback to students on their ideas, argument structure, and research quality while it is left to other students to rate the impacts of their peers' arguments. • Students are or can be encouraged to back up their claims with evidence which can foster digital literacy and research skills. and crawled argument weight ratings • It could be used to evaluate extracted argument structures and sequences from raw texts, • The site could be used by companies and government organizations as "intuitive debate software for internal discussions and decision-making". Kialo is a subject of research studies and its data has been used in research as there are datasets of its contents Its data has been used to train and to evaluate natural language processing AI systems such as, most commonly, BERT and its variants. This includes argument extraction, conclusion generation, (incl. sentence attackability scores), language model fine tuning argument impact prediction, argument classification and polarity prediction. ;Content analysis in social science and belief studies The contents can also be analyzed to e.g. show the most common Con rationale-types and factors in general, == Reception, motivation and distinction from alternatives ==

In 2022, MakeUseOf named the site as one of the five best "debate sites to civilly and logically argue online about opinions" ;Online discourse quality The site aims to be a hub for civilized debate where shouting, rudeness or irrationality aren't allowed. As of 2023, there are major concerns about online irrational or misinformation-fueled debate – for example, a researcher affirmed 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". 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". ;Communication formats e.g. "tend to only allow a linear progression of arguments in a stream-of-discussion format". On the site, users contribute to a debate tree rather than engaging in argumentative back-and-forth commenting. 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. 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. 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. 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. ;Complementarity 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". He states that Wikipedia – another peer production site to which Kialo is sometimes compared with due to argumentative discussions on Talk pages and its public collaborative knowledge integration – "tells you the what and we tell you the why". == See also ==