Hello! I am the CEO and cofounder of Radiopaper. Thanks for mentioning us. The mechanism you describe is indeed one of the core features of the platform. The effect is to distributes moderation decisions to those most immediately affected
Thanks for this question. It's one we've given some thought to. You're absolutely right that the ability to make new threads allows for the possibility of heavily branched conversations, which could be tricky to follow in their entirety.
Our thinking about this was that we want to make it as easy as possible to follow a conversation between two people, however long and involved the conversation gets. So, while conversations can branch endlessly, it's always easy to follow what any two people are saying to each other.
In the longer term, we might also add some features around seeing an overall conversation branching structure, but it's not on the short-term roadmap.
Thanks for taking a look! We're excited about the mechanism, and about our early enthusiastic users.
You're right that the conversations going on now are mostly a bit high-brow or formal. This is mostly an accidental feature of the way we rolled out the site to people we thought would like it. Many of them are professional writers!
But absolutely, Radiopaper is also a good place for banter or conversations about whatever (keeping in mind our content policy, naturally: radiopaper.com/policies). Sports gossip, politics, whatever — go for it!
Thanks for signing up! And thanks for the feedback. It's clear that discoverability is an issue with the site in its current form. We hope to add some features to improve that experience very soon.
Thanks, everyone, for your feedback and attention. We're grateful for all the suggestions, sign-ups, comments and criticisms. Here are a few things we want to add to the original post in response to your questions and feedback:
1. First, a clarification about our mechanism:
* only the first message in a conversation or thread requires a reply or approval for publication. The algorithm is not "for every n messages in a conversation, publish n-1." The reason for this is discussed in some of your comments: if every message requires a reply to publish, then either party in a conversation can unilaterally end a conversation at any time.
* Instead, once a conversation or a thread is published, either party can add messages to the conversation in any order. Does this mean that once you get past the first-message test, you can troll to your heart's content? Not really. Yes, you can keep publishing messages into the conversation. But unless your counterparty replies to you, additional messages will be considered "post-scripts." Post-scripts do not push a conversation to the top of any feeds, whether on a user page or on the Explore page. This will remain the case even when we have individual feeds and a more complex algorithm than simple reverse-chrono. What this means is that a conversation gets less and less discoverable the longer it goes without both parties jumping in.
2. Second, a clarification about our ambitions:
* no system is perfectly troll-proof. We call Radiopaper "troll-resistant," rather than "troll-proof," for a reason. But we also believe that our level of troll resistance is sufficient to radically change the experience of using Radiopaper in the long term, vs other social sites.
* two reasons for this: one is that most trolls are pretty lazy. Raising the bar even slightly eliminates 90%+ of the worst actors. More importantly, however, we reduce incentives for trolling. Right now a good way to gain clout on social networks is to post inflammatory or insulting replies. On Radiopaper, that will just get you ignored. On Radiopaper, the incentives are instead to strike a balance between engaging your interlocutor and engaging your audience. We believe this will eventually disproportionally attract the best minds on the internet to the site.
3. Third, a note about where we're headed: our next steps in the medium term are to add social features like following, notifications, reactions, and individual feeds. This will make Radiopaper a bit more like Twitter or Facebook, and a bit less like Reddit or HN. Our goal is to be more social network than forum.
4. Lastly, a call to action: if you like the concept and/or the design, we'd love it if you started a conversation! One important feature of the site is that you can converse on Radiopaper with someone purely via their email address. Only one person in a conversation ever even needs to log in or make an account. This feature is available at radiopaper.com/new. If you don't have any ideas for who to start chatting with, check out my user page: radiopaper.com/DavidSchaengold. I'd be happy to talk.
An earlier iteration of the site actually had a set of reactions that included a 'disagree' option, with something like what you're proposing in mind. We ended up removing reactions from the product temporarily for the sake of simplicity, but hope to add them back in shortly.
The full set was -Agree -Disagree -Interesting -Beautiful.
Sock-puppet bots are definitely a risk for us, as ordinary bots are for other sites. Our core mechanism is complemented by, and does not replace, the standard anti-spam, anti-bot techniques.
Additionally, other users on Radiopaper will understand the mechanism. So, if they see a controversial post with 100% fawning replies, they're going to understand what's happening, and discount the credibility of those replies accordingly.
Once a conversation is published, you can no longer choose not to accept your counterparty's messages. However, if you choose not to respond to further messages in that conversation, your counterparty's additional messages will be considered "post-scripts," which do not cause a conversation to rise to the top of the Explore page. The effect is that, while no user can claim the last word from a counterparty, you can make it unlikely for a conversation to be seen by simply allowing the other user to have the last word.
This technique is not possible on Radiopaper. Once a conversation is published — which happens as soon it has messages from both parties — neither party can block the other party or unpublish the conversation (though you can edit your own posts, including deleting them).
Either party can keep adding messages to the conversation in any order, but only a back-and-forth is considered an update to the conversation as a whole, for the purposes of sending it to the top of the feed. That way, if a conversation turns sour, one person only needs to stop replying, and the conversation will gradually sink down the list into oblivion, even if new messages continue to be added by the ignored party.
Our mechanism is designed to make these questions less urgent. In in-person conversations, people are usually able to act as informal moderators for each other. We hope that will work the same way on Radiopaper, rather than needing to rely on the decisions of those who operate the platform. If you don't like a message directed to you, just ignore it, and it won't be published.
There will of course still be cases where Radiopaper moderators need to step in. We have a content policy that outlines the reasons we might do so: https://radiopaper.com/policies. But our hope is that most of the worst stuff will just never get published, because it will simply be ignored.
Thank you — we wanted the design to communicate that Radiopaper is offering something quite different. "A breath of fresh air" is exactly what we hoped for!
Thank you! We felt that it was really important to get the design right, and I'm glad that you found it clean and simple. You're absolutely right that we were inspired by the graphic design of old breviaries and liturgical books.
Email is in some ways like a whole hidden social internet. A lot of people use email who have no interest in Twitter, Facebook, etc. And many of those people are really interesting. Radiopaper provides a way for them to have public conversations online without having to learn a new technology, and without having to worry about what might end up associated with their online presence in the absence of active management.