Dimos Forum Structure

How healthier discussion is promoted by the platform

DeanMachine
DIMOS

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In the Dimos Manifesto, the first principle we shared was:

Shared attention — focusing on the same thing leads to healthier conversation. We need structure to guide conversations; like roads that lead to a destination.

To get shared attention, we need to give limited access to topic creation and unlimited access to participation. Anyone can discuss a topic, but topics will not be equally discover-able.

Discover-ability is a critical tool for how we steer discussion into specific topics. Freedom of speech is an essential human right, but freedom of reach should be earned. Shared attention is about having topic overlap on what we are discussing. By promoting a high level of overlap, we are decreasing the amount of “noise”, which leads to healthier conversations with faster knowledge discovery.

For more detail on this, let’s define the user types:

Participants — participants can comment on topics, respond to other people’s comments, like comments, follow organizations, and propose facts relevant to the topics. Participants cannot create topics and cannot moderate topics.

Organizations — organizations create topics that followers can participate in. Anyone can be an organizer. Organizations pay to increase the discussion group size (discover-ability) by targeting non-followers. This payment is the basis for our compensation model (we will discuss more in-depth in a future post). Moderation for the topic is handled by the organization and by the Dimos team to ensure topic relevance. This is done by using Transparent Moderation as described in the manifesto.

Fixed Topics/Unlimited perspectives

In the Dimos ecosystem, the topics for discussion are finite and fixed by organizers. Unlike Twitter, the structure intentionally funnels the focus directly onto a specific issue, pairing the discussion with facts that are relevant specifically to the topic.

Beta Version of Dimos Topic Page

Key User Experience Differentiation

Position — each user states their position on a topic when they are commenting on it. This helps bring context to each comment and powers analytics around sentiment.

Facts — Relying on 3rd party fact-checking sources, each topic will have a section of confirmed and verified facts. Those facts can then be referenced directly in a comment.

Moderation History (not pictured) — comments in a topic thread will all be relevant towards the discussion. This key difference with Reddit promotes thoughtful discourse rather than trolling or going for a laugh. Over time, we expect to see less and less moderation as the platform is considered the “serious” place for discussion. If someone feels that their comment is removed without warrant, they can see the reason for removal and even dispute it.

Meme center (not pictured) — each topic will have a dedicated meme area. Although meme’s are hard to place directly into a discussion debate, they are powerful tools for showing the extreme perspective of a position (plus they are funny, interesting, and one of the reasons we love Reddit and Twitter). Having a dedicated area segments the main argument-driven discussion, but still influences opinions by being discover-able.

Rank — unlike Twitter, participants have ranks based on their historical activity. Likes, comments, facts, account lifetime, and moderation history all contribute to this score. At the moment, Rank will be used more for context and compensation and have no impact on user function. It is possible that this will also influence user functions like submitting facts, restricting post amounts, and visibility of posts.

We hear you Sacha, and we’re gonna fix this ourselves

In our next post, we will go more in-depth on the compensation model, and how Dimos, just like Uber and Airbnb, will enable a new job type for professional debaters and researchers.

Just like Dimos is about discussion, it is our hope that these blog posts will promote some discussion around social conversation online and how to make it better. We want your opinions on what we are doing!

Join the discussion today:

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DeanMachine
DIMOS
Editor for

Dean Pappas | Building on Solana | Ex Grape, Marlin, Ethereum Classic, Zel, Taucoin | Ex GM at Zeta Global | Hearthstone and MTG