Online Conversation

Do they happen? What to do about them? — I debated writing this article but thought it might be helpful to bring any shady practices on Medium to light. Have any of you experienced inappropriate private messages on Medium, even slightly so? Here are related questions: Does sexual harassment or bullying happen on this platform? If so, does the…

Our top 3 (virtual) conversation formats — Having group discussions in a video call is now a familiar part of almost everyone's life. With #zoomfatigue running rife, we know many of you are yearning for the day where groups can be back together in a physical space. But let’s face it, virtual meetings ain't stopping any time…

Have you ever been in a meeting online which wasn’t actually that great? How often has it just been a convenient but poor substitute for the real thing? This needs to change and fast! Now more than ever we need to ensure that we DO run great virtual meetings —…

Learn how to have better, safer and more productive conversations online around Māori, refugees, NZ history and Tiriti — ActionStation believes in a compassionate, just, inclusive, diverse and thriving Aotearoa New Zealand. But institutional and interpersonal racism is undermining this vision. In 2018, complaints of racism to the Human Rights Commission hit a five year high while complaints about racism in schools emerged from a Children’s Commissioner study involving…

Why Social Media Isn’t Helping Us Have Educated, Well-Rounded Discussions — I was in a meeting the other day about social media’s impact on the way we discuss the news. People were saying how platforms like Facebook and Twitter give us open, engaging environments where we can share opinions and ideas like never before. As someone who does social media full-time…

Why graph? — In the previous part I proposed another five additions to our graph model: tags, products, places, revisions or versions, and impressions as nodes. We saw how this augmented model created an interesting network of people, places, products and topics, interconnected by stories and discussions. But we never really discussed what…

Browser — In the previous part we discussed how sharing content is prepending a block to another, and assigning audience. Kind of like a reverse-reply. And thus how the functionality of sharing content does not require any extensions of the core model, unlike the introduction of likes or other common platform features. …

Sharing content — In the previous part we explored different ways to extend the core graph model, to incorporate some basic platform features. Specifically, we looked at so-called user actions — arrows in the graph, pointing from users to other nodes, and representing features like impressions, likes, ignores etc. We haven’t mentioned shares…

Conversations as graphs — In the previous part, I used schematic figures of networks or graphs, to illustrate a certain aspect of an online conversation, and to describe the spectrum, that ranges from asynchronous and asymmetric blog comments to synchronous and symmetric chats, with forums somewhere in between. …