Ben Clarke

And we've used CAPTCHAs in one of them to try to slow people down for this kind of duration of, of yeah, maybe 10, 20 seconds.

kind of at the moment we're getting mixed results, right?

So it seems to get rid of the worst things, though it's difficult experimentally to induce hate for lots of reasons, including ethical ones.

But in terms of improving the comment quality, we don't see that right now.

I think the form is a big one, captures annoying people, and that sort of makes sense.

What you mentioned with Reddit is interesting.

Yeah, I know they do that.

And I think that that points to the fact that we could have

systems that slow people down and design digital spaces in that way.

But the thing that rubs up against that slightly is for many of these big social media organizations or media organizations like the Guardian, they want engagement, right?

And if people are slowed down, there's a risk that they lose people to their sites.

I think

We have to think, what do we really want?

And I would assume, like the conversation we're having now, and like you've expressed, there are a lot of people out there which would actually rather have a productive conversation and have moments for pause, right?

That's a small cost to pay, maybe.

Yeah, I think there's nothing in them which is inherently either good or either bad.

They're just another means for us to communicate, right?

So there's nothing that's per se better or worse than, say, having a face-to-face conversation.

It's really all down to how we design them.

So if we design them in a way that means we put the emphasis on reflection and we encourage people actually to spend more time there, but not only saying the worst stuff, right, but actually contemplating what it is that they're doing, we could design slow text.