Ben Clarke

It helps us to do a lot of things.

It helps us to navigate the complex world that we live in in an effective way.

But I think there are also some downsides of this.

It means that we're

we're not encouraged to bite our tongue or to take a moment to reflect and pause on what it is that we want to say or why we might find a comment disagreeable and we kind of just fall into loud screams and perhaps not the most productive thing.

So I think it's a little bit both of human psychology, but also how we design comment forums.

This is definitely an aspect of the problem.

I mean, we could, yeah, definitely we could.

So the thing you mentioned actually with captures is interesting.

We've been experimenting with exactly that after this study where we found these results.

So we've designed a couple of experiments with some of our students of finding ways to slow people down in comments forums.

We've just constructed our own and done these kind of small scale experimental studies.

And we've used captures in one of them to try to slow people down for this kind of duration 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.

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.