There were too many comments to get through, so I'm not sure if I'm repeating ideas here, but some of the thoughts that initially occured to me on reading this article were about how to build better social media to combat this sort of thing. My brief thoughts were: 1)limit messages to long enough to express a simple thought but not long enough to go on rants (maybe 300 characters)? 2)Provide a mechanism where people can vote to lock the thread if it is unproductive, make the mechanism available only if it gets over a certain length, have some low-but-not-too-low threshold to get threads 'burnt', say, 12 votes? I'm just pulling these numbers off the top of my head. 3)Make it so you can't write to the same thread until someone else has written to prevent multi-post rants (kind of like passing the talking stick). 4)Prevent allowing multiple accounts logged in in the same hour from the same ip, so people don't just rant from multiple personas.
There were too many comments to get through, so I'm not sure if I'm repeating ideas here, but some of the thoughts that initially occured to me on reading this article were about how to build better social media to combat this sort of thing. My brief thoughts were: 1)limit messages to long enough to express a simple thought but not long enough to go on rants (maybe 300 characters)? 2)Provide a mechanism where people can vote to lock the thread if it is unproductive, make the mechanism available only if it gets over a certain length, have some low-but-not-too-low threshold to get threads 'burnt', say, 12 votes? I'm just pulling these numbers off the top of my head. 3)Make it so you can't write to the same thread until someone else has written to prevent multi-post rants (kind of like passing the talking stick). 4)Prevent allowing multiple accounts logged in in the same hour from the same ip, so people don't just rant from multiple personas.