6 Comments

Beautiful article. I think it is very interesting to think of the online expressions of offline patterns.

In the article, it says "[Common areas] shouldn’t be a destination you have to go to, but an optional location where you can pause for a moment of socializing or linger and settle in for a longer hangout."

As it turns out, the entire web paradigm is one of destinations, a page or a site. Any webpage to which you navigate is always a destination.

But what if every page had a community water cooler that you could visit to connect with friends and colleagues and meet new people?

If you like the idea of the online water cooler, you'll love Canopi. Canopi is a browser overlay app available wherever you go on the web. Just use our Chrome extension, the bookmarklet, or visit sites with our SDK installed to see the bouncing icon on the lower right hand corner of the screen. Click the icon, the side bar expands and you can see who is on the page with you. If this is your first time, you need to make an account. You can also read the page-specific chat and initiate conversations with others you connect with on the Canopi.

Let's install a Canopi on the New_ Public home page. It' s easy.

1) Go to https://presencebrowser.com/bookmarklet and drag the Bookmarklet button onto your Bookmarks bar thereby installing the Canopi bookmarklet in your bookmarks tab.

2) Navigate to the New_ Public home page, open the Bookmarks tab.

3) Click the "Canopi" bookmark to enter.

I've already put a couple messages for you on the Canopi.

Feel free to respond there on the Canopi or even send me a friend request.

P.s., you may have wondered what I was speaking about when I was saying "above the web page." This is an aspect of what I have been speaking about.

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Feb 23, 2022·edited Feb 23, 2022

I’m intrigued by the possibility of online “water cooler” locations as a way of creating a community over a specific search “destination “. In doing so, how do you maintain a relational and neutral approach when hate speech and misinformation occur?

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Hi Silvia! Giving the community a way to flag speech is important. Once it has been flagged, moderation by the community moderators and/or the site owner over which the potentially offending content is placed.

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Lead the way, Daveed. :)

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Interesting concept. However, in my opinion, the design of social tools for the vocal few who stick their comments out probably need to rethink the strategy of how their value to these social extroverts can bring about value to the silent majority of visitors. Maybe truth validation, or profile highlights could be more useful as we should learn from the failings of the social media platform giants.

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I agree that there are other ways that social extroverts can create value. On page presence is actually just the start for us. We do think that meeting people with similar interests can be catalytic but we are also working on truth validation though we focus on providing context that can be used to better understand the information ecology.

We are delivering next week an app that enables participants to create conceptual links between a piece of content on one page and a piece of content on another with a relationship. You can imagine a contradictory "bridge" from a sentence in a news article to segment in the video where the person in the segment of the videos is saying something that contradicts what was written in the sentence in the news article. When a bridge is submited for minting, it goes to a validation queue where an approved validator verifies that the relationship between Content A and Content B is as specified. If so, the approved self assembles into the universal knowledge graph that exists in the layer above the webpage. Because the relationship is correct, the map maintains integrity. We therefore do not seek to identify what is true but reveal web of relationships between pieces of information (e.g., claims and evidence) in the hope that this contextual information can help one discern what is most likely false and what is most like true.

I know some think the answer is to censor what they deem prohibited speech and to partisan fact check adversaries but these are right out of the totalitarian playbook. We can't censor our way to democracy whether we call it fact checking or stopping terrorists. That's not to say that anything goes. Obviously dangerous speech and hate speech that incites violence has no place on the web, but the current level of censorship of people with dissenting points of view is dangerous for Democracy in the long run. That all being said to clarify that our approach to supporting truth discernment is relational and neutral and rather than didactic and authoritarian.

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