Rebuttals, Argument, Debate, Balance and Corrections on the Internet

Shane

I spent a whole year looking for an application which found rebuttals for me before we started working on building rbutr ourselves. I was incredibly surprised when I never found anything which did quite what I wanted, and to this day, am a little surprised that still no one else has. However, that is tempered now with the realisation that many other people have tried to solve the same problem – we just all use different methods. rbutr is a unique answer to a common problem. The gamble we all make when we decide to try to solve this problem ourselves, is that our unique vision is the right way to go about it… (amongst many other things, but lets keep it simple here!)

So in my journeys looking for rebuttal discovery apps, I was directed to several annotation services, some of which were already dead, some as good as dead, and only one or two which were still in operation. The big player which was under construction, and still is, is Hypothes.is. Dan Whaley, the founder of Hypothes.is no doubt also went through a similar journey as me, but he actually collected information about all of the past annotation, error checking, reputation etc tools and saved them in a spreadsheet.

Since then though, we have also been in contact with a few other people who have developed, or are developing their own solution to this problem of rampant un-verified misinformation which fills the length and breadth of the internet. And I thought it was time to start compiling my own list of current attempted solutions. No doubt this list is incomplete, but it is a start at least. And hopefully I can develop it over time. But for now, here is a simple list of all of the web annotation, fact checking, argument resolving, debate balancing, and rebuttal finding plugins that I am aware of:

  1. rbutr
    Page level rebuttal linkages. Crowd sourced, lets users connect rebuttal articles to the pages that they are rebutting, alerting other users whenever they land on a rebutted page. Functional, in public beta.
  2. Hypothes.is
    Hypothes.is is an on page, content level annotation service which aims to bring highly reputable peer review to the pages of the internet. Unavailable, in development.
  3. Skeptive
    Skeptive is a firefox plugin which allows people to collect articles which present opposing sides of a given topic. Skeptive allows users to rate websites and attempts to evaluate which websites you are likely to agree with or disagree with. Functional, and live.
  4. Remarrk
    Aiming to provide a website annotation and communication system. Alpha version live.

 

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