It is no secret; social media can be toxic.
From political discussions to sports debates, it can be challenging to find an opportunity for healthy discourse that doesn’t devolve into insults and name-calling.
In an effort to encourage balanced, online discourse, Boulder software development shop Adattivo has introduced a new project from its team to generate safe, balanced discussion on the web.
The product, Ponder, is a social media tool that sifts through your social reading list to find relevant discussion topics and present the user with both sides of the discussion.
Adattivo CEO Steve Jovanelly said the project was born from a pain point for project lead Steve Wagner. He was tired of not being able to have real conversations on social media and sought a way to change that.
Ponder was built to cultivate an online environment that promotes healthy, collaborative and encouraging discourse between social media users, regardless of topic.
“I feel personally with being on Twitter that you can’t have a conversation without someone yelling at you because their thoughts are different than your thoughts,” Jovanelly said. “I just want to have a constructive conversation.”
Ponder’s first release is a browser extension that supports Reddit discussions.
When Reddit users click a post about a topic they’re interested in, Ponder will offer them options to find constructive conversations about that same subject. By using software tools on the backend, Ponder can identify possible matches for constructive discussion across Reddit.
“Users can see in order of relevance what conversations that they could hop onto and have a little better discussion about the topic they’re searching,” Jovanelly said.
The Ponder extension is available on the Google web store and the Firefox browser add-on store. Future releases will include support for other social media platforms like Twitter and browser extensions for Edge and Safari.
The project was built in Adattivo’s Innovation Lab, an arm of the business designed to innovate new ways to use the internet. The lab is currently working on another project, Dolphin, that allows users to share and trade unused toys for free with people in their community.
Jovanelly said the innovation lab gives Adattivo’s employees another outlet to showcase their skills and personal interests, outside of client projects.
“I wanted to have an ability for folks to pick up new technologies and build some things that are relevant out there,” he said.
