Socratrees: Make Discussions Great Again

Terms like 'misinformation', 'fake news', and 'echo chambers' permeate current discussions on the state of the Internet. We believe a lack of technological support to evaluate, contest, and reason about information online---as opposed to merely disseminating it---lies at the root of these problems. Several argument technologies support such functionality, but have seen limited use outside of niche communities. Most research systems overemphasize argument analysis, standing in stark contrast with the informal dialectical nature of everyday argumentation. Conversely, non-academic systems overlook important implications for design which can be derived from theory. In this paper, we present the design of a system aiming to strike a balance between the two. Informatron is a website for collaborative argumentative discussion targeting layman users, but includes sophisticated community guidelines and novel features inspired by informal logic; we argue these are key to scaling up argumentation. Based on a six-week-long evaluation and subsequent survey sent out to all active users, we conclude that while contributing to arguments remains a complex task, most users learned to do so effectively with minimal guidance and all recognized that structure improves online discussion and results in a clearer overview of arguments.