I've been a big fan of ChangeMyView(https://www.changemyview.co/) and Intelligence Squared (https://www.youtube.com/user/iqsquared) and this seems like potentially a great combination of both!
I think polling people before the debate to get the "initial odds" and then after to see how the consensus has shifted and combining that with some sort of score like CMW does would go a long way to advance the gamification!
Regarding the polling suggestion, that's actually how it works! Clearly need to work on the messaging a bit, to make that more apparent. There's an initial poll and then you're asked if you've changed your mind after a minute of reading the arguments.
Let me know if you have any other suggestions.
Anyways, what is your strategic advantage? How do you imagine debatable progressing? Could it ever be as big as one of the social media networks, or at least a well known niche? Are there competitors who've done something similar?
The strategic advantage here is focus. Just like there's only one Wordle, or the front cover of NYTimes, per day, we're creating artificial scarcity by focusing peoples attention on just one debate at the day.
I would consider this a success if people start asking themselves, "hey, have you heard the debate of the day?"
In terms of how big this could get, keeping an open mind and seeing how folks use the site.
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Should_animal_testing_be_leg...
https://idebate.org/debatabase/environment-animals-philosoph...
What's the difference vs a reddit poll?
It's different from a reddit poll in two ways:
1) Artificial scarcity - like Wordle or a NYTimes cover photo, there's only one per day. This focuses attention to one topic at a time.
2) Before/after polling. The audience is polled initially and then asked if they've changed their mind after a while reading arguments. The winner is the debate that changes the most minds.
My name is Rob and I built Debatable. Very excited to launch on HN, will be here to answer any questions :)
And +1 to using this in corporations. The hope is that the tool is generic enough for all kinds of use cases!
I'm curious how this one turns out.
