# cmv: r/changemyview is a pretty safe corner in the harsh internet

https://reddit.com/r/changemyview is a heavily moderated forum with strict rules that try to maintain civility in very sensitive topics. usually such topics go crazy very quickly on a typical internet forum but this doesn't seem to plague this forum.

the idea is that someone posts some view they harbor and the commenters will try to convince the author of the opposite, or at least have the author learn more nuance about the issues. funny comments, agreeing with the author, rudeness gets all removed so the thread stays very much focused on the author's view.

and the whole thing is gamified. whenever the author acknowledges that they have shifted their view or gained a more nuanced view about their issue thanks to a comment, they have to give that comment a "delta". basically they have to include "!delta" or "Δ" in their response. a bot then counts the delta points over the whole subreddit and displays the accumulated delta points next to each username. it's probably a nice feeling to get rewarded with such a point and that might keep people engaged in the discussions.

the delta system also helps researchers to understand what makes some comments more persuasive than others. here's one academic's research site about this. note specifically the media coverage section: https://chenhaot.com/pages/changemyview.html.

i've tried posting some of my crazy views to see what happens:

• @/uppercase: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/oaqzcz/cmv_writing_doesnt_inherently_need_uppercase
• @/binding: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/o0z5jj/cmv_books_should_be_wirebound/
• @/intmon: https://old.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/ofdnn1/cmv_a_copyrightpatentipfree_world_is_nicer/

although the discourse remains relatively civil, the whole thing is quite overwhelming. for one, there's a lot of repetition since most commenters don't seem to read the other comment threads. and some commenters seem still quite mean even if they are within all the rules which can make responding to the commenters quite exhausting emotionally.

and then i quickly learn that most issues can be broken down into smaller issues that need to be discussed separately. discussing everything in one big thread can get confusing. e.g. when i wanted to argue about the usage of uppercase letters, i could break that down into capitalization of sentence beginnings and the capitalization of names. those must be argued completely differently.

and it's incredibly time consuming. understanding your opponents' arguments, preparing a detailed but short response is not trivial. i think such discussions can't happen on a very short timeframe. while i gained a bit of nuance during the discussions, they didn't fundamentally change my views. i feel i'd need to invest more time into the whole thing for that to happen, not just the few hours i reserved to test the site.

and i felt quite disconnected from my opponents: i didn't feel i understand them, and i didn't feel they understand me either. i think anonymous forums are not for me. i prefer to know my opponent personally, i think that can make the communication more effective. i think i'd prefer to be paired with a single person to discuss an issue over months and maybe then present a shared document that contains our agreement rather than arguing with a dozen people at the same time. reddit doesn't really have a good way to present long back&forth discussions anyways.

while i probably won't be posting much to r/changemyview, it's definitely a site where i can look up discussions about almost any topic. all i need to do is to append "site:reddit.com/r/changemyview" into my search query. i recommend anyone fancying online discussions to explore this site too.

published on 2021-07-13

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