Rbutr: a browser extension that finds rebuttals to web pages you're reading

This reminds me of Intel Research Berkeley's (now-defunct?) Confrontational Computing project, which produced a Firefox extension called Dispute Finder: <a href="http://ennals.org/rob/disputefinder.html" rel="nofollow">http://ennals.org/rob/disputefinder.html</a>, <a href="http://confront.intel-research.net/Dispute_Finder.html" rel="nofollow">http://confront.intel-research.net/Dispute_Finder.html</a>

In my experience:<p>&#62; Foster good principles of logical debate within the community<p>This is the most agonizingly difficult problem to deal with.<p>Getting people to actually judge arguments on their logical and factual merit is ridiculously difficult. Many do not even seem aware such criteria exists, much less have capability to recognize or respect those traits in opposing arguments. The moment you start touching on politically or emotionally-charged issues like religion and discrimination, fair judgment of opposing logic and facts becomes scarce.

Great idea - I've always wanted to see something like this.<p>But... compulsory registration? This just dissuades most of your potential users from even giving it a try....

Having gone through the tutorial, I had a couple issues. I couldn't mark a page to be rebutted, switch tab to the rebuttal, then mark that page as the rebuttal except by manually copy-pasting the url. When adding tags, I could only add tags from the list and couldn't remove a tag I accidentally added. Shouldn't the tag text box be editable?

This sounds really cool. Very minor quibble: in rebutr's Philosophy, section 3, "backs it's claims up" should be "backs its claims up".

This extension can access:<p>* Your data on all websites<p>This item can read every page that you visit -- your bank, your web email, your Facebook page, and so on. Often, this kind of item needs to see all pages so that it can perform a limited task such as looking for RSS feeds that you might want to subscribe to.<p>Caution: Besides seeing all your pages, this item could use your credentials (cookies) to request or modify your data from websites.<p>* Your tabs and browsing activity

This is fantastic. I've always wanted to be able to see this, but the only way so far has been either if they allow comments, or if I see a discussion in the place I used to follow the link (eg. Twitter, HN, Reddit).<p>Is it all manual or is there some automated component?

Websites/domains should be allowed to rebut rbutr rebuttals and be highlighted/referenced like Talk.Origins and True.Origins do for each other.[1]<p>What are they going to do with all these rebuttals? This is like level two. We need to go up some more levels.[2]<p>[1]: <a href="http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/moonrec.html</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/" rel="nofollow">http://worrydream.com/LadderOfAbstraction/</a>

There is definitely room for some cool innovation in the online flame war space. I've thought it would be cool to have some kind of dedicated place for summarizing well-worn debate topics so that whenever comments on a site dissolve into assertions about the same old things you can point them towards an existing summary instead of again rehashing the same old facts and contexts. I haven't taken the time to flesh the idea out to see if it could really work, though.

It seems that users have to submit rebuttals to articles they read, I thought that was done by the system using NLP techniques, specifically Sentiment Analysis. Now that would be really cool.

This makes me think of sidewiki. Will many people really go find rebuttals and contribute back to the original page? It seems a little bit too much of work.

Related, but not implemented yet: <a href="http://hypothes.is" rel="nofollow">http://hypothes.is</a>

From the looks of it, the hivemind has already taken over.

Nice work Shane. How do you find the rebuttals?

I would love this but 90% of the people I meet and know are not actually interested in <i>actual discussion</i> of the ideas they believe in and consume.

&#60;snark&#62; A browser that flames debate on the internet? Yeah, that's helpful. &#60;/snark&#62;

<i>rbutr is the best tool for keeping yourself genuinely informed online.</i><p>I'm not so sure about that, I wonder if there are any articles that disagree..