Opinion space

Internet users are increasingly inclined to contribute comments to online news articles, videos, product reviews, and blogs. The most common interface for comments is a list, sorted by time of entry or by binary ratings. It is widely recognized that such lists do not scale well and can lead to "cyberpolarization," which serves to reinforce extreme opinions. We present Opinion Space: a new online interface incorporating ideas from deliberative polling, dimensionality reduction, and collaborative filtering that allows participants to visualize and navigate through a diversity of comments. This self-organizing system automatically highlights the comments found most insightful by users from a range of perspectives. We report results of a controlled user study. When Opinion Space was compared with a chronological List interface, participants read a similar diversity of comments. However, they were significantly more engaged with the system, and they had significantly higher agreement with and respect for the comments they read.