Are you craving thoughtful community dialogue online and finding traditional platforms like Facebook overwhelmingly toxic? You’re certainly not alone. And lucky for you, there’s a new game in town.
Carbondale local Stephen Shapiro has put his tech skills and resources to use developing a locally-focused, community-driven platform that aspires to become a civic engagement hub for the Roaring Fork Valley and beyond. Mountain Perspectives quietly launched in partnership with The Sopris Sun a few months ago, and now welcomes all our readers to participate.
“Watching the Facebook group for Carbondale and its content made me wish for something more,” Shapiro said.
Tracy Kallassy, Carbondale Library branch manager and Sopris Sun proofreader, agreed. “There’s so much hatred and negativity, and you never know if you’re talking to a real person or a bot,” she said about Facebook. “Everything feels so manipulative, and it’s so easy to get caught in your own echo chamber. Whereas with this, it’s a lot easier to get out of your own circle.” Kallassy was among the early Mountain Perspectives beta testers.
According to Shapiro, Facebook and other social media platforms were “destroyed with the attention economy,” because incendiary comments often garner more interactions and thus dominate a conversation.
Shapiro founded Sopris Apps, a company that developed a product similar to Mountain Perspectives designed specifically for school districts called SchoolBlocks, implemented in over 1,000 schools including Roaring Fork School District and Aspen School District. His engagement feature set is built upon the concept of meritocracy: rewarding constructive behaviors with badges and visibility while sinking comments that are deemed unhelpful or even cruel. Artificial intelligence is utilized to help moderate the content, alleviating that burden for humans who are of course given oversight.
“With Mountain Perspectives, we can take advantage of a moment in time where the technology is available to ensure engagement from people is productive, on topic and kind,” Shapiro said.
Users can earn badges for insightful, informative, constructive, funny, passionate and nice comments and thus climb in the leaderboards. However, identities are kept anonymous. Instead of certain personalities becoming identifiable on the site, users are randomly assigned an alias (like “melon monkey,” “sienna squid” or “magenta mole,” for example) that changes with each new discussion topic. This way, conversations are more focused on ideas and less on ego.
“The goal is to encourage meaningful engagement between people who might have opposing views,” Shapiro explained. By removing the associations of identities, users may find themselves both agreeing and disagreeing with the same person without even knowing it.
“As many people remember, avatars were something people used in the early days of the internet,” Shapiro said. “You could name yourself, hide behind your avatar and speak freely.” This inevitably led to vitriol and hate, as people hid behind anonymity. With artificial intelligence, however, that problem can be avoided. “Now with the combination of AI moderation and human review, we can take advantage of the benefits of avatars, giving people a pathway to speaking honestly, while ensuring those opinions are productive and meaningful.” The system will track users across conversations, giving those with the most merit higher trust and clout scores, which influences which opinions are seen first.
“I read The Sopris Sun cover to cover every week, and there’s always things I want to talk to other people about, or to know what other people are thinking about, and there isn’t a great way to do that right now,” Kallassy said. She hopes others will jump on this opportunity to try a new approach.
Rather than a peer-to-peer platform, where users create posts, Mountain Perspectives invites organizations to propose topics of conversation for users to engage with. The Sopris Sun is an early partner, but the aspiration is to have other nonprofits and news providers using the site, each with their own page. These organizations can then review an engagement report for insight into which of their topics are receiving the most attention. So far, 11 local organizations have expressed interest in joining the site.
To log in, you need a Facebook, Microsoft or Google account. Until a feature is developed for notifications, emails will be sent weekly to users letting them know about others’ engagement with their ideas and new topics that align with their interests. Shapiro’s team is also working on translation features to have engagements that transcend language barriers. That way, someone may comment in Spanish on a topic and an English-speaker would be able to read that and respond and vice-versa.
As a product in development, the more engagement Mountain Perspectives receives, the better it will become. Shapiro welcomes feedback through a link found under the “See How It Works” tab and invites organizations to join for free if located in the Roaring Fork Valley by requesting to be listed under “View Contributing Organizations.” He hopes this concept can grow out of Carbondale and become a feature in other communities throughout the country.
“If I were to have an outcome where our community had a new platform to engage meaningfully with each other, it feels like my career would be complete,” Shapiro said. “It would be an incredible moment in my life to provide such a thing.”
Want to engage in the conversation? Join here: mountainperspectives.soprissun.com
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