I’ve toyed around with Kialo. Here are some thoughts about why it doesn’t catch on:
Argument mapping has disadvantages for politics and career-building. It doesn’t allow the rhetoritician to slant the discussion, and it sharply limits the ability to gain credit by highlighting a point that’s already been made, or restating it in a different way.
The platforms themselves do a poor job of attracting eyeballs, so even if somebody did a great job of building up the Kialo form of some argument, it would go unappreciated.
For those who take argument mapping seriously, we already have existing traditional forms that achieve much of the benefit of Kialo. The main benefit of Kialo is for helping amateurs and beginners navigate the complexities of an argument they’re new to, but beginners and amateurs are those least likely to care about getting all the nuances of an argument.
Kialo’s short response format and lack of citations makes it hard to connect a point with a broader body of literature, and means that misunderstandings are likely.
For those trying to use Kialo to understand an argument, it’s a terribly unreliable resource.
Kialo specifically makes it hard to figure out which arguments are important. I think there’s not much signal in its voting mechanism for impact.
It’s less pleasant to read argumentation on Kialo than in a more traditional format.
The amount of objections is overwhelming in some cases, while other arguments are missing.
For the future, I expect that additional objections will come to the fore, such as ChatGPT and other LLMs being able to produce personalized sets of arguments and counterarguments based on natural language prompts (which it can already do to some extent).
I’ve toyed around with Kialo. Here are some thoughts about why it doesn’t catch on:
Argument mapping has disadvantages for politics and career-building. It doesn’t allow the rhetoritician to slant the discussion, and it sharply limits the ability to gain credit by highlighting a point that’s already been made, or restating it in a different way.
The platforms themselves do a poor job of attracting eyeballs, so even if somebody did a great job of building up the Kialo form of some argument, it would go unappreciated.
For those who take argument mapping seriously, we already have existing traditional forms that achieve much of the benefit of Kialo. The main benefit of Kialo is for helping amateurs and beginners navigate the complexities of an argument they’re new to, but beginners and amateurs are those least likely to care about getting all the nuances of an argument.
Kialo’s short response format and lack of citations makes it hard to connect a point with a broader body of literature, and means that misunderstandings are likely.
For those trying to use Kialo to understand an argument, it’s a terribly unreliable resource.
Kialo specifically makes it hard to figure out which arguments are important. I think there’s not much signal in its voting mechanism for impact.
It’s less pleasant to read argumentation on Kialo than in a more traditional format.
The amount of objections is overwhelming in some cases, while other arguments are missing.
For the future, I expect that additional objections will come to the fore, such as ChatGPT and other LLMs being able to produce personalized sets of arguments and counterarguments based on natural language prompts (which it can already do to some extent).