Add ability to skip routing and direct link to specific statement for voting

[patcon]

About "comment routing": https://roamresearch.com/#/app/polis-methods/page/5PQ3RLtic

Specifically, I'm trying to think how to solicit participation from other stakeholder groups. Seems like it might be interesting to be able to invite a stakeholder to offer their expertise. A better "hook" would be if the first [few] statements directly asked them to use their most valued offerings. In a real conversation, bc of how powerful that affect is, that's the first question I ask to engage someone in a larger discussion I hope they'll commit to: "What is the skill/expertise/experience you'd be most excited to offer?"

E.g., maybe I want to invite someone from /r/AskAHistorian to participate in a polis conversation, and there are a few questions specifically to engage them:

11. I am a historian.
12. I feel that ...
13. I think that ...

Would be neat to experiment with what might happen if they could be invited to a convo with https://pol.is/xxxxxxx?priority-statements=11,12,13, or something like that.

Regular comment routing would take over after the queue is exhausted.

Would there be any downside to this? Or is it interesting to anyone else?

[ThenWho]

I like the idea.

It will not work in larger scale convos (e.g. people will send around links to friends with statements that they'll like to be voted on, and skew the results), so it will have to be an option during convo creation.

But I can see how it can be handy in smaller convos. In these cases, the risk of low participation probably outweighs the risk of misuse, and this looks like a great tool.

[patcon]

Thanks for commenting! :)

people will send around links to friends with statements that they'll like to be voted on, and skew the results

Ooooo interesting take. I'll admit I feel differently.

Because isn't this the sort of messy thing people do when discussing things in real life? Like if friends are talking about current events, they lead with the stuff that they known will connect with their friends. The nice thing about this sort of cherry-picking in polis is that you know the friend doing the cherry-picked sharing will be compelled to guide their peers back to the content that bears on the wider conversation. So I'm not sure the size of conversation matters to the use-cases, no?

Like if people could "share" a specific statement with friends from a big conversation, that feels like an amazing emergent utility of the tool imho! This sort of sensing seems like how groups of people do collective computation together :)

[metasoarous]

Thanks for bringing up this idea @patcon.

I think what @ThenWho is pointing out here is that if "one side" is doing more of this for a particular set of comments representative of their views, it may bump those comments up into the majority opinions category undeservedly. One way to counter this would be use the "group informed consensus metric" found in the report instead of pure majority. But there may be other unintended or subtle consequences of doing this as well, which is part of why we don't allow users to search through comments.

Nevertheless, I can see some utility in it as well, in certain situations. So it's worth considering.

Some of these issues could be gotten around by making it so that only moderators can create these links, and for the ids to be encrypted so that other participants can't hack them for their own dastardly deeds.

Note also that some of the use cases for this functionality will be somewhat well handled by adding the importance feature (#217).

[patcon]

which is part of why we don't allow users to search through comments.

Didn't realize this. Neat! Oh man, so much in the history of the UI and background considerations like this...! Thanks for added context

[ThenWho]

I hear you @patcon , but @metasoarous has my number :) All this is speculation of course. But, "if I could think of that in 5 minutes, who knows what people can come up with" kind of thinking here. Trust in people is super important, but so is prepping for the known unknowns.

Maybe a good starting point would be to limit linking to one statement only. That would go halfway into what you envisioned but limiting the abuse potential, and might give us some hard data on how it will be actually used (instead of just speculation).

[patcon]

Related: a/b testing #313