Earlier this week, I shut down the discussion forum on Brain Terminal and replaced it with a new sister site called Free Speech Free-for-all.

In addition to providing a discussion forum much like the one that existed here, the new Free Speech Free-for-all site allows users to create their own blogs, post links to news stories, and conduct opinion polls.

Part of the reason behind spinning off a separate site is that I’m hoping Free Speech Free-for-all will develop into a community that does not lean heavily in one ideological direction or another.

Most online forums coalesce around a particular point of view. As a result, participants can very easily wall themselves off from information that challenges their assumptions. Groupthink develops over time, and the communities become echo chambers.

I think the value of online media is that everyone has ready access to information they might not otherwise see. The downside is that on the Internet, everyone can live within their own ideological cocoon.

In the past, non-partisan communities that discuss news and politics have had a very difficult time sustaining themselves online, because they usually end up devolving into endless flamewars. The people who contributed value to the community end up leaving, thinking that the conversation has become pointless.

Through smarter software, I hope to prevent that from happening.

It’s an experiment, and I’ll be tweaking the behavior of the site over time to try to strike the proper balance.

If you think this kind of experiment has merit, I hope you’ll join the free-for-all.