Want to create a public debate on a topic and have others vote on the outcome? Convinceme.net (beta) offers three debate options:

open debates - others can add arguments for either side of the debate and/or vote on it and earn points, the debate doesn’t have an ending
competitive debates - head to head debates where others are only allowed to vote on the outcome
king of the hill - first person to receive 100 convince points for their argument wins and debate ends

The first time I registered it shaved off the “TD” in my name and registered me as “avid” so I needed to re-register. I then created a debate shown below for “Real life or Second Life”

Starting with a blank debate template allowing others to add arguments to either side:

Before publishing and with no arguments added somebody already voted once for Second Life.

There is a ‘watch’ function to keep track of debates you’re interested in and includes a personal watchlist RSS feed, as well as other Convinceme RSS feeds allowing subscription by debate type or the following categories: books, comedy, conspiracy, economic, fashion, fights, food, history, martial arts, movies, music, people, philosophy, places, politics, religion, sci-fi, science, sports, supernatural, technology, toys, travel, trivia, TV, video games, weapons and zombies.

Civility
To keep the peace with debates some basic rules are required:

1. No profanities directed towards people.
2. No personal attacks.
3. No racial slurs.
4. No threats or implications thereof.

Violation of these rules will have your account removed.

Hmm thoughts
If civility is maintained and there are enough people involved — and that’s a big if — this might gain a little traction. It combines a digg-style voting with the ability to create original content (the arguments). Sites like Yahoo Answers have proven that point systems can generate activity and interest.

The points don’t seem to have any value or unlock any other features although on the playoffs page there’s a teaser:

Compete for a chance to enter and win each season of debating playoffs. Only top candidates can enter, and win the BIG BUCKS!

This isn’t the only thing coming soon, they also promise a weekly podcast. They should have kept the podcast in the back pocket until they actually launched one.

Perhaps the biggest letdown is Convinceme.net not offering any way to put the debate on your site/blog say with some copy/paste code. Maybe that functionality will be coming soon too?

Also, not having the .com hurts. Convinceme.com leads to a site dealing with “computational tools for modeling and aiding reasoning.” I’m sure they’ll enjoy a few new hits. There are very few historical examples — del.icio.us comes to mind as a rare exception — of sites that don’t own the .com having much sucess.

That’s the other thing, the business, where is it? Ad supported? At this point I guess that’s the plan?

Unfortunately in it’s current beta state Convinceme.net has more downside than upside. Don’t think I’ll be using it that much other than keeping in mind as a place to suggest taking a debate elsewhere. I think many folks, myself included, would rather keep the debate on their sites rather than sending visitors elsewhere to a site that may or may not be here in six months. Good concept, just not very good execution. Grade: D+

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