Current news commenting systems are designed based on implicitly individualistic assumptions, where discussion is the result of a series of disconnected opinions. This often results in fragmented and polarized conversations that fail to represent the spectrum of public discourse. In this work, we develop a news commenting system where users take on distributed roles to collaboratively structure the comments to encourage a connected, balanced discussion space. Through a within-subject, mixed-methods evaluation (N=38), we find that the system supported three stages of participation: understanding issues, collaboratively structuring comments, and building a discussion. With our system, users’ comments displayed more balanced perspectives and a more emotionally neutral argumentation. Simultaneously, we observed reduced argument strength compared to a traditional commenting system, indicating a trade-off between inclusivity and depth. We conclude with design considerations and trade-offs for introducing distributed roles in news commenting system design.

Statistical statements that refer to data to support narratives or claims are commonly used to inform readers about the magnitude of social issues. While contextualizing statistical statements with relevant data supports readers in building their own interpretation of statements, the complexity of finding contextual information on the web and linking statistical statements with it impedes readers’ efforts to do so. We present DataDive, an interactive tool for contextualizing statistical statements for the readers of online texts. Based on users’ selections of statistical statements, our tool uses an LLM-powered pipeline to generate candidates of relevant contexts and poses them as guiding questions to the user as potential contexts for exploration. When the user selects a question, DataDive employs visualizations to further help the user compare and explore contextually relevant data. A technical evaluation shows that DataDive generates important and diverse questions that facilitate exploration around statistical statements and retrieves relevant data for comparison. Moreover, a user study with 21 participants suggests that DataDive facilitates users to explore diverse contexts and to be more aware of how statistical data could relate to the text.