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Online discussion and debate platform, Dinnertable.chat is pleased to announce the launch of its host SaaS offering for media outlets and higher education institutions. The platform web add-on was inspired by the Dinnertable.chat platform, an online space where people can enter into constructive dialogue with those who hold differing viewpoints for the purpose of finding common ground on various social and political issues.

Existing modes of public online discussion offer little, if any, encouragement to maintain constructive dialogue and respectful debate, and also face external challenges including:

1. People maliciously abusing systems to publicly and/or visibly spread toxic ideas
2. Bad actors trolling serious conversations, diminishing focus and overall value
3. Confusion and misinterpretation due to text often lacking contextual and emotive cues
4. Text-based conversations that lack higher forms of emotional expression are often dry and bland
5. Echo chambers develop when majority “gangs up,” squeezing out minority viewpoints

The Dinnertable.chat hosting service add-on is explicitly designed to actively combat these problems and promote positive communication traits. This is accomplished in the following ways:

1. One-on-one communication, minimizing the visible “blast radius” of toxic messaging
2. Participants rate one another post-discussion, which quickly identifies and minimizes trolls
3. Communication is verbal and dynamic which allows for a higher message bandwidth
4. Voice-based communication provides an intimate, exciting, and emotionally vulnerable experience
5. One-on-one conversation dynamic eliminates ability to gang up or drown out minority viewpoints

The Dinnertable.chat platform integration service can be easily implemented by media sites, publishers, colleges, and universities to enhance the online conversation experience for their respective users, leading to better conversation on whatever is being discussed. Better communication allows users to actively engage with content longer and encourages readers to think critically about that content in a more organic way than the text-based discussion widgets of yesterday. The add-on turbocharges universities and publishers, allowing their users to both better express themselves while improving their understanding of the subject matter being presented. The host integration can easily be integrated into a range of mobile apps and websites, and can be customized and branded for specific needs.

For publishers, DTC integration allows you to add real-time personable conversation to your content. This allows your users to speak directly with others about what they think about the content, how it makes them feel, and whatever differences of opinion they may have. For the journalists, the add-on allows their readers to speak ‘truth to power’ by being able to directly express their ideas and views without drowning out others, which is a major issue on social networks like Twitter.

For universities, DTC integration provides professors with a means of allowing students to freely exercise ideas through conversation and debate with other students, while still keeping student anonymity. However, these discussions are fundamentally structured to encourage positivity and productivity, as users are prompted to rate how good of a conversationalist the other was post-conversation. For larger discussions and more challenging ideologies, universities can host partnership debate challenges with other schools to increase the diversity of ideas and culture.

“One of the core issues with having a  discussion forum is that it only works for talking about topics in an organized and professional way, which is not how most of the Internet behaves.,” says Jonathan Dunlap, the founder of Dinnertable.chat. “We're providing a new kind of integrated user communication platform that provides an environment where people can be their authentic selves while holding each other to be accountable to be fair and open minded.”

About the Dinntertable.chat platform

Dinnertable.chat is a mobile app and web platform that facilitates real-time discussions and debates on a range of social and political issues, and the Hosting (service) is Dinnertable.chat’s integratable SaaS add-on for websites, media outlets, and higher education institutions. Designed to act as virtual matchmakers for people with political differences, Dinnertable.chat and the service let users choose a topic they are interested in or have a position on, then connects them with someone who holds an appropriately contrasting viewpoint. Matched users then each control a fun virtual character who represents their respective words and emotions on-screen during the conversation. The vision of Dinnertable.chat is to provide accessible tools that help engage people in good-faith dialogue for the purpose of finding common ground through live conversation.