Scholars have previously described how online communities engage in particular discourses and forms of argumentation. In parallel, HCI and STS researchers have described discourses surrounding ethics and values and their role in shaping design processes and outcomes. However, little work has addressed the intersection of ethical concern and the discourses of non-expert users. In this paper, we describe the argumentation strategies used by Redditors on the subreddit ‘r/assholedesign’ as they discuss ethically problematic design artifacts.
‹ All reading
“That’s dastardly ingenious”: Ethical Argumentation Strategies on Reddit
Through this analysis, the breadth of ethical argumentation strategies used “in-the-wild” by non-experts are revealed, resulting in an increased awareness of the capacity of community members to engage in “everyday ethics” regardless of specific ethics training.