Facebook Launches “Forecast” – A New App To Host Crowdsourced Discussions & Predictions

Scrolling through various social media conversations, trends, and discussions gaining the most momentum online, what we clearly can see is how much we humans love being right. Well, that doesn’t come as a surprise to me as human nature revolves around our perception of ourselves and the world we live in.

But people are so obsessed with being right that someone presenting their opinions and views seems like an opportunity for a battle to them. Some people start searching for alternative perspectives and outlooks that they can agree with to be ”more right” than others, even if that means disregarding the knowledge of the leading experts.

That’s where Facebook is focusing on with its new app Forecast. It enables its users to present questions and predictions about future events; then, the other users can vote on them and discuss. Based on the shared information, users will get insights on potential outcomes.

Facebook has explained Forecast as a platform to bring up questions and predict the future using in-app points. The community will be submitting all the questions which will be further moderated for clarity employing Forecast’s Moderation Guidelines and Facebook’s Community Standards.

Basically, this new app will be hosting mini debates where users can take a shot at guessing what comes next through the questions raised and approved by the Forecast’s moderation team.

The Forecast points system is impressive. The app will allot points to the user who originally posted the question on the basis of points. Responses that are more popular will account for more points. Users can earn more points on the basis of their reasoning. This means that the more questions a user posts and justifies their responses satisfactorily, the more his credibility will increase, as shown in their point score.

However, this system might be a little defective. According to the app’s moderation guidelines, users will earn 100 points, which means its not for your knowledge but your activity. As mentioned before, you can also gain points on the basis of your reasoning, although most of the points seem to be coming from the posed questions and their following responses. Concluding that it might be less about enhancing credibility and more about encouraging the users to participate, which makes me think of it as a weird way of calculating a user’s ”score.”

However, the primary motive of Forecast is to share knowledge and encourage discussion between peers, which can potentially result in a more informed argument.

The platform of Forecast can be mainly used as a propaganda portal if sufficient users come up in support of one side of a debate. Probably that is where the weighting of favored justifications will come into play. But anyway, this seems like a potential problem and could see it struggle to attain substantial momentum.

But maybe the aim isn’t to gain momentum just like the eight other applications that Facebook has released within the last six months, the idea behind them was to catch on to an emerging trend and see if they can develop it into a more valuable functionality. If Facebook stays ahead of the race, it can suppress the competitor apps even before they can earn momentum.

So with this, we can say that the Facebook team is basically tossing ideas at the wall to see which one sticks to it. So whether or not the Forecast app is successful, it will definitely give some new directions to the Facebook team. Who can, for sure? We have to wait and see it for ourselves. Let us know your opinions on this new app via the comments below.