CarlBeckel

Their response to this concern on the FAQ at Kickstarter is as follows:

"No one has yet made an effective attempt to leverage the strengths of the Internet to improve the quality of information we consume, at the place that we consume it. In essence, we are bringing crowd-sourced peer-review to the event horizon where information is produced—the thousands of news sites and blogs on the Internet. To encourage quality, we will employ a reputation framework.

We’ve closely researched over 20 current and previous online projects such as ReframeIt, SpinSpotter, ThirdVoice, Stickis, Fleck, ShiftSpace, WebClipper, zBubbles, and others – as well as offline efforts such as FAIR and Media Matters. All have key conceptual flaws which ultimately are or were fatal limitations on their effectiveness and scalability. Hypothes.is is a direct result of our conclusion that previous efforts have missed the essential ingredients of success, and has been designed to address each of them."

I've had this same thought many times.

Studies like these seem to point so often to things like violent TV and computers, which sounds terribly anecdotal, but I guess bland enough that people will accept the study as verifying something they already know.

I would love it if maybe sometimes you would get a study like this that concludes, "Researchers suggest that the decline in empathy is caused by excessive exposure to charitable pleas for helping whatever poor children or country are in fashion at the moment, as well as those awful animal abuse commercials that make me cry."