I hacked together a (very, very, very rough) "opposing view reader" for myself before I had heard of this idea; it pulled data from Pew's 2014 political spectrum of news sources (http://www.journalism.org/interactives/media-polarization/) and served me a randomized news source each day, weighted on a bell curve around where I already was (so I mostly got "nearest but slightly different views.") The problem was... it was boring, not very useful for staying informed, and I basically just ignored every time Fox news showed up.
There needs to be some way to incentivize people to actually read the "opposing view" and take it seriously; in my experience, most people who claim to be reading the opposing view are still using it to prop up their own conclusions, and not dealing with it on its own terms. The abstract benefits that people talk about from seeing diverse media are always outweighed, on an individual level, by how annoying it is to listen to people who seem obviously wrong!
I'm very glad I did debate in high school; as weird and silly a world as that is, it does provide a legitimate, strong incentive to understand both sides of an argument well enough to convince a third party, and practicing at it made me much more skeptical and (I like to think?) nuanced. I don't think there's any way to move an incentive like that to "real life," but it is a very interesting exercise to try to understand another viewpoint well enough you could convince someone of it, even if it's hard to take the exercise seriously without a shiny trophy resting on it.
There needs to be some way to incentivize people to actually read the "opposing view" and take it seriously; in my experience, most people who claim to be reading the opposing view are still using it to prop up their own conclusions, and not dealing with it on its own terms. The abstract benefits that people talk about from seeing diverse media are always outweighed, on an individual level, by how annoying it is to listen to people who seem obviously wrong!
I'm very glad I did debate in high school; as weird and silly a world as that is, it does provide a legitimate, strong incentive to understand both sides of an argument well enough to convince a third party, and practicing at it made me much more skeptical and (I like to think?) nuanced. I don't think there's any way to move an incentive like that to "real life," but it is a very interesting exercise to try to understand another viewpoint well enough you could convince someone of it, even if it's hard to take the exercise seriously without a shiny trophy resting on it.