4thought

An online home for Channel 4’s controversial answer to “thought for the day”

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Channel 4 are a UK institution — a commercial channel with a public remit and an attitude that sets them apart from other mainstream TV channels.

With core values of Do it first, Make Trouble and Inspire Change, their take on “thought for the day” was always going to be, well, interesting.

4thought.tv is a Moral and Ethical Opinions TV show, broadcast after the Channel 4 news every night. It shows 90-second films featuring everyone from right-wing activists to Sinead O'Connor.

Atto Partners were commissioned to design and build its online home.

Year 1

During 4thought.tv’s first year, the goal of the site was to initiate a dialogue around the 365 short films uploaded every year.

The project had an ambitious aim: to raise the quality of online debate by first requiring the site’s user to address their response to the person, before giving their opinion on the topic.

We built a semi-automated way of beginning a comment that focused on feelings and reactions before getting into doctrine.

4thought.tv frequently tops Channel 4’s community participation charts.

Simplify

Year 1 was so successful that we were re-commissioned to produce a refreshed version of the site for launch in October 2011.

The project team decided that the site’s user base was mature enough to remove the stabilisers and allow free comment on the site, so version 2 focused on using 7-day themes as the basis of the redesign.

After evaluating all sorts of gimmicks and gizmos, the team decided to keep things super-simple, and focus instead on guiding the user around the site, giving them more of what they came for.

Underneath its simple exterior lies a custom content management system, comment moderation system and the scaling infrastructure required for a show with millions of viewers each week.