One previous thread 'Debating with people over the internet' mentions some of the problems in online communities, forums and blogs. These problems are not limited to internet, they are also present in everyday life, however, on the internet there are additional tools available for dealing with these problems and guiding the flow of discussion.
Major benefit of internet forum is that it allows input from people of different backgrounds that contribute with a variety of arguments. In the 'real' life we are limited to inputs from people we communicate with.
Anonymity is (IMHO) another major tool that helps focus arguments around ideas and not their proponents, which is significant, as the same idea should not have different meanings if it comes from different persons. Ideas exist beyond (specific) persons (for example, in books, or other persons). Analyzing how ideas originate, and why some people support them while others do not is another thing, and that can also be discussed anonymously. How? Well, by discussing relations of ideas to public persons, because, after all, even if I tell my name and background here (which you may not be sure I was truthful about), you will never be able to know about me as much as you can know about public persons.
Many online discussions, specially politics related, seem to be about criticizing other users, 'winning' debates, building self-esteem, fun, sharpening arguments and wits, etc. Now, most of these things are GOOD! Fun is good, self-esteem is good, as is sharpening arguments; winning debates if you are 'right', as then other people will understand why 'right' is 'right', and will benefit from it as they will see the world in a new better light, etc. However, for me personally, internet is not about debating and being right, but about discovering new ideas, arguments, challenging my own views, learning new things.
This is often made more difficult due to presence of 'noise': trolling, insulting, repeating, repeating, repeating, irrelevancy, (block)quoting, many good mixed with many bad comments, etc. There is a forum that tries to tackle some of these issues. http://www.explore-ideas.com Explore Ideas forum is anonymous, and also totally eliminates nicknames and prevents any way of attaching ideas to users. It just presents ideas with no message header information. It is organized as an interactive non-linear 'tree' where users follow arguments and line of reasoning that makes sense to them, and these arguments are merged into one story, while new relevant ones appear. You may be able too see how these changes discourage some of behavior mentioned at the beginning of this paragraph. Anyhow, this forum is one more attempt to improve an online discussion experience.
"Homosexuality is genetic."
Spam should be concise.
There should be no spam.
Only one thread?
So what is this, Usenet version 2channel?
Also, fail advertisement. AND fail tl;dr post.
Putting aside that post is an advertisement, the question is whether that forum's structure really does discourage certain undesired behaviors, as is claimed in the first post.
This is indeed nothing more than an overly wordy ad for some site. And somehow the poster seems to think it warrants a new thread when it would much better have fit as a reply in the previous thread.
massive fail for minimum comment length.
also, spam and tl;dr.