Other people have answered in specific examples, but for me the problem is just it isn't a good website for discussion. Populist answers that get in early and

Other people have answered in specific examples, but for me the problem is just it isn't a good website for discussion. Populist answers that get in early and are digestable get upvoted heavily. Long, wordy answers that don't give an easy answer are not voted up as heavily as they take longer for people to read, or worse yet, sometimes they state their point early, provide their argument later and people dont read the justification and just upvote the top part as it aligns with their point of view. Reactionary posts get a lot of traction because people get caught up in emotion and upvote. A placid answer saying "guys lets calm this down and wait" will not garner many upvotes because its not particularly polarising. Nuanced answers tend not to be as popular as ones that give a clear bad/good guy answer. Worse than that, almost nobody reads the articles linked, its mostly people reading a headline, going to the comments and finding the first comment that falls into their world view. Too often you find an article that is quite good, with a highly upvoted comment rebutting the article in a way that makes no sense - because people aren't reading the article, they are just assuming and then finding the comment they -believe- counters the article. I browse reddit constantly, but I don't think it represents issues well at all, it basically is a bandwagon simulator.