Warning: Stream-of-consciousness rambling ahead. FB and media sites are especially egregious offenders, but are symptomatic of the modern internet as a whole.

Warning: Stream-of-consciousness rambling ahead. FB and media sites are especially egregious offenders, but are symptomatic of the modern internet as a whole. I'm not really sure how we change this - the web is based around user interaction and sharing, and people will always prioritize that which they care about, which encourages more extreme views in any discussions among more general groups. Dividing into sub-communities can reduce discord and increase legitimate discussion and less-extreme views, as moderate community members will not be suborned by unrelated topics they care about, but why join the sub-communities? Also, as seen on some Subreddits, this can instead lead to an echo-chamber, with dissident views discouraged. Perhaps forums with a ranking system unlike current like/upvote, share, freshness, and number-of-response based systems could assist - Having longer-lasting, even permanent, threads for each topic might encourage novel discussion over rehashing the same arguments repeatedly, while prioritizing long-form replies could at least provide more grounds for debating views, but none of that fixes the essential problem of moderate apathy. I wonder if moving to a more mercenary web could help - while it feels as though it would be losing something essential, if there were a cost to responding and payment for valuable contributions, moderate feedback could be encouraged financially, rather than by passion alone. You would still need an essentially different ranking system, especially to prevent response repetition, else I suspect you would see the opposite of the desired result - people posting extreme views to get a quick buck. Additional elements would likely be necessary to create a network entirely successful in encouraging discussion from a full spectrum of views (while repetition may be deadly to discussion, stagnation is also fearsome), but it's a starting point for consideration. I'll have to think on this more later - I might give building a prototype a try. This digressed fairly significantly from the original topic, but I'd be interested in thoughts regarding diversification of views on the internet.