I think a discussion platform is a complicated dynamic system. Social media has various algorithms and even layout decisions (how comments are sorted) that prom

I think a discussion platform is a complicated dynamic system. Social media has various algorithms and even layout decisions (how comments are sorted) that promotes stuff that gets engagement. Then they have a mess of filters that tries to limit some of the worst behavior. I suspect what makes it really hard to understand is there's a training effect as users subconciously learn what things get more attention, and what attention they see as favorable is a moving target depending on their emotional state. So you really have no idea what changing the kind of attention they get will do, and even if you did, when you try to make changes to see what happens, you have to wait on the timescale of human learning to see what the result of those changes are; how the dynamic is settling into a new stable state.