Hopefully I'm spectacularly wrong, but I don't think it's possible. the freewheeling idea of the web to be able to better suss out democratically tr

Hopefully I'm spectacularly wrong, but I don't think it's possible. the freewheeling idea of the web to be able to better suss out democratically truth & idea & reason is absolute I think most of the 1990's-style optimism about the web was strictly an illusion, based on the fact that early netizens were more educated/intelligent than the general population, simply due to the fact that they tended to get net access through academic institutions or were highly motivated tech-savvy individuals. It sure wasn't perfect, as many of those people weren't exactly amazing, but it was better than what we see in 2021. That, and the fact that the web's reach was much smaller, making it a much less attractive target for malicious disinformation campaigns. Once everybody's racist, uneducated uncles started logging major minutes surfin' the web things deteriorated fast. I'm not convinced anything can possibly be done, at least not within the scope of better internet forum design, to somehow coax a better level of discourse and truth-finding out of (pardon my frankness) lower-quality individuals who are actively having their minds poisoned by disinformation campaigns. Honestly, the places doing this best these days are some sub-reddits, and HN itself. If you spend enough time on Reddit, you can find some absolutely lovely niche subreddits with strong, caring, and active moderation teams. Most subreddits do not fit this description; some do. HN takes a similar approach; most don't realize the level of human moderation by dang et al that goes into keeping this place from becoming a cesspool. But, we could definitely at least do better than something like Facebook which seems actively designed to reward inflammatory posts and conflict in general.